HOW TO BE CONFIDENT IN ONE STEP!

I spend a lot of time surfing YouTube to try and find valuable content and occasionally I find inspiration for this blog. Recently I’ve been noticing a lot of extremely popular videos claiming they can teach people a few simple tricks for how to be confident. They have titles like “How To Be Confident In Any Situation” or “5 Easy Tricks to Boost Your Self-Confidence.” These videos have millions of views! Are you kidding me??? LMAOOO

Obviously I got curious and took a look because I couldn’t help myself. I’m too naturally skeptical. How the hell is a 7 minute video supposed to teach someone with low-self esteem to magically achieve confidence? For the most part, this kind of internet content focuses a lot on posturing, body language, eye contact and “keeping cool” in any situation. Seeing a pattern here? All of these things are encouraging the viewer to “fake it till you make it.” And sure, maybe these things work as a short run strategy to create the illusion of self-confidence. But in the long run— tough luck, buddy. People see right through that shit.

Puff out your chest and man-spread as much as you want. If you’re not actually confident, people will eventually sniff it out and then all those YouTube clips will have no answers for you. Why? Here’s the underlying issue. These videos tell you how confident individuals tend to behave. They tell you about the common body language and temperament of confident individuals. After they’ve already gained their confidence. After they’ve already earned their confidence.

If you think confident behavior is independently correlated with confidence, you’re falling victim to a very common logical fallacy. This is what us nerds in statistics would call a “reverse causality.” Being confident causes confident behavior. Not the other way around. So you might be thinking “yeah but Fil, some people are just born confident.” Nope. Some people are born (or raised) to have an ego. These two are not the same thing. Ego isn’t earned through success. Ego is a learned defense against others who might question your confidence. It’s easy to have an ego. It’s not easy to be truly confident.

In my life, I’ve had some lows and some highs in terms of self-confidence. Which I think is normal. One thing I can say for sure from my own experience is that the only thing that breeds real confidence is real achievement. And yeah I’m only twenty-one so of course I’m no expert on this shit. But the rapidly growing success of this blog is something that I can personally say continues to give me confidence and continues to remove my need to have an ego.

Here’s the point. If everyone’s goal is to be more confident in a society of hyper-competitive individuals, then there’s a simple solution here. As far as I’m concerned, no matter who you are, your best bet is to find out what you’re good at and keep improving that skill. Make it— don’t fake it.

Filip, again.