Why confidence is not a necessity for success

My story of chasing confidence.

For long I felt like a fake. I tried again and again and I failed miserably. Nothing seemed to help. I read book after book, watched video after video, immersed myself in all stories — reel and real about a confident protagonist. The one who is confident no matter what the situation was. He has a handle on his life. And I could never have that feeling. Could not borrow it even for a second. Could not even fake it. Fake it till I make it became fake it till I could not even just stand the idea of faking. And I could make nothing. No matter what I did, what I pursued, what I achieved, nothing seemed to contribute to my internal compass. It always felt like an abyss. Nothing could fill it. Nor I could find what I put into it.

You have to feel the confidence in yourself, the self esteem movement told me. You have to believe in yourself, the self help guides professed. I had to have complete confidence, irrespective of what I achieved or have not, supposedly. Only then I had a chance, I was made to believe. Confidence is the medicine for all my problems, proclaimed the gurus. And I started looking at peers, friends, people who portrayed that confidence. Who could manifest that ultimate potency of manhood. Who had the ability to “look” as if they can handle what can possibly happen. Not to be perturbed by anything.

So I tried copying. Imitating others. Emulating people. Like how they handled situations. Like how they did not give a crap about things. Especially things that would scare the shit out of me or things that would make me deeply care. Those things that I was deeply sensitive about. Now, I had to just man up, suck all those silly feelings and look and be confident. How exactly, I had no clue though. After endless tries, I would accept the defeat, recoil and drink a hell lot of humility. Only for some time, and then I would start again.

I am one relentless piece of rat. I could never give up. I tried new ways to make my “confidence” work. Methods to find my confidence that is lurking deep down somewhere within me, hopefully. Binge watched for hours, movies and series where the hero portrayed the essence of confidence. Shouted to myself how awesome I was. Recollected in glorious detail all the greatest things I have done in my life, every day. Only to end up recollecting some of the stupidest things also that I had committed. Only to get into to hours of defensive self discourse on how what I did was and is and ever will be right. I had to be right always to be confident, or so it seemed.

I seemed confident when things were good. When I was getting recognized at work or when my latest funny dance moves were a hit among my friends. Or when I could make people laugh. Or when I could connect with random strangers and have a great conversation. For few moments. Those few rare moments I was always waiting and lusting for. But then the strange face of darkness will show up again, uninvited.

The scientific mind in me could never accept the fact that I can believe in something — even if its about myself, without an ounce of fact corroborating it. How can I believe in my super natural abilities to do anything when I do not have much to show? But I still went about doing things solely to improve my confidence. And when I failed I blamed my confidence or actually my lack of it. It did nor occur to me that deficiency in my actions could be at least partially responsible. No. I sucked because my confidence sucked because I sucked. End of story.

And I realized one day it was all a futile exercise. I stopped catering to my self esteem. Something that I would have done thousand times before with eagerness. To gain confidence was no longer an activity I wished to endure.

Do we really need to feel confident to pursue and achieve something? Confidence supposedly manifests itself in your appearance and feeling and actions. Reverse engineering this argument, if someone achieves her end result does it necessarily derive that she is confident? And what does “being confident” even mean? Is it a state of mind where you feel you are unconquerable? Is it bravado? Or is it just a complete faith in your ability to do things? Or is confident simply a way for some people to encourage themselves to pursue their goals? And what happens when they lose confidence?

Chasing confidence feels fake. It is not tangible, there is no specific metrics to measure it. At the risk of sounding blasphemous to all those self improvement believers, the belief that you can do anything, is stupid. Yes, you can try. There are so many things you can achieve. But to believe that irrespective of the actions you take you can be successful is so far away from truth. Or the belief that you can keep performing the right actions that would help achieve results. There are so many things that you cannot control and so many ways you can go wrong. And if you say confidence is about not worrying about results then isn’t that someone without confidence can do? So then is confidence really a necessity for success as it is made out to be?

So I started pursuing actions on areas that I was curious about. To learn about things for which I had inexplicable attraction towards. I still took baby steps at the beginning because of my lack of ability to handle failure. But I kept driving at things that kept me hooked. Like my unrelenting passion for entrepreneurship though I hadn’t set up even a lemonade stand till then. I did things for the experience. For the understanding. Not that it would make me confident but something that would make me comfortable in what I do.

I do, I learn, I experience I come across some nuggets of wisdom. I do not have a single strand of bravado or belief that I will be extremely good at what I am trying. I do it because I like to learn new things, to understand life in a new light, because I would love to be a man of wisdom. Because am on survival mode and I do all things possible for me to do right now. I interact with my life every moment. Everything I do is a way for me to hug, grapple and struggle with life and create value. I try to be someone who has tried things and given his best.

And when I do something long enough I noticed that I do sound “confident” to others. I can talk fluidly on the subject to impress enough people but internally I never feel that thing called confidence. There are just a bunch of things I have tried and I have not tried. Now, I am aware more than ever, what I know of and don’t know of. I know what I know and that’s all I know. And I keep doing things I never have done and things I need to do. And my only triggers are curiosity, ignorance and sheer mindset for survival.

Actually what I do have and feel all the time is opposite of confidence. That I don’t know anything. I know that I need to learn and put effort. That is when I realized that this is my natural way of seeing things. This is how my mind works. It always did. It does not need to believe point blank in its ability. All I need to do is do whatever I ever can at this moment, right now. I then learn from it, learn more, do more and repeat. And if and when I create value out of it, I take the understanding and try to do something bigger and better. And for long I have been trying to get into the box of confidence that never fitted me. It never even felt like something real. It always felt like that invisible box everyone else could see. Except me.