Self Confidence

Self confidence and assertiveness should be my New Year’s resolutions every year and should have been my resolutions for all prior years of my existence. When I'm at my worst, it's my self confidence that kills me, which is unfortunate because of what Jack Welch said: "Control your destiny or someone else will."

Here’s what I know about self confidence:

It’s a skill (and therefore trainable).

Definition: Self confidence is the ability to believe in yourself to accomplish something bigger than yourself.

Self confidence is a function of repetition, which means don’t bail after the first fail. Here is one of the most important rules for life: Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. It takes somewhere around 10,000 hours to master something, anything worth mastering (an instrument, a language, a specialized skill). Even youthful prodigies like Mozart and Jimi Hendrix failed during those first 10,000 hours at their crafts. And guess what? There are like 10 billion to 1 odds that you are at Hendrix or Mozart levels of innate talent in whatever it is you do.

To be self confident, you need to be the captain of your ship.

Get away from people who tear you down.

You have to catch yourself when you’re good: Analyze what went well instead of what went wrong. Example: A basketball team down on its luck should analyze tapes of when it did things well rather than be hyper-focused on the mistakes it made. Self-awareness of faults is important to a point but then you need to key in on what you’re good at. You have to know your core competencies and transfer them to the right fights. Picking the right fights is another component to this crucial battle.

Make a list of all the things you are, a note to yourself. A mantra to repeat every day. Here’s mine:

Kendall, congrats on living an extraordinary life. You’re persistent, approachable, and you know people. You know how to dig into the heart of a problem and solve it. You’re a storyteller—when you write, you’re like a sculptor, slowly but persistently getting to the marrow of the issue, and sucking it down. You know how to connect with people and find out what makes them tick. Congrats on getting a PhD before you turned 40. And an MBA. You are a Master Doctor Master. But what you really are is a writer and a researcher. And an enjoyer of life.

Bottom line: No one will believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself. Practice believing in yourself. Read this mantra every day.

Lastly, a thought from an amazing human being for these times: Elon Musk. Musk is at the nexus of Transport, Energy and Space Travel. He’s CEO and Chief Technology Officer of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity.

In an interview with Chris Anderson, curator for TED, Anderson asked Musk just how he does it. What is Musk’s special sauce???

Musk has no real answer at first. Here is a guy who is going to get us to Mars before any national government will and he’s kind of speechless, which isn’t a sign of a lack of self confidence but a quiet confidence. Anderson then suggests that it’s Musk’s ability to think at a system level of design—to pull together design, technology and business into one package and synthesize it in a way very few people can.

And here’s the critical thing: Musk can feel so confident in that click-together package that he can take crazy risks and bets his fortune on it.

Musk’s response to Anderson's statement is that you should start with a framework for thinking—physics—and boil things down to fundamental truths. Which is true. Fundamentally. But it’s his confidence that does it. You can’t get to Mars without some confidence.