Confidence Comes From Mastery
How confidence in your life and abilities comes from mastering skills
I wrote before about the difference between courage and confidence. Now we’re going to look at confidence and its connection to mastery–mastery of skills, and, ultimately, mastery of being useful in the world.
Confidence comes from feeling that you will succeed at what you try. You have confidence when you walk down the street feeling like you will succeed at being respected, liked, or admired. You have confidence when you do a job knowing you have the skills to do it well. You have confidence when you are in a relationship and you know you are a good partner. You have confidence when you are on a camping trip and you know how to start a fire, set up a tent, carry a pack, and, most importantly of all in any of these things, how to improvise and learn something new by trying–you have to learn to trust your ability to learn.
If there is a word to connect this all together it’s “mastery.” Confidence follows mastery. I don’t mean mastery as a sort of end point though. There is no such thing as total mastery–there is always something more to master in everything, but at some point you will feel like you can do something with excellence consistently.
There is of course the Dunning-Krueger effect where someone might be confident in their abilities even when shouldn’t be. But confidence derived that way is easily shattered by the reality of actually trying to apply their limited abilities, and failing.
The Need to Feel Needed
Human beings need to feel needed. We are a species of community and relationships, or, as Aristotle put it, “Man is by nature a social animal; he must satisfy certain natural basic needs in order to survive.” We need to feel like we are valuable and we can offer something to this world and to the community of our fellow humanity. When we do not feel like we are needed–like we are superfluous–we fall into a psychological void. Depression, anxiety, rage, and suicide are symptoms of a person feeling unwanted and unneeded by the world. Relationships fail when one partner feels unneeded. People feel awful when they are fired, laid off, or get rejected by hiring manager after hiring manager. People feel lonely and anxious when they go to a party, don’t know anyone, and feel like they can’t contribute to the conversations or the overall vibe of the party.
“[In totalitarian thought] there is only one thing that seems discernible: we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
One of the best things you can give to another person is to make them feel needed and valuable. Just the act of being a good listener for someone shows that you value what they have to say–that they aren’t superfluous–their voice is their own and they deserve to be heard. Listening is the simplest act of making someone feel valuable. This is important for more than just two people talking together. Scaled up to a whole society it is vital that every day citizens feel like their government is listening to them. When they don’t feel listened to they won’t feel valued and unrest, loss of national vitality, or a failed state will follow.
Is every human being valuable? Yes. Is every human being going to be valued at this moment? No. Everyone is valuable because of their potential, but not everyone will be valued today. The lonely, unemployed incel living in the basement spending his days playing video games and posting hate messages on social media is not going to be valued by the world, but because they have the potential to become something more they are still valuable as a person. Until they can make themselves valuable as a person they will suffer in the psychological void of feeling unneeded and unwanted.
Sometimes people can feel necessary, valued, and masters of life even when those around them aren’t valuing them. This kind of quiet confidence–the kind you see some people exude even when alone in a group of people they don’t know–is rare though. We are social creatures, and at some point we do need the rest of society to signal to us that yes, we are valuable. This signal could be money. It could be lots of viewers and thumbs up on YouTube. It could be praise from your community and people who will listen respectfully to what you have to say.
Those who master are those who make themselves valuable. The more social skills you master, the more valued you will feel by people in conversations and at gatherings. The more work skills you master, the more valued you will feel by organizations that will pay you. The more artistic talents you master, the more valued you will feel by people who want to experience the emotional connections brought by art. Masters are wanted.
Money is one measure of value–a proxy of value created for an economy. But it isn’t the only measure of value, and I think most of us have a sense it can be an inaccurate measurement. A wealthy fail-son who inherited wealth and spends his days posting on social media has money, but unless he decides to do something with his life he’s not particularly valuable. Since the market crash of 2007 I think most people have a sense that the finance industry is overvalued too–rich, but not as valuable to society as its wealth implies.
We are attracted to other people who are masters of something. Who would you want to talk to at a party? A wealthy lottery winner, or a world record holding professional juggler? Someone who has mastery of something–an occupation, social skills, artistic skills, or even a party trick is attractive to us. We respect and are drawn to people who have mastered a skill. At the same time it’s often intimidating to be near a master. Feelings of envy towards what they can do and shame towards ourselves because we aren’t such a master can keep us away from that person. But that’s a flaw in ourselves to be corrected–that feeling is a signal we can do better.
If you feel like you have mastered the skills (professional and social) to flourish in life on your own terms then there is no need to feel envious of other masters. That doesn’t mean those feelings won’t creep up, but you will have every reason to tell yourself that you are fine. You are a master of some other domain and worthy of the respect of the world and yourself.
Mastery of Life and Confidence in Life
“Even if all these [basic] needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he, individually, is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actualization... It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
Abraham Maslow
Think of this as a means of improving poor mental health–learn a new skill that others will value you for. It’s probably a good idea to make that a useful job market skill (though there is no reason you can’t be master of more than one thing!). Even if it’s not a passion you will at least derive the benefits of feeling like you are improving yourself and of feeling wanted by the world again. Mastery over a marketable skill will grant someone mastery of self reliance. If you lose your job at one company you’ll know you’ll be fine because your skills are always wanted and there will be other ways to use them to maintain your life and flourish. That kind of confidence in your own self reliance is powerful.
Between money or mastery it should be obvious that what will provide more fulfillment for a person is mastery. That feeling of self-improvement on your way to mastery, and the feeling that yes, you are a master of a skill is far more fulfilling than money. Yes you need money, and it is necessary to provide enough security and freedom for fulfillment, but without mastery over some skill–some domain of life–that fulfillment won’t come.
Money and status on average (at least when the domain is healthy) follows mastery. Alan Watts put it like this, “if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you could eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something, is to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.”
With the resources of money, status, and mastery of skills, a person has every reason to be in full confidence of themselves. They’ve proven to themselves at that point they can thrive in life. That is confidence in their own life, and it grants the person the confidence to explore beyond their current abilities and try new things. They’ll always have a solid base in life they know they can rely on when they try something new.
“Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.”
John Bowlby
even a real talker can be a good listener, if engaged listening is applied. I think that when I reply back - maybe several years later, with "you were right about..." it is appreciated.