đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
Itâs a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and lifeâs big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
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Q: Is overconfidence really bad for us?
In the movie Toy Story, Woody is convinced that Buzz cannot fly. âThere are plastic,â Woody ridicules when Buzz opens his wings. âHe canât fly!â he declares, addressing the other toys.
Buzz quickly corrects Woody. âThese are of trillium carbonic alloy.â
âAnd I can fly.â
âTell you I can fly in this room with my eyes closed!â
When Woody challenges Buzz to prove it, he goes to the edge of the bed in Andyâs room and says his most memorable catchphrase. âTo infinity and beyondâŚâ and jumps off the ledge!
He bounces off a bunch of toys, hangs by a toy plane and rotates by a string, bounces off a few other toys, and lands back on the bed.
The rest of the toys are overjoyed. âYou flew magnificently!â Rex is visibly psyched.
Woody is taking none of it. âThat wasnât flying! That was fallingâŚwith style.â
Woody is right. Buzz cannot fly, but thatâs not important. Whatâs important is Buzz believes he can fly. He is 100% positive. And because he believes it, the rest of the toys believe it well.
Thatâs the power of confidence.
Today, letâs talk about confidence. More precisely, letâs talk about overconfidence. Overconfidence has got a bad rap. Weâve heard stories about the overconfident leader, friend, CEO, investor, politician, who leads themselves, their team, country, and others astray because they are stubborn, headstrong, and too full of themselves.
The conventional wisdom is: donât be overconfident. This has some truth in it. But like all conventional wisdom, it has its limits.
Ever wonder if good-looking people are generally more successful? They are. Beautiful men and women bring take home more money than others. Meanwhile, unattractive women earn less and unattractive men earn a lot less than average.
But hereâs the kicker: the gorgeous donât rake in the dough because we like looking at them. Itâs because their pretty looks make them more confident. Itâs not about looks, dummy!
When it comes to how much money you end up making, your level of confidence is at least as important as how smart you are.
More confidence provides several other benefits.
Overconfidence increases your productivity and makes you choose more challenging tasks â which make you shine in the workplace.
Overconfident people are more likely to be promoted than those who have actually accomplished more. In fact, just speaking first and often â a very confident behaviour â can make others perceive you as a leader.
All good so far, but doesnât being overly confident make you deluded? Absolutely! But that can be good too.
Successful people are delusional in a positive way. They tend to see their successful history as a validation of who they are. This positive interpretation of the past leads to increased optimism towards the future and increases the likelihood of future success.
Success gives more confidence and begets more success.
On top of that, self-deception has been associated with stress reduction, a positive self-bias, and increased pain tolerance â all of which enhance motivation and performance.
Why is confidence so powerful? Because it gives you a feeling of control. People who believe they can succeed see opportunities where others see threats. They are not afraid of uncertainty or ambiguity, they embrace it. They take more risks and achieve greater returns.
Confident people also have a high internal locus of control. In other words, they do not feel like victims of fate. They see their success as a function of their own motivation and ability â not luck, random chance, or fate. They carry this belief even when luck does play a crucial role in their success.
Which leads us to the issue of arrogance.
Doesnât all this confidence turn you into a jerk? Sadly, there are some positives on that front too.
Narcissists, the shameless kings and queens of confidence, score better in job interviews. People donât necessarily want to hire narcissists, but end up doing so because they come off as being self-confident and capable. Plus, theyâre more likely to reach leadership positions. Overconfidence has been shown to even raise output among teams, while underconfidence harms it.
The poison of underconfidence is so infectious that it can bring down even the most smartest of people in the world.
Letâs observe Gary Kasparov, 25 years ago.
It was 1997 and Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess master in the world, was playing against Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer, as the world watched.
It wasnât merely a friendly game of chess. This match had been blown up into an epic debate â which is smarter: man or machine?
This was a rematch, actually. Kasparov had won the competition last year handily, losing only one of six games.
If you dunno about Kasparov, hereâs a primer. He was the most dominant player of his generation. He had been world champion already for twelve years. He was the highest ranked player in history. When he walked into a tournament, people thought about being in second place. They just knew this guy was going to smash everybody else.
But Deep Blue was no amateur either. Despite losing the overall match to Kasparov last year, it had won the first of the six games. And IBMâs well-funded team of engineers had learned from that loss and spent the past year honing Deep Blueâs software.
Regardless, Kasparov was confident.
But at this moment the machine had given Kasparov a pause. It was the forty-fourth move of the first game and Deep Blue had shifted its rook from D5 to D1. For the life of him, Kasparov could not figure out why it would want to do that.
Kasparovâs mind went over it again and again. The clock was ticking.
âCould it have made an error?â
This was a dangerous assumption. It would be foolish to underestimate the machine merely because he had beaten it last year.
