Why You Should Underestimate Yourself
Never underestimate your opponent, that is the fastest way to lose. Rather than underestimate your opponent, take your belief in your own abilities with a grain of salt.
The sooner you learn to look past the image you may have manufactured of your own grandeur, the sooner you can start making real progress to winning and accomplishing your goals.
This became clear to me after making a bet on a game of chess with my cousin.
Playing Chess with my cousin, every move I made was more genius than the last, carefully placing myself in just the right positions and gradually taking apart his defense piece by piece. Never had the game been so easy. It was only a matter of time before I had won the game and the bet.

It wasn’t until he took my queen that I woke up and realized I was losing. With both my knights, a rook and a bishop in the graveyard compared to the meager knight and a few of his pawns I had managed to capture, I couldn’t understand how I had underestimated my opponent so much. He had a majority of my pieces and was placing me in check with every move. The mental picture I had created of my opponent was completely washed away as I eventually lost the game and the bet.
How did I convince myself that I was winning?

I learned that regardless of who you’re facing, never underestimate your opponent based on how you feel. Doing this, I had only placed myself in a position to lose.
Another great example of the cost of overestimating your abilities can be seen by Iron Mike Tyson’s loss to boxer Buster Douglas.
The undefeated heavyweight of the world, Mike Tyson, was so caught up in his own greatness that he barely trained; instead, opting to have sex with the local women. He ultimately got knocked out by an opponent who was said to be less skilled.
Getting past that feeling of overconfidence is hard, especially if you don’t know that you’re being overconfident.
By underestimating your own ability, however, you allow yourself a larger margin to grow rather than thinking that you know it all. You must understand that you may know some, but there is still so much more to learn, simply because you don’t know what you don’t know.
Sometimes being upset and losing is the best way to measure just how good you are and how much better you could be.
