Clarity = Confidence
I stumbled onto a truly excellent tweet and I’m interested to see if I can apply it practically toward building confidence:
https://x.com/aarolston/status/1680416050926481408?s=20
In my experience the things that make you feel not confident are things that have slow feedback cycles and ambiguous success criteria (i.e. lack clarity): applying for jobs, designing a portfolio, fundraising, finding a wife/relationship, or being part of the cool group.
If you can have clarity on what the problem requires or how to succeed in each area then you can have confidence. In other words, every confidence problem is actually a clarity problem.
How to Gain Clarity
Ask:
This of course is the most straightforward solution. If you want to know what your manager wants you to do differently or how to improve you can just ask. This doesn’t work however where the feedback giver is not incentivized to take the time or be honest about the feedback - as is the case for recruiters, VC’s, and potential dates. Or they may genuinely not know themselves.
Watch it done successfully by a friend:
You may know roughly what part of your funnel is broken (e.g. crappy resume when searching for a job) and may have even read a lot about it but without seeing it implemented it’s hard to know how to apply it. In the resume context the examples you get are often like, “just put your biggest accomplishment - like if you increased Youtube’s users from 100M to 1B just put that!” Which is insanely not useful. Watching others close to your shoes do it successfully is most useful since you get to see all the tactics embodied in a specific way and gives you a specific path to follow.
Talk to an expert:
This solves the slow feedback cycle problem. Instead of doing your resume, cover letter, LinkedIn, and interview and only getting a yes/no at the end of all of that, a hiring expert and give you direction feedback at each point. The same goes for a business mentor, dating coach, etc.
Generalized vs. Specific Confidence
A gap in this framework is that some people can be confident even with zero clarity in a given situation (my good friend Arrius). How are they able to do that?
Clarity brings confidence to a specific situation. Success (which also comes from clarity in a situation) in multiple situations begins to look like generalized competence rather than specific. Generalized competence brings generalized confidence.
Therefore to gain generalized confidence you gain clarity-based confidence in multiple situations. Or more likely, since most of us have confidence to begin with and just have some areas where we’re lacking just hire an expert in the few places you’re lacking.