Alain de Botton - On Confidence

On
Confidence

Other books in this series:

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

Why We Hate Cheap Things

How to Find Love

Self-Knowledge

The Sorrows of Work

The Sorrows of Love

On
Confidence

Published in 2017 by The School of Life

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Contents

It can be humbling to realise just how many great achievements have not been the result of superior talent or technical know-how, merely that strange buoyancy of the soul we call confidence.

We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world.

We so often lack confidence because we implicitly regard its possession as a matter of slightly freakish and irreplicable good luck. Some people simply are very confident, for reasons that neuroscientists may one day uncover. But, we tell ourselves, there isnt much we can do about our particular situation. We are stuck with the confidence levels we were born with.

In fact, the opposite is true. Confidence is a skill, not a gift from the gods. And it is a skill founded on a set of ideas about the world and our natural place within it.

These ideas can be systematically studied and gradually learnt, so that the roots of excessive hesitancy and compliance can be overcome. We can school ourselves in the art of confidence.

In well-meaning attempts to boost our confidence ahead of challenging moments, people often try to draw our attention to our strengths: our intelligence, our competence, our experience. However, this can have awkward consequences. There is a type of underconfidence that arises specifically when we grow too attached to our own dignity and become anxious around any situation that might seem to threaten it. We hold back from challenges in which there is any risk of ending up looking ridiculous which comprises, of course, almost all the most interesting situations.

In a foreign city, we grow reluctant to ask anyone to guide us to the nice bars, because they might think us an ignorant, pitiable lost tourist. We might long to kiss someone, but never let on, in case they dismiss us as a predatory loser. At work, we dont apply for a promotion, in case the senior management deems us delusionally arrogant. In a concerted bid never to look foolish, we dont venture very far from our cocoon. Consequently from time to time, at least we miss out on the best opportunities of our lives.

At the heart of our underconfidence is a skewed picture of how dignified a normal person can be. We imagine that it might be possible, after a certain age, to place ourselves beyond mockery. We trust that it is an option to lead a good life without regularly making a complete idiot of ourselves.

One of the most charming books written in early modern Europe was In Praise of Folly (1509), by the Dutch scholar and philosopher Erasmus. In its pages, Erasmus advances a hugely liberating argument. In a warm tone, he reminds us that everyone, however important and learned they might seem, is a fool. No one is spared, not even the author. However well-schooled he himself was, Erasmus remained he insists as much of a nitwit as anyone else: his judgement is faulty; his passions get the better of him; he is prey to superstition and irrational fear; he is shy whenever he has to meet new people; he drops things at elegant dinners. This is deeply cheering, for it means that our own repeated idiocies do not have to exclude us from the best company. Looking like a prick, making blunders, and doing bizarre things in the night does not render us unfit for society; it makes us a little more like the greatest scholar of the northern European Renaissance.

There is a similarly uplifting message to be drawn from the work of Pieter Bruegel. His painting Dutch Proverbs presents a comically disenchanted view of human nature. Everyone, he suggests, is pretty much deranged: heres a man throwing his money into the river; theres a soldier squatting on the fire and burning his trousers; someone is intently bashing his head against a brick wall, someone else is biting a pillar. Importantly, the painting is not an attack on just a few unusually awful people: it is a picture of parts of all of us.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Nederlandse Spreekwoorden (Dutch Proverbs), 1559.

Bruegel and Erasmuss work proposes that the way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; its to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness. We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we will be idiots again in the future and thats OK. There arent any other available options for human beings.

We grow timid when we allow ourselves to be overexposed to the respectable sides of others. Such are the pains people take to appear normal, we collectively create a phantasm that suggests that normality might be possible, and this is problematic for everyone.

Once we learn to see ourselves as already, and by nature, foolish, it wont matter so much if we do one more thing that might look stupid. The person we try to kiss could indeed think us ridiculous. The individual from whom we asked directions in a foreign city might regard us with contempt. But if these people did so, it wouldnt be news to us. They would only be confirming what we had already gracefully accepted long ago: that we, like them and every other person on the earth are a nitwit. The risk of trying and failing would have its sting substantially removed. The fear of humiliation would no longer stalk us in the shadows of our minds. We would grow free to try things by accepting that failure was the norm. And every so often, amid the many rebuffs we would have factored in from the outset, it would work: wed get a kiss, wed make a friend, wed get a raise.

The road to greater confidence begins with a ritual of telling oneself solemnly every morning, before heading out for the day, that one is a muttonhead, a cretin, a dumbbell and an imbecile. A few more acts of folly should, thereafter, not matter very much.