While Deep Blue had access to all of Kasparovâs previous matches and knew what he was capable of, Kasparov had very little knowledge of what the machine could do.
What if it was smarter than he thought? What if instead of being able to think five or ten moves ahead it was capable of thinking twenty moves ahead?
âMaybe itâs doing something Iâm not smart enough to see.â
That forty-fourth move didnât end up affecting the game. Kasparov won anyway â but he was still visibly shaken.
In the second game, Deep Blue made another inexplicable move. It âshouldâ have advanced its queen, but instead it moved a pawn. This was good for Kasparov, but again it didnât make any sense... unless the machine was smarter than he was.
Kasparov shifted uncomfortably in his chair. After only a few more moves, it was visible to all watching that the human champ couldnât win, but he might be able to get a draw. Yet Kasparov extended his hand to Deep Blueâs human representative. He gave up.
In the remaining games Kasparovâs playing style shifted dramatically. He became defensive instead of aggressive (which was his signature style). Games three, four, and five would all end in draws.
In game six he made a rookie error and fell prey to a common trap. He should have known better. But Kasparov was intimidated. And it would be his downfall. He lost the sixth game and, with it, the match.
So, what are we trying to say? That Kasparov should have been more confident in his ability (after all he was the best of the best)? That he shouldnât have given so much credit to Deep Blue and given up so easily? That he should have assumed that Deep Blue made an error? But, that would have been overconfidence, wouldnât it? And as far as we know, overconfidence comes with a lot of downside, doesnât it?
Nope! As long as you use it in the right context.
Let me explain with an example from another subject: food. We often denote some food to be healthy or good and others to be unhealthy or bad. But, according to renowned nutritionist, Dr. Michael Greger, from a practical point of few, foods are not so much good or bad as they are better or worse. For example, if the only way you would take dark-green, leafy vegetables is by putting hot sauce on them, be my guest. Itâs better than eating a McD burger. If the only way you can eat oatmeal in the morning is if you make it creamy with hot chocolate, nothing better that that, especially if the alternative is fried chips. Similarly, if the only way you can crack an interview, or be heard in meetings, or go on a (second) date is by faking confidence, go right ahead â especially if the alternative is underconfident silence.
Studies show that smiling when youâre sad can make you feel happy, and moving like youâre powerful actually makes you more resistant to pain. A feeling of control also reduces stress â even if youâre not in control. The âperceptionâ is all that matters.
But at the same time, plenty of examples show that overconfidence can be a slippery slope to denial and hubris. When you look at the âfakers,â youâll find they cannot keep up the âperceptionâ forever. They make excellent first impressions in both work and romance, but after few weeks on a job theyâre regarded as untrustworthy, and a few months into dating, relationship satisfaction tanks.
Overconfidence isnât always good, but under the right circumstances, itâs your weapon of choice. And like all weapons, it comes with prerequisites, warning labels, expiration dates. Use it accordingly.
As the old saying goes, âThere are no âpretty goodâ alligator wrestlers.â Thatâs an arena where overconfidence gets you killed.
Once again, letâs go back to Kasparov.
Machine had finally beaten man. But was it really a genius computer? Could it really think twenty moves ahead and use strategies the grandmaster could not uncover?
Nope. In fact, the exact opposite was true. The inexplicable rook move in the first game? It was due to a bug.
IBM had programmed in a failsafe for just this type of event. To prevent the machine from wasting too much time during a âhiccup,â it would make a totally random move. So thatâs what it did.
Of course, Kasparov didnât know this. He saw the move and figured Deep Blue knew what it was doing â and that he didnât. And this got under his skin. He read the computerâs random move as genius, as brazen confidence, evidence it was smarter than he was. And Kasparovâs resulting loss of confidence became his undoing.
Kasparov could have achieved a draw in the second game, but he felt he was already beaten and resigned. He was not âconfidentâ in his own abilities and assumed the machine knew better.
When your only options are being overconfident and being underconfident, itâs better to be overconfident.
The âmere appearanceâ of confidence can be the difference between winning and losing. When you have confidence, even falling (in style) can look like flying.
Timeless Insight
During creative problem-solving, experience can enhance performance by efficiently guiding us towards solutions that worked in the past. However, it can also harm performance if the problem requires a novel solution.
For example, if you start off with a bad idea that kind of works, it becomes excruciatingly hard to come up with a better idea that excels the initial bad idea. Especially, if itâs a tough problem to solve, and thereâs time crunch. Because this involves forgetting or unlearning what you already know, and that is no mean feat.
What Iâm Reading
Science, the discipline in which we should find the harshest scepticism, the most pin-sharp rationality and the hardest-headed empiricism, has become home to a dizzying array of incompetence, delusion, lies and self-deception.
â Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions
Tiny Thought
We tend to be outraged by small insults but passive, subdued, and silent in front of very large ones.
Before You GoâŚ
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek đ