Somewhere outside Austin, Texas, one of today’s most prominent thinkers lives on a small ranch with his wife and two children.
Despite working as American Apparel’s director of marketing in his early life, Ryan Holiday has authored an expansive library of books, publishing 13 titles in the last 11 years. One of these books, Ego is The Enemy, raises interesting questions about youth, ambition, and wisdom. If you want to become wiser, happier, and more productive, then I suggest you continue reading.
Expedited Shipping
The very first chapter of Holiday’s book is antithetical to the modern perception of confidence. Where most modern media passionately exclaims that we should automatically be confident in ourselves and our abilities, this book urges us instead to “[earn] this opinion”. According to Holiday, true confidence is built from genuine hard work. Alex Hormozi summarized this elegantly recently:
“You don't become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.”
Naturally, my brain began trying to devise a means of optimizing this process.
Of course, overblown ego and false confidence are not only frustrating for others to deal with, but are directly harmful to one’s success in any meaningful pursuit. I’m not searching for a way to look successful or intelligent as quickly as possible, but rather a method of becoming highly competent (and—by extension—truly confident) in the most efficient manner possible.
Is this a symptom of my youthful impatience, or can we leverage this timeless knowledge to overclock the improvement of our lives?
First Principles
To determine if this question is even worth asking, we should first drill down to the core of true confidence.
It’s generally agreed that, in order to be justifiably confident in any field, you must first gain relevant experience. What can we gain from experience that allows this? In my estimation, the answer is: wisdom. The form of wisdom I’m referring to is not knowledge, but rather the internalization of knowledge such that it can be applied to one’s life without any effort. If knowledge is conscious movement, then wisdom is reflexive action.
Almost everything we do provides us with knowledge of one form or another, but—in order to build true confidence as quickly as possible—we must optimize the process of converting this knowledge into wisdom. Having given this problem some thought, I’ve concluded that the best way of doing this is to tap into those who’ve come before.
Somehow, it seems that almost every fundamental question has been already answered in one form or another. In the age of the internet, we have more information than we know what to do with, and yet most of life’s problems can be solved by a decent library. When you read the thoughts and ideas of someone decades older than you, you gain access to years of hard-fought wisdom in the space of a few hours. In and of itself, however, this information is not enough; without adequate contemplation, the wisdom of others threatens to regress back to bland, inapplicable knowledge.
It follows, therefore, that ambition is most efficiently converted to wisdom when present-day experiences are analysed in the context of ancient ideas. Only then, once we have laid this foundation of wisdom, can we hope to build the well-founded confidence that characterizes a master of any given field.
Okay. How do