Several days ago, I had a wonderful opportunity to be one of panelists in a Go-Talk session. The session was titled “The Power of Grit” and I was supposed to share my experience on developing grit. However, in this post I will not discuss about grit, I will discuss it in another post. Instead, I want to discuss about confidence.
But why? Well, because I think I made a mistake on this point when I answered one of the questions from a colleague in the audience. To be exact, the question was something along this line, “are you familiar with a term called ‘the imposter syndrome’? For me personally, working with these bright people around me sometimes make me feel like I am not good enough. Do you have any tips to be confidence?”
After a lot of thoughts, I consider my answer to the question was a mistake. I answered, nowadays I am not confident about a lot of things. I added, looking back, the period when I was confident about a lot of things was probably because at the time I was at the left side of the Dunning-Kruger effect curve. Self-doubt is good, I said, because it means that we know we have a lot to improve on ourselves.
This answer was a mistake, first and foremost, because I don’t know what confidence truly means. Now that I have time to look for a better answer, I find out that according to Merriam-Webster, confidence means, “a feeling or belief that you can do something well or succeed at something”. Imagine how terrible a person will grow if he/she does not believe in himself/herself!
To put in a better context, what do I usually do when I have to work on a problem that require tools that I am not familiar with or skills that I have not mastered yet? In a pair programming setting, I tend to try to be honest and say it upfront to my partners on what aspects I am lacking. This is okay, I think.
Sometimes I even lower the expectation by saying things such as, “I am total idiot on this”. I realize now that it might not be the correct way to behave. So far I am just lucky to have partners that don’t lose all their confidence on me the moment I said such things.
Then, what is the better answer? Is confidence good? Or is it bad? Should I be confident in my ability to solve a problem even though I don’t have all the answers upfront? Or should I always lower the expectations of everyone around me? Where is the border between being confident and being smug? Where is the line between humility and inferiority?
Frankly speaking, I don’t have a definite answer to the questions above even now. But I do think the following excerpt from Paul Graham’s essay titled “The Dream Language” is a good first step towards answering those questions:
To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. You need the young hacker’s naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran’s skepticism. You have to be able to think, “how hard can it be?” with one half of your brain while thinking, “it will never work” with the other.
The trick is to realize that there’s no real contradiction here. You want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. You have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of whatever solution you’ve got so far.
People who do good work often think that whatever they’re working on is no good. Others see what they’ve done and think it’s wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.
If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward. In the first phase of the two-cycle innovation engine, you work furiously on some problem, inspired by your confidence that you’ll be able to solve it. In the second phase, you look at what you’ve done in the cold light of morning and see all its flaws very clearly. But as long as your critical spirit doesn’t outweigh your hope, you’ll be able to look at your admittedly incomplete system and think, “how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?”
What do you think?