“Success is determined not by whether or not you face obstacles, but by your reaction to them. And if you look at these obstacles as a containing fence, they become your excuse for failure. If you look at them as a hurdle, each one strengthens you for the next.”
― Ben Carson
via Harv Eker.
Not everyone can be CEO of Coca Cola or the next Steve Jobs.
And who is capable of deciding about it? Who is the one that chooses to say: “You would do this x thing for the rest of your life because this is all what you can do!”? How many real-life examples are out there of people telling to challenged ones “you can’t do it” and then those second ones get out there and do it?
1.Lower self-confidence makes you pay attention to negative feedback and be self-critical.
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Low self-confidence may turn you into a pessimist, but when pessimism teams-up with ambition it often produces outstanding performance.
What Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is talking about as a high self-confidence person in this article is actually a delutional one. A person that has no connections with reality. Pessimists have been proven to be more accurate about the evaluation of a task they made than optimists. But the thing is that they tend not to do it again in contrast with the optimists that they think they did a better job than what they actualy did and they think that they would do an even better next time. (A concept that I learned from Tony Robbins)
2.Lower self-confidence can motivate you to work harder and prepare more.
Someone from the article’s comments writes the old quote: failing to prepare is preparing for failure. Yes, absolute true, but how much “hard work” would be enough to feel that you are well prepared and be confortable about presenting your work? For almost of “those” people the answer is endless!
3.Lower self-confidence reduces the chances of coming across as arrogant or being deluded.
Yes reduces the chances but that doesn’t mean that the only way to be modest or have a good sense of what’s going on is having low self-confidence. Not to mention that it increases your chances of coming across as a person who doesn’t believe in himself or at his work. Who wants that?
I also want you to think of people that are/were extremely successful and gave you the feeling, since you can’t actually know, that they have/had low self-esteem. Do you want me to name you thousands of successful that I think are also very confident about themselfs?
The article in general might be in some use for low self-confident people, to get them to feel better about themselves, but even to those it can give the impression that low self-confidence is something that you need to pursue and not change!! 😛 The point of all the million articles, books, videos, podcasts, movies and so on that try to inspire us and to get us to feel more confident about ourselves, I think, is since life as it is will get us down sometimes, we need something to keep us moving! And I hope I put a small stone to that direction myself also with this one…
Reading the best strategy for reducing stress from HBR, reminded me of this old but amazing video of Louis CK.
Louis CK is a very good comedian and he is making a very good point. We have stoped appreciating things in our lifes and we take everything for granted. We expect too many things from our daily lifes and when we experiencing “the gap between what he(we) expected to happen and what was actually happening”, as the HBR article says, we feel frustated, angry, disappointed, sad or some other negative emotion. Or when something changes the things that worked in the past or our routines.
So the articles suggests to “Either change the reality around you or change your expectations.” Very good solution!!! Find a way to make it the way you want it or change the way you see things or both! But that’s something you need to think about it when you are trapped in that emotionally state! Not very easy..
So I would recommend a much more pro-active step than that: Appreciate the things you accept for granted. Right now and every day you wake up in the morning there are thousands things you could feel grateful about. About the birds, about the sun, about the rain, about the fogs, about that you are still alive! Does it look fake to you or artificial? Well maybe, or maybe you are used to have them! If a guy from the 50’s gets in a time machine and gets to our present wouldn’t be excited from all the things that didn’t exist back then? So why not accept his attitude right now?
When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop… . But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem—and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works. That’s what we wanted to do with Mac.
Why Apple is such a great company today…
But those that manage to capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.
What does it matter to you right now? What do you want?
This is the guy who created Instagram and the acquisition from Facebook made him very rich but mainly very successful. This article is about the latest and how small steps stack one to the other. Like the “dots” of Steve Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford. Enjoy!
Outside the box or whatever else you might call it. Find your frame and start to paint outside of it!
Startups are hard, but they can also go from difficult to great incredibly quickly. You just need to survive long enough and keep going so you can create your 52nd game.
Read the whole post! Small and great!
You don’t want to do things that “everyone else” does, because “everyone else” is broke. And probably unhealthy. And probably unhappy. They think exactly like their parents thought, who thought exactly like their parents thought, and this cycle has go on sometimes for decades. So this is not the model you want to follow.
Prosperity is often the byproduct of innovation. And innovation requires critical thinking, lateral thinking and creativity. So what do you do to nurture yours?
I totally agree. A distiction though: diversity of thinking opinions, yes, but model the ones of the people that are doing what you want to do.
Great philosophy to live by!