Is "confidence" a good thing?

zoobyshoe

This is exactly what I was talking about in my first post in this thread: it's much better to learn to project confidence regardless of the doubt you might actually feel.
A person with OCD assumes every pothole he hits was a pedestrian. A drunk driver assumes every pedestrian he hits was a pothole.

physicsboard

Overconfidence is bad because you can get 'over your head' and fail. However, if overconfidence allowed you to try and fail whereas underconfidence didn't let you try at all, I'd say sometimes overconfidence is the lesser of the two evils.

You can also be confident in your inablilities as well. When someone asks me if I can play the guitar, I'm always confident in my resounding 'no.'

In my opinion confidence is layered. The first layer his how confident you are in yourself, IE how well you know yourself and how well you know what you know and what you don't. Then there's your projected confidence, which is what others see in a snapshot. For example, if someone asks you a question about something you know a lot about and you project this through a confident response that would be utilizing layer 2. Likewise, even if you were confident in your knowledge if you project yourself without that confidence the other party may seek a second opinion. The most important layer is the third layer. This is the confidence others have in you. It takes factors from layers one and two.

If your are frequently confident but also wrong, people will lose confidence in you. All the projecting in the world won't make the difference then. Likewise, even if you don't project your confidence very well, if you are consisentantly right, people will recognize this and become confident in your abilities. However it takes a lot longer then if you project confidence approprately, and you can be overlooked to the point where you never get a chance to shine.

In short, not being confident is a bad thing and you should become confident as soon as possible.

FreeMitya

What I call "responsible confidence" is a good thing; that is, believing that you can be as successful as you want to be as long as you work hard. One certainly does not want to be one of those students who thinks he/she can do well with minimal diligence. Now, there are extremely gifted people who have very little trouble with the subject matter, but they're usually not the ones you see slacking off.

salzrah

I think confidence comes from expressing yourself. Life is a game. You are living your life by expressing yourself in actions and words who you want to be. Once you realize this you see that confidence is your belief in the actions/words you present to the world. To be confident you have to believe in yourself.

Evo

And for others to be confident in you, you have to deliver.

mathsciguy

I think it is good, to some degree. I have, on certain occasions, performed better by being assured that what I am doing at the moment is something I am quite competent at, thus I am confident about it. But for things where I have a biased preconception of 'this isn't just my thing', or at least on things where I don't really have the motivation to do is where I have performed quite badly.

But again, those 'preconceptions' which I think is highly related to confidence might be a little paradoxical; I don't know if I have this confidence because I am actually good at this stuff, or I am good at this stuff because of my confidence?

Jimmy Snyder

That's better than mine.

physicsboard

To add to my previous post, sometime not knowing the limits of your abilities (or being overconfident in how well you know yourself) can lead to some very interesting challenges. As a child I always thought I was quite good a math. Looking back, what I was doing was really not indicitive of how I would fair against calculus, but I believed I could do it given enough time because I was good at math. I got highish grades in Jr high and I guess this reinforced the 'Good at math' but they weren't impressive by any means. I doubt I was even in the top 5% of my class.

I often wonder whether I would've been as successful had I merely been though of as average. If I would have applied myself as hard, or spent time mulling over the theorms and axioms we we're given in class. I was confident that I could do it, and that was the only edge I had over anyone else, and it was enough. Sometimes overconfidence is believing in yourself even when you shouldn't and it's shocking what a difference that makes when it comes to learning.

Overconfidence goes hand in hand with determination and hardwork.

Mentalist

Sometimes people over-estimate their confidence in something and crumble from their delusion.
Other times people are either arrogant or mask their insecurity behind a veneer of confidence like someone mentioned.

Who knows what women are attracted to? I read in a study they were attracted to hormones of a man. This study was interesting as they gave the women different types of dirty clothing (i.e., the man didn't take a bath and was wearing the clothing for a few days), and the women attributed their attractions to the best "scent", of course they didn't know about smelling clothing that hadn't been washed or changed for a few days.

At this point, I don't care anymore about what women are attracted to. Either they like me or they don't. There is a lot of women and less men in the world. So who really has the upper-hand here?

Jamin2112

That's what I was trying to get at.

Jamin2112

Would you like to be that type of person? I'm not sure I would.