Why You Can’t See Your Own Value

00:00:00So, quick recap up to this point.In chapter one, we talked about howmost self-help advice gets confidencecompletely backwards. This is the peelfallacy, this idea that you need to feelconfident or believe that you'reconfident before you can actuallyperform well.Turns out that's not true. In chaptertwo, we learned it's actually thereverse. You have to perform well andthat's what builds confidence.Confidence is the output, not the inputof high performance. But, there are acouple caveats to that building ofconfidence. For one, confidence isdomain specific.Two, you have to build that evidence,but that evidence has to be rooted inreality. Uh and then in chapter three,we learned about all of the ways that wemisinterpret reality, let's say. We aremiscalibrated towards reality. Weoverestimate ourselves in somesituations because of our ignorance, weunderestimate ourselves in othersituations cuz uh we just assume that wegot lucky or that we were in the rightplace at the right time. And then, ofcourse, there's all sorts of socialcomparison aspects, differentnarcissistic tendencies that can warpour perception of how good we are at atsomething. And that can give theillusion of confidence. Now, that lastpoint is really important

00:01:15because inthis chapter,we're going to take a little bit of adetour to talk about self-esteem becauseself-esteemis very relevant to this discussion ofconfidence. Andup until this point, we've really been[ __ ] on the self-help industry andtraditional self-help advice and thepeel fallacy and how it's gotten itbackwards.But, it turns out that conventionalpsychology also got this backwards for agood 60 or 70 years as well.And their version of getting thisbackwards was the self-esteem movement.So, I want to take a few minutes andjust kind of briefly catch our listenersup on what self-esteem is, where theidea came from,uh how prevalent it became for a numberof decades, how it infiltrated publicpolicy quite a bit, and what therepercussions of those mistakes ended upbeing. Because it it's going to relateback to a lot of this discussion ofconfidence that we've had. So, theconcept of self-esteem, it goes all theway back to the early days ofpsychology. I I I think from thebeginning, everybody kind of had thisintuitive sense that people seem to havea relationship with themself. And if youhave a good relationship with yourself,where if you tend to have positivefeelings and thoughts about yourself,you

00:02:31probably are doing better in lifeversus if you have bad thoughts andfeelings about yourself.William James was one of the firstpeople that really tried to pin downthis concept and put a framework aroundit. And he simply defined self-esteem asyour successes divided by yourpretensions.Essentially, what you achieved dividedby what you expect of yourself. And so,if you have insanely irrationally highexpectations of yourself, you'reprobably going to feel bad aboutyourself quite often. Whereas if youhave very low expectations for yourselfand you actually achieve quite a bit,you're going to feel very good aboutyourself. Now, this little equation,it's fun, but I think it's moredescriptive than prescriptive. Like, itdoesn't really tell us what to do.Right? Like, it does it mean we shouldhave low expectations for ourselves? Idon't know if that's necessarily thecase. Does it tell us that we should goout and achieve as much as possible?I don't know if that's necessarily greatadvice, either. The thing that WilliamJames intuitively got correct was thathe saw self-esteem as an output of youractions and behaviors, not an input ofyour actions and behaviors. As we'regoing to see, this is going to changepretty soon. Because the next generationof psychologists came along,um starting with

00:03:46Carl Rogers in the '40sand '50s.Uh and Carl Rogers, you you Rogeriantherapy, we've talked about it on someprevious episodes. You know, his bigthing was was this concept of ofunconditional positive regard. So, whathe noticed in his clinical practices isthatgenerally, people who came in with a lotof problems, there was an intense amountof self-judgment and and an intenseamount of shame. And they they seemedextremely critical about themselves andoften in in very irrational and unfairways towards themselves. And so, CarlRogers was just very focused on gettingpeople toaccept themselves. All right? Like justtolerate their own flaws and faults. Andsure enough, he discovered that if youwere able to do this,uh it it didn't seem to free people upto actually improve their lives in somemeaningful way.Now, around the same time, AbrahamMaslow was doing his early work uharound humanistic psychology, and he wasplaying around with uh differenthierarchies of psychological needs. Youknow, most people at this point arepretty familiar with Maslow's uhpyramid. Turns out the pyramid is notvery empirical. It was just kind of athrowaway framework [snorts] that hejotted down in a notebook, but that's apodcast for another day.

00:05:01But, Maslow was the first person whoreally put self-esteem as a need.Uh and not only that, but he he put itlike pretty high in the hierarchy. Andso, he saw it as a prerequisiteto high human functioning. And I thinkthis isuh him and Rogers are kind of the firstpoint where you see this argument oflike, "No, self-esteem is not the resultof living a good life. It isnecessary to live a good life." And so,this is where the Peel fallacy creepsin. AndI have not seen any direct evidence thatNorman Vincent Peel pulled from Maslowand Rogers, but Maslow and Rogers wereprominent in doing a lot of their workin the 1940s when Peel wasgoing through all of his insecuritiesand anxieties. So, it would not surpriseme if Peelkind of pulled his framework off ofMaslow and Rogers and thenuh popularized it to the mainstream.>> Yeah, either way it was kind of in thezeitgeist, right?>> Yeah, that was just kind of the thethought that was coming up in theculture for sure.>> So, once we get into the 1950s, uhyou start getting into uhsome of the work by Nathaniel Brandonand he wrote uh a very popular bookcalled The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem.

00:06:16Um and this is where you really see theconcept just like take hold and Brandonand a number of uh researchers andpsychologists around him like reallystrongly believed that if you could justmake people feel good about themselves,uhthen you would see all sorts of goodpositive outcomes happen as a downstreameffect of that. It It was really justthe Rogerian idea of unconditionalpositive self-regard on steroids. Uh tothe point where it's it's there therewas a strong uh moral inclination oflike we should be implementing this intoschools. We should be implementing thisinto prisons. We should be This shouldbe part of our public policies. Likegiving people high self-esteem, makingsure that everybody in society feelsgood about themselves. So, then thatwill enable them to go out uh andachieve great things.And so, by the time you get to the 1970sand '80s,this is just the water that everybodyswimming in.>> Self-esteem and the Peel fallacy, notonly is it dominating the personalgrowth and and self-help spaces, uh itit is now just kind of uh acceptedorthodoxy ofpsychologists and is being aggressivelypushed uh into public

00:07:32policy.So, one simple example of this is thatin the 1980s, there was a Californiaassemblyman by the name of JohnVasconcellos and uh he was the chairmanof the Ways and Means Committee uh, andcontrolled the entireuh,California educational state budget.Now, Vasconcellos became a bit of aself-help junkie. He attended EsalenInstitute. He got really into the humanpotential movement. Uh, I believe hewent to like a Wayne Dyer seminar orsomething and and he just got completelyconverted. He was like, "This changed mylife. Everybody needs to do this." Andhe actually had quite a bit of power inthe state of California to implement alot of these changes. So, in 1986, hemanaged to create the California TaskForce to Promote Self-Esteem andPersonal and Social Responsibility.God, you got to love bureaucracy.These names.>> So good.>> So, this task force commissioned UCprofessors to research the link betweenself-esteem and six social problems:crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, childabuse, welfare dependency, and academicfailure. And so, the California statesystemstarted implementing this research. Theystarted really digging into everythingand really trying to see likewhere these interventions helped and andand what sort of

00:08:47difference they weremaking. And so, the researchers studieduh, for over 3 years and they foundnothing. There was no link. There was noconnection. There was no causation. Theycouldn't find anything. The problem waswas that the guy who controlled theirbudget wanted there to be a link. He hadbasically staked his career on therebeing a connection between self-esteemand all these prosocial outcomes. So, in1989, the the task force published itspublic report and the press releasedeclared a strong relationship betweenself-esteem and social problems had been{quote} "definitely confirmed." Thestatement itself was false. It did notreflect the data accurately. Theresearchers who allowed it to go throughknew it was false, but they also knewVasconcellos controlledthe University of California statebudget.>> This was crazy. I didn't know that I Iknew that, you know, the self-esteemmovement started in California. Like allthat I've heard that story. I did notknow there was like a systematic kind ofpapering over of the actual results atthe time. They knew it was false andthey kept pushing it.>> I think this is>> That's wild.>> This is one of the few times that thatpolitical corruption has has intersectedwith psychology>> [laughter]>> and actually had a very real

00:10:02a very realimpact and effect um on the world. Thistask force report from California, itwent on to become the best-selling statedocument>> Mhm.>> in history. It sold over 60,000 copies.Vasconcellos became anational celebrity. Uh he went oncountless talk shows. More than 40California counties formed their ownself-esteem task forces. The the rippleeffects lasted for decades. What it didis it validated the hypothesis which hadbeen aroundyou know, since since the '60sthatif you could just make people feel goodabout themselves then they would performhighly as a result. It's the the Pielfallacy all over again.>> Well, I mean, it's it's one thing to belike Piel and write a book about it,>> Yes.>> and then it's another to be a governmentofficial and like this is our policy,institute it, and scale it to thatdegree.>> And institutionalize it.>> So, that's what I just found wild. Andthey did it knowing that it wasn'tactually true.>> That didn't actually work.>> I mean, I don't know about you. Wetalked a little bit earlier in theepisode. You know, you said that youdidn't feel like this stuff was pushedon you.>> And feel like it was like shoved down mythroat in that way, yeah. I do rememberlike the grade inflation stuff. That Ido remember being

00:11:17a thing. Like when Iwas in middle school, like oh,everybody's getting A's and B's. Likethis is weird. So, I do remember that.>> Yeah, we had grade inflation. We hadparticipation trophies. I remember I washorrible at sports and I got a trophyfor everything I did. Which I rememberat the time just thinking it wasridiculous. I'm like, why are theygiving me a trophy? Like, I don't evenwant to be here.>> [laughter]>> This also could have just been the waterI swam in though, too. And it could havejust been like there was a lot ofpositive regard around. Because I doremember there were definitely adultsaround me saying, "Oh, you kids are socoddled these days." I do remember that.But I just don't remember it being likeshoved down my throat like everybody'sspecial and everything like that. Gradeinflation was definitely there. Umthere was a lot of that.>> So I very specifically, cuz I was anunderachiever in school, and I veryspecifically remember my teacherstelling methat I could do anything I wanted, thatI was brilliant, anything I dreamed Icould accomplish, I just had to believein myself. That like I remember going toschool counselors and they were telling,you know, like it>> Did you have like assembly speakers comeand stuff? I do remember that. Okay.Okay, maybe I'm misremembering just alittle bit cuz I remember this now.There was like motivational speakers whowould come to our schools.>> Yeah, we had motivational speakers come.We had uh I remember we Yeah, I meanthere was tons of stuff.>> Okay. Yeah, okay, I might bemisremembering this just a little[laughter] bit. Like all right, yeah. Ithink it was a little bit of since I wasa kid I didn't know what came beforethat.

00:12:32So yeah.>> Yeah.>> Yeah. And and to tie this back into someof the research we talked about earlier,right? About the the link betweenperformance and confidence.Remember, adults, if you make them feelbetter about themselves, they willperform a little bit better.Uh kids, they will not.>> Mhm.>> Yeah. And in fact, what you find withchildren, and and this is actually avery important point for the for theparents out there, when you are uhtrying to motivate and validate yourkids, it's very important that youvalidate them for things that they'vedone, not for things that they are.Because if you tell a kid, "You're sosmart. You're so great. You can doanything." and they haven't doneanything, what you're actually subtlydoing is you're creating an incentivefor them to not do anything. Becausethey're already being rewarded for justexisting. And so if they actually tryand fail, then they risk losing whatthey already have. Whereas if you onlyvalidate them for the things that theytry,then you create an incentive for them tokeep trying new things. And this isreally important. This is something thatI I mean it you see it come up a lotwith um gifted children. You actuallythere there's some I I did a YouTubevideo on this last year, but there'ssome really interesting research aroundkids who are who are particularlytalented or or gifted, it's

00:13:47very commonthat they get validated way too muchwhen they're young.Uh And so what what happens is that theythey actually become demotivated. Cuzobviously we when you're young, anythingyou you try to learn, you're going tofail at. You're going to be bad at itfirst. And so if you're one of thesekids that is just always being told howgreat you are without doing anything,then you you actually develop someneuroses around trying and failing. Youjust kind of become a sloth.>> Right. Yeah, I or perfectionism takesover to the point where you don't actand don't take those risks. And yeah,yeah, you see that a lot.>> Stay right there. More solved coming upafter this. This episode is brought toyou by Shopify.We treat confidence like it's aprerequisite to starting something, butusually it's the other way around. Youstart and then the confidence latercatches up. Take starting a business,for example. Most people, they nevereven start because the list of reasonsnot to outlast their nerve. Now, Shopifyclears that list and makes it easy tomake things happen. Everything you needto start selling is ready from day one.And it especially helps with the scarypart, the moment that somebody goes topay you for the first time. This iswhere a lot of sales quietly die, butShopify checkout gets more of themacross the line and

00:15:02more returningcustomers details are already saved.It's just one tap and it's [music] done.And because Shopify runs everything fromsetup to checkout, you can focus on whatactually matters, growing the damnthing, making a better product. And[music] you have all the tools to do it.With Shopify, nothing stands betweenyour idea and a real business. So, gomake it one. Start your free trial atshopify.com/solved.That's shopify.com/solved.Start your free trial atshopify.com/solved.All right, we're back. Let's jump backinto it. So, yeah, we we kind of forgetnow, but it is it is hard to overstatehow big the self-esteem movement got.Like, not only did it comprise theentire self-help industry and personalgrowth industry. By the mid-90s, it's amulti-billion dollar industry. But,we're talking about education systemsacross the Western world. We're talkingabout public policy. We're talking aboutuh like government bureaucracies arebeing created. NGOs are being created.You're talking about like prisonsystems, correctional systems, corporateprograms>> corporate programs,>> seminars,>> billions and billions of dollars, tensof thousands,

00:16:18maybe hundreds ofthousands of jobs are hinging on thisidea that if you can make people feelgood, they will perform better. Theproblem was is that the academicsquietly knew the math was not mathing.The data was not lining up. It was therewas not much strong evidence going on.So, around the year 2000, theAssociation for Psychological Sciencedecided that somebody needed to get tothe bottom of this. Somebody needed tolike really figure this out. And so,they tapped a researcher by the name ofRoy Baumeister and at the University ofFlorida State. And Baumeister is asuperstar. You and I are both fanboys ofhim. Like, anybody who's like if you'rea psychologist listening to this, youprobably know who Baumeister is. Uh andif you're not, you probably you probablydon't. But,Baumeister is a a bit of a badass. Andhe was tapped by the Association ofPsychological Science and basically toldlike, "Look, you have all the resourcesyou need. We'll give you all theresearchers you need to help you get tothe bottom of this, figure this out,like get the data right, and and comeback to us with with what the realityis, what the effect sizes are.And it's worth noting it that Baumeisterhimself fully subscribed to self-esteem.

00:17:33He He was completely bought into themovement, totally bought into the ideathat that you needed to make people feelbetter about themselves. And so, he tookthe project on with a lot of pride andgusto. And over the next few years, whathe found wasbasically a a nuclear bomb to theself-esteem movement. He published apaper in 2003, and the results prettymuch just murdered the self-esteemmovement. Like shot it in the [ __ ]face.>> its tracks, yeah. Yeah.>> [laughter]>> Yeah.>> And it has been dead ever since.>> Yeah. Yeah, shot it dead in its tracks,more or less, and then, um, it basicallysaid what we already knew about it then,too, right? Like that self-esteem reallyis largely an outcome of success, notthe input, not the cause of it.Artificially inflating it, like yousaid, especially in children, doesn'tproduce better outcomes, doesn't produceachievement. It actually, a lot oftimes, does the opposite, like we'vetalked about.Um, there were two tiny effects that didsurvive kind of the scrutiny of it,though. One of them was just kind ofPeople with higher self-esteem were alittle bit happier.Um, and they did They were a bit more,um, likely to just take action onthings, like this behavioral activationtype things, right? Um,but the quote from Baumeister was itfell

00:18:48short of of what many psychologistshad hoped for, including himself, likeyou said. So, he took a very honest lookat this, and,you know, up to that point, he kind ofthought that, for the past 30, 40, 50,60 years, this has been the holy grailof psychology, is finding a way to getpeople to feel better about himself. Andhe just flat-out admitted, like, no,that's that's actually wrong. He alsofound the two, interestingly, whichwe've kind of already talked about, aconnection to narcissism. Highself-esteem they found was actuallypositively associated with a lot ofnarcissistic traits. And not only that,but when ego is threatened under thesecircumstances, aggression becameactually a lot more common. So, somebodywho was very high self-esteem, staked alot of their identity on something, andyou threaten them, they were much morelikely to become aggressive out of this.Um I believe they they even did some ofthese studies in in prison populations.>> Yeah. You you think about this a littlebit.>> Just think about it. If you go into aprison, you're probably actually goingto find a lot of people who are veryhigh in self-esteem. They think a lotabout themselves, right? And they'realso very, very aggressive. If youthreaten their self-esteem in any way,threaten their identity in any way.Baumeister was one of the first ones toreally find that connection there. Uhthe conclusion that they really came tothough out of this was that it wasn'tthe level

00:20:03of self-regard that you have,the level of self-esteem that you had,that predicted the problems, but likewhether or not it was anchored toanything real, which is exactly whatwe've been talking about this wholetime. That evidence building, thatmastery experience that you have. If youcan link your your self-regard and yourself-worth to something that's actuallyreal in the real world that you've done,that's a more durable form ofself-esteem, and that you don't get allall the aggression and everything withit. If you just pump up self-esteem anddon't anchor it to anything real, itbecomes very fragile at that point andturns into narcissism. So, this is kindof what they found through the in theearly 2000s when they started doing allthat. Uh there's another set ofresearchers, too, another couple ofthem, Crocker and Knight. They basicallyfound that same thing, and they said itit self-esteem it wasn't about the levelthat you had, it wasn't how much youhad, but what you staked it on, what youstaked your self-esteem on. So, if youtie your self-esteem, if you tie yourself-worthum to a specific domain, then any threatto that domain is also a threat on you.Okay, and this is where you get the likeyou get a lot of people coming back atyou, and it can turn into aggression atsome point, like physical actualphysical aggression at some point. Whatthey found is just even ordinaryfeedback, if you've placed all yourself-esteem in this one area and you getordinary feedback from it, you you'llget very defensive with it, too. I don'tknow about you, but I like

00:21:18definitely many times in the past whereI stick a lot of my self-esteem on beingthe smart kid or whatever. Like I wasgood in school and like went to gradschool and like had this whole identityaround being smart. And any perceivedslight of my intelligence, I would getincredibly defensive about it. And evenlash out at people sometimes, too, orjust be like, "Oh, [ __ ] you, you don'tknow that you're dumb, you know,whatever, you don't know what you'retalking about." And I had to kind ofreally sit and wrestle with that for along time.>> It's interesting becauseby my definition,that's not self-esteem.>> Right. Like>> Yeah. Exactly.>> you're having to defend yourself yeah.all the time,>> You don't have a whole lot ofself-esteem or have>> Right. You don't You clearly don't feelgreat about yourself. So it is I mean,maybe at some point we'll do an episodeon self-esteem, but I I've always feltlike one of the core issues ofself-esteem is is just been a definitionproblem and a measurement problem. AndAnd it is interesting cuz if you do goback to some of those originalresearchers and writers in the the '50sand '60s, um they did define it in amuch more holistic way, or they triedto, at least, right? And And like if yougo back and read Nathaniel Branden, likehe talked about that self-esteem isit really is a comfort with yourselfeven when things are not going well.Right. Um it is it is a a willingness tobe different or be rejected or to have

00:22:34your ideas not accepted because you feelcomfortable enough with yourself, right?And this is often the difficulty withpsychology is that when it comes time tomeasure things,it's very difficult to measurepsychological processes andpsychological experiences. And so,to get some form of measurement, youhave to boil things down into like asimple survey.And once you kind of water it down intoa survey question,you dilute the concept and you kind ofmake it a little bit of a a caricaturelike a cartoon version of what theoriginal kind of philosophical claimwas.>> Right. Do I mean just like with CarlRogers or or Maslow or Young, like theywere not they were not>> empirical at all.>> But but they were also not advocatingfor likeunrealistic form of self-esteem. Theywere trying to get at like, "Hey, youthere's needs to be something here thatyou can that you can rely on it. You canlean on.">> Yeah.>> Right.>> Can I go on a tangent really quick?>> Allow it.>> [laughter]>> I mean, we're already on it.>> And it.>> This comes up a lot. You know, there's alot of discourse these days around liketherapy culture, right? And um one oneof the moreintelligent things I've seen writtenabout it um

00:23:50came from a writer named Freddie deBoer. And he he he basically made theargument he said that uhtherapy concepts, you know, there's acertain class of ideas and concepts thatare very good and healthy on anindividual level, but they becomeunhealthy on a social level.>> Yeah. And I could see self-esteem beingone of those things cuz when you thinkabout Carl Rogers, right? Like>> I have I have a lot of sympathy andunderstanding for like where he wascoming from. You know, if he was aclinical psychologist, right? He'sworking with individual people. Peopleare coming to him with like massive lifeissues, huge crises going on in theirlives. And they're probably coming inbeing unbelievably harsh on themselves.And so, of course, he rightly observed,which I think all of us have observedthe same thing. Like all of us knowsomebody in our lives that isirrationally hard on themselvesand makes themselves miserable quitefrequently because of the amount ofself-judgment that they have. And so, Ithink Carl Rogers was just making a veryobvious observation of like "Hey dude,you shouldn't do that so much. Youshould give yourself a break. Have somelove." You know, like if you're whenyour partner [ __ ] up, you don't likescream at them for every little errorthat they make. Like you you have somecompassion. You forgive

00:25:05them. You know,you tell them it's going to be allright. Uh you you you look at the bettersides of their their personality. Likewhy don't you do that for yourself? Thatwas it. I think what the self-esteemmovement is they they tried to take thatconcept that was true in the micro andthen make a macro version of it. Andit's like, well, let's just makeeverybody feel great about themselves.Andcuz then clearly it will map, you know,well onto society. And I just think it'sone of those uh concepts that it it justdoesn't work that way.>> It was same kind of thing with>> it.>> with Peel where he's like, this workedfor me, so it should work for everybody,right?>> Same Same fallacy.>> Yeah. Whatever it is, a a a technique, atherapy a therapeutic modality, whateverit is.Working on the individual level, onceyou scale it, then it just getsperverted. That's a definitionalproblem, I think, too, because everybodyhas a different definition of it, likeyou said. So, yeah, that's that's aninteresting little tangent we went on.I'm glad I allowed it.>> [laughter]>> You should feel good about yourself forallowing that.>> Where this like gets into problemsthough, too. So, the Crocker and Knight,the whole thing about around um stakingyour your self-esteem on a single domainsomewhere, right? You've also talkedabout this before, too, about likediversifying your identity, right? Ifyou do stake your identity on too manythings. This is something I definitelyrealized where like a long time I wasjust like,well, I got to I got to be a smartperson or whatever it is, right?

00:26:20And uhthat's a very fragile way to live. So,you need, you know, maybe there's somerelationships you need to stake youridentity on as well. Maybe there's otherareas, maybe there's hobbies, maybethere's whatever. Umso, yeah, but the the problems you runinto though, Crocker and Knight theyidentified several areas. The two bigones though really were learning andrelationships. It's like when you learnwhen you're learning something, you'restaking a lot of your identity on that.Any setbacks on that are like consideredhuge catastrophic failures at thatpoint. Then you're stupid or you can'tlearn or you can't do this, you'reincompetent. And again, it's just like acatastrophic failure on your part. Theother one is relationships though, too,because at that point, what you're doingis you're staking your self-esteem onall of that external validation, whichwe've already talked about, too. You'relooking for an external source of of alittle drip of validation, and when youdon't get that, boom, that's also acatastrophic failure of your identityaround that. So, there's kind of a ametabolic tax to it, too, that they'vethey've come across, you know, like whenif your self-image needs this constantdefending, there's kind of a low-gradevigilance that's going on. You're alwayson guard, and you're always like lookingfor some external way to to get thatvalidation, and it's just it'sexhausting. Self-esteem is definitelynot what it's cracked up to be, butthat's what we found, yeah.>> Yeah.

00:27:36Again, it'sit's the side effects of getting thingsright. It's it's not the cause. So, wewere raised to believe that self-esteemwas something that we could be given,you know, and we could be given itthrough trophies, compliments,encouragement, uh grade inflation.But, what nobody actually told us isthat self-esteem that isn't earneddoesn't stick. People can tell us allthe best things in the world aboutourselves, but if we didn't do anythingto be told that, it's not actually goingto help us. It's not actually going tomake us feel better about ourselves.And it turns out, in many ways, this canbackfire. And that backfiring explains,I think, a lot of the problems that thelast few generations have grown up with.>> So, we've taken the self-esteem detour,and I think that's useful as context forwhat we're going to explain in the restof this chapter, which is how youactually do build that generalizedconfidence.Because if you can't delude yourselfinto feeling confident, as we saw withthe appeal fallacy and the self-esteemmovement, how the [ __ ] is it that somepeople just seem to be so self-assuredin so many situations? Like, there aregenerally confident people in the world.We've all met them, we've all beenaround them. Maybe there've

00:28:51been timesin our lives that we felt that wayourselves. So, where does that comefrom? How do we get it? If self-esteem'snot the way we get it, if if the appealfallacy's not the way we get it, likehow do we actually get it? So, Banduracame back to save the day. In the late2000s, I think around 2007, 2008,Bandura returned to the concept ofself-efficacy. But, he added to it. Hefound a broader, more widely applicableversion of self-efficacy. Now,we talked earlier, Drew, about me notpatting myself on the back too much, but>> Go ahead. Go ahead, Drew.>> Can I Can I justCan I just give myself a Can I just takea victory lap on this one?>> [laughter][gasps]>> So, I wrote something probably about 12,13 years ago. I think it started as aviral article. Since then, I I post onsocial media all the time. One of thedrums that I bang on frequently is Isay, "Confidence is not an expectationof success. Confidence is a comfort withfailure." And that is exactly whatBandura found. That generalizedconfidence, it is not feeling likeyou're going to succeed in every domainyou go into. Generalized confidence is acomfort with failure and setback, nomatter what you do. So, one way to thinkabout this,

00:30:06right, is Bandura's originalfinding was that self-efficacy orconfidence can be builtonly within a domain.>> Right.>> But, that domain can be a lot ofdifferent things. That domain it couldbe woodworking, it could be music, itcould be relationship skills, it couldbe your career path, it could also bemanaging failure.You could treat managing failure as askill that you can develop confidencein.Andalmost magically,if you choose that skill to buildconfidence around, a tolerance offailure.That makes you confident across theboard. That is what allows you to walkinto any room and feel self-assured andnot worry what's going to happen to you,cuz you know you can handle theworst-case situation.Now, Bandura called this copingself-efficacy.I like to think of it as like metaself-efficacy.>> Yeah. Yeah, it's a very meta skill,yeah.>> Uh because it's almost like if you and Ihave been drilling towards the core ofwhat confidence is, I think this is weyou we have now just enteredthe core.>> Yeah.>> Like this is the base level that if youwant to feel confidence across a widespan of areas and experiences

00:31:21in yourlife,the way to do that is to becomecomfortable and develop self-efficacyaround the tolerance of failure,around the tolerance of challenge andsetback. And of course, there's just I Imean, this is not new. Like the Once youget intoaccepting and embracing failure, likenow now you're now you're calling backto to the ancient Greeks and Romans.Like this is stuff that's been aroundfor thousands of years.Obviously,any process of learning requires acertain degree of failure. Any processof growth requires a certain degree offailure. An acceptance and tolerance offailure is what drives humility. It'swhat drives compassion. It's what drivesforgiveness. Like so many of the classicvirtues of the Western world arerootedin a tolerance for failure and inability to manage and overcome failure.You know, when we were doing research,the best example I came across ofuhlike a process to build this metaself-efficacy is um is there's there's agreat story about Sara Blakely, who'sthe the founder of Spanx, billion-dollarcompany.Um Blakely hadzero entrepreneurial experience before

00:32:36she started the business. She had soldfax machines door to door for 7 years.She had faced constant rejection. Shehad no experience in fashion. She had noexperience in clothing or textiles. Shehad no business degree, no connections,no venture capital. She had neverstarted a business before.All she did is one day she cut off thefeet of her pantyhose, wore them underwhite pants to a party, and realizedthat she had founda gap in the market. That a bunch ofwomen werereally interested in and excited aboutthis super simple thing.She called dozens of hosiery mills. Shewas turned down by every single one. Uhand then finally she convinced one tomake a prototype and it's, you know,from there the rest is history.But the interesting thing about Blakely,there's this anecdote that she tellsfrom her childhood that's superfascinating, which is that every daythat she came home from school, youknow, most parents I don't know if yourparents did this, but mine certainly didnot. Uh most parents though, when kidscome home from school, the question theyask is what did you do at school today,right? Her father asked a differentquestion. He said, "What did you fail attoday?"Every single day. And so she had to comehome and

00:33:51tell him something that shetried and failed at.And what this did was it conditionedinto her brain that failure iscompletely normal and okay,and actually that that is what you getrewarded for in life. First of all, I'mtrying to imagine my parents asking methis question and I'm like, I can't Ilike can't even visualize it.>> [laughter]>> Yeah. Yeah.>> Second of all, I'm trying to imaginewhat the hell I would say to them. Uhyou know,>> Like my parents would say, "Oh, youknow, tell me one good thing thathappened today." That was you know, it'smore of a>> It's back to it's all the positivethinking, right?>> positive thinking and avoidance aroundit. Yeah. Yeah. I do like to say when Igo skiing with my friends, I I I joke alittle bit and I say, "If you if youdon't eat [ __ ] at least once you're notgoing hard enough.>> Yeah. Terrible advice, don't take that.You're going to hurt yourself [laughter]with it. Butthe the spirit behind the the that ideais definitely there. It's a it's a weirdupbringing she had for that. That's nota normal thing.>> Very weird.>> Right? Yeah.>> I imagine this mindset's pretty commonin athletics.Right? Like I I could see coaches,right? Like trying to like really fosterthis in in athletes. But other thanathletics, I really think business isthe only area that you see this likewidely encouraged. I remember I remembervery early on in my career uh I where Iwas like very much struggling

00:35:07to get by,like was not making much money, tryingto like launch products, sell products.Like nobody was buying anything. Iremember going to a seminar and and thisguy got up on stage and he said that if5% of your customers are not asking fora refund, you're not selling hardenough. And that blew my [ __ ] mind.Blew my [ __ ] mind. I was like[ __ ] Yeah, I'm not doing anything.You know, and it's I don't know. Like Ihave personally found that I do think inmany ways like business is often a avery great proxy for personal growth anddevelopment because it has the financialstakes, obviously. So it's like you[ __ ] care and it at the end of theday you [ __ ] your ego. Like if it's ifyou're losing money, like you just haveto leave your ego at the door. It isruthless in making you reevaluate like alot of your own emotional assumptionsand dispositions. Learning how toaccept that what you thought was true isjust like not true at all.>> I agree with definitely with that. Ithink it's it's more accepted in thatcommunity and and it's not um itdoes hasn't gotten really as distributedthroughout other parts of society andculture. You know, we talked about theloopuh back in chapter two. Umthe the competence loop, like gettingthat started.

00:36:22Like there's that chickenand the egg thing. The obstacle togetting that started is rarely like athe belief in the skill. Like a lot oftimes you're like, yeah, I couldprobably do that, but really what it isis like, uh, but what if I fail? So, Icould probably figure that out overtime, but a lot of people, and includingmyself a little with a lot of things, islike, uh, I don't I'm not sure I couldhandle the failure around this.>> You're right, there's a high tolerancefor that in the business community, inthe entrepreneurial community. It, forwhatever reason, and athletics, too. Forwhatever reason, it just hasn't spreadto the other parts of>> You know, there there's a like, forinstance, if you grow up in a reallydifficult background, like there's nomargin for error.>> That's true. That's a good point.>> That's a very good point.>> Like I think about how my wife grew up.Like, she had zero margin for error.Like, she couldn't afford to fail atest, ormiss a week of school, you know? Like,it it isit could be catastrophic.>> Yeah. Not only that, but actually, too,um,if we think about it,the default kind of is to just not gothere, right? Inaction is kind of thedefault for a good reason. Like, it'sit's it's less risky. Not taking therisk is actually the better option, um,just from a survival standpoint.Inaction really is not a character flaw,it's kind of what we do. We have tolearn to be okay with failure. It's notthe other way around. So,

00:37:37do youremember all the like the research onlearned helplessness?>> Yep.>> Um, so, back in the what was this? Like,the '50s and '60s, I think.>> '60s.>> Yeah, they did they did the research onthat, and that was Martin Sel- Seligman,actually, too, another famouspsychologist. And what they found, Idon't know how far you want to get intothis. It was the the dog study though,where they were>> Yeah, where they would shock dogsrandomly, and they found that if you ifthere was if it was unpredictable whenthe dogs would be punished, that theyjust gave up.>> Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, that's what theconclusion they made was like, oh, if ifthe dogs uh didn't know, this wasuncertain, un- unpredictable, theycouldn't they couldn't figure out whatwas going to they couldn't predict whatwas going to happen, they would justgive up, right? In the mid-2010s, theyactually came back and they said,actually, we we got that backwards. Thedefault is to to just not do doWe actually have to learn that>> to do something.>> to do something in the face of failureand uncertainty. So they had thatbackwards for like 50 years.>> If I can bring Maslow back for a second,this just occurred to me like listeningto you talk. Let's just accept at facevalue Maslow's hierarchy which I don'tthink either of us totally buys intoMaslow's hierarchy. I don't think if youeven Maslow bought into Maslow'shierarchy.>> The just the pyramid actually wasn't hisinvention. That was that was a marketingthing in the 60s and 70s that came out.>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So but anyway and it'sit's it was also

00:38:52it was a concept thatwas revived after he died that he neverpublished himself and he probably neverpublished it because he didn't put awhole lot of weight on it.>> It was an idea.>> It was just an idea. It's like athrowaway idea that he had. To bringback Maslow's pyramid because I do thinkit is usethere's enough truth in it that it canbe useful to think about. If you thinkabout the lower levels of his pyramid,right? Like physiological needs, safetyneeds,and then community or connection needs,right? Those you can't really risklosing.Right. Those are very high stakes thingsand those also kind of become the safetynet for you to take risks in other areasof your life. So if you do have a stableenvironment with a loving family and astrong network of friends who are cansupport you and take care of youthat liberates you to take more risksand become more tolerant of failurewhich thenbuilds confidence and self-efficacy andand self-esteem, right? All the greatthings.But if you don't have those things inthe first place like it's it's actuallyirrational to riskyour financial stabilityto likebecome comfortable with failure.>> We talked about this in the purposedebate we did do a little bit.>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you knowmy friend Scott Barry Kaufman has like

00:40:08revised Maslow's hierarchy tohe revised it into a sailboat but he hebasically made this differentiation. Hesaid thatthere is a fundamental differencebetween the lower levels of the pyramidand the upper levels of the pyramid,which is that the lower levels of thepyramid are uh they're protective.Right? You have to have them. If youdon't have them, you wouldsuffer and be miserable. Whereas theupper levels of the pyramid are likeoptional, but they are optimal. Theyhelp you flourish. You don't need them,but by pursuing them, they help youflourish. And so that would be youresteem and your uh self-actualizationand your sense of purpose and all thatstuff. So anyway, that's just somethingthat occurred to me. I mean, I don'twant to say self-esteem is a privilegecuz that feels like it's probably goingtoo far, but it's if you have theopportunityand the safety net in your life wherethat you can tolerate a lot of failures,um to a certain extent that is aprivilegedposition.>> Mhm.>> [clears throat]>> Yeah. Yeah, then there's probably somepeople who can do it without that, butmost people are not like that. Yeah.Yeah. I I Yeah. That makes sense to me.>> Okay, so we we kind of just establishedthat meta self-efficacy is actually adomain-specificuh competence around failure, right? Iactually think it's broader than thatthough.

00:41:23I think it actually has to domore with uncertainty.>> Mhm.>> Like you're you're good at sitting withuncertainty, which failure has a lot ofuncertainty around it, right?>> That's very Buddhist of you, DrewBernie.>> Well, hear me out.>> Okay.>> There's a a really rich literaturearound what they call the intolerance ofuncertainty with this too, okay? Now, anintolerance of uncertainty, there's kindof like there's cognitive, there'semotional, there's behavioral aspects toit. You think uncertainty is a badthing. It's a stressful bad thing,right? It's unfair, it's dangerous,whatever.>> Yeah.>> Um so right there, you're you've alreadykind of pigeonholed yourself into acertain way of dealing with this, right?You have an emotional response to thattoo, an aversive emotional response.You're anxious about uncertain things.>> What might happen.>> What might happen, and oh my god,there's a million horrible things thatcould go wrong in the situation, right?>> Yeah.>> But then you also all these behavioralresponses to that. So, what that does,you know, you have those cognitivedistortions, you have those emotionalreactions to it, and that motivates youto engage in a bunch of copingmechanisms around uncertainty thatactually just end up making it worse.>> Okay.>> Right? Okay, so for instance, yeah,there's like excessive informationseeking, you know, somebody who goes outand researches fora a whatever months before they can buya carpet or a rug or something likethat, right?

00:42:39Um then you have likereassurance seeking. That's a big one.If you're not confident in arelationship, you go to the person youkeep um reas- like seeking reassurancefrom them. Um you avoid the decisionaltogether maybe. You keep checking onthings. You premature commitment to thesafest option. You just see, "Okay,that's the highest certainty option. I'mgoing to go to that with that." Even ifthat's not the best situation or thebest decision in that situation, right?Each one of those, okay, each one ofthose behaviors that you do,they give you short-term relief fromthat anxiety of the uncertainty, right?>> Right.>> But it actually prevents you fromdiscovering that you would have justbeen fine without having that certainty.>> Wait, so okay, that that's actuallyreally interesting. So, back in chaptertwo, we talked about the mechanism ofbuilding self-efficacy. There were a fewfactors that were involved, and one ofwhich was you needed to be at the edgeof your capability, and then the otherwas that you needed to have accuratefeedback that was based in reality oflike how you performed. And if we'reconstantly looking for reassurance andfor other people to tell us that,"You're okay, you're doing fine. No,it's going to be fine. Everything'sokay. Like here, look, everything'sarranged perfectly." What you're doingvery subtly is you're robbing yourselfof the ability of developing thatself-efficacy

00:43:55around uncertainty becauseyou are removing A you're no longer atthe edge of your capability, and then Bthe the the feedback that's coming backto you is that you need somebody else toreassure you to handle uncertainty. Ifyou look at uncertainty as a skill,you're never developing the skill. It'slike you're never taking the trainingwheels off. And so you just you continuetoflounder in in a fear of uncertainty.>> Right. Right. You're learning, butyou're learning in the wrong directionhere.>> Yeah.>> Because what you're what you're learningis not how to deal with uncertainty,you're learning how to avoid thediscomfort of uncertainty. Okay?>> Okay.>> That's that's really what you're doinghere. And so every time you do that,you're just reinforcing like, oh no, Ineed to avoid this uncertainty byengaging in all these behaviors. And allthese reassurance-seeking behaviors. Andso every time that comes back up again,you're just going to engage in that loopover and over again. You're not actuallygoing to get good at sitting withuncertainty. You're just avoiding thediscomfort of the uncertainty. That'swhat you're teaching yourself to>> Interesting. That makes sense to me.>> Yeah. So and you know, people people whoare high in the intolerance foruncertainty, they actually they and theysee this. They become less confidentover repeated decisions. Like it's theexact opposite of what they're trying todo, right? Each decision

00:45:10uh rather thangenerating like that mastery evidencethat we talked about, is actuallydraining your confidence further cuzagain, you're just avoiding the thediscomfort rather than engaging with theuncertainty there.>> Yeah. It is interesting I mean I'm justdoing like a common sense check. And andwhen I think about the most confidentpeople I knowor the most confident people I've beenaround, there iskind of just this like it like theydon't even think about the result.>> No.>> Yeah.>> Right. They don't even care, right?>> They just do things. They just dothings.>> Yeah. And and it's>> And they take what comes.>> And and they understand they're like,hey, it might not go well, but whatever.We'll deal with it when it happens. Anduhuh to me it's it's like a piece of thistoo is reallycoming back to that like knowingunderstanding what you control andunderstanding what you don't control,right? Because it's the things you don'tcontrol, you're never going to becertain about them. There's nothing youcan do to be certain about them. And andand what you just pointed at, themechanism you just described shows thatthe more you try to be certain aboutthem, the more you just foster greaterYeah. sense of uncertainty. Exactly.Uh and so yeah, I I I do think it itdoeskind of come back to the the stoic thingof just focus on what you can controland then just let go of everything else.>> If

00:46:25you think about it, too, taken tothis extreme, this is like OCD, right?>> Yes.>> So people who have anobsessive-compulsive disorder aroundsomething or like clean- cleanliness orwhatever, the more they check, the moreanxious they get about it.>> Yeah.>> Because again, they're just reinforcingthat like I can't sit with thisdiscomfort, so I have to engage in theserepetitive behaviors around it. So it'staken to extreme, that's what it is.>> Yeah, that makes sense. One of the thebiggest takeaways here is thatuncertainty is not the enemy. It'sactually the price of admissionto kind of anything worth having or orhaving a broad generalized sense ofconfidence. And the people who try toeliminate uncertainty, they justunintentionally promote greaterintolerance of uncertainty, greateranxiety, greater fear of the unknown.>> So ultimately, if we're trying to builda skill, the skill of confidence, it isthe ability to act without needing toknow what the outcome is.>> Like that seems to be like the the seedat the core of of all of this. So it'sinteresting. I mean, this episode hastaken us onquite a journey.You know, we started with a veryconventionalunderstanding of confidence from NormanVincent Peale.

00:47:40At this point, we've nowwe've dug into all the research, we'vedebunked it in a bunch of differentways, we went through the self-esteemmovement.And really what we're we're drillingdown and we're finding is that at theend of the day, the trick isn't to feelmore certain of your success, it's tobecome more tolerant of your failures.Which means that pursuing confidenceisn't really about pursuing anything perse. It's almost aboutallowing things to happen. It's It'sdeveloping this kind of paradoxicalability todo things without expecting a certainresult. Which is a abit of a mind [ __ ] and like we're nowleaving psychology land and enteringinto philosophy land. AndI think that's where we're going to endup in chapter five becausethe conclusion thatthat I've come to that that we've cometo in our research is that confidenceisn't even really the right questionthat people should be asking, right?Like we've been hammering on this pointthroughout the episode that confidenceis aby product of doing the right things,not the cause of doing the right things.It is the output, not the input. So, thequestion remains,

00:48:56what is that input?What allows you to act withoutexpectation? What allows you to uhtolerate failure and uncertaintybut still do things that seem worthdoing. And what we'll find is actuallyan ancient virtuethat has been around for as long ashuman civilization has been around.And it turns out modern psychology backsup that this is what we should have beenfocusing on all along. Hey everybody,thank you for watching. This chapter ispart of a much larger episode. You canget that entire episode right now onSpotify. Check it out there. And if youwant to consume it chapter by chapterhere on YouTube, we release them everyfew days. And if you want to get a fullPDF guide with all of our citations,resources, and full summary of theentire episode, you can go tosolvepodcast.com/confidence

00:49:49and get it there. Check it out. I'll seeyou again soon.Mhm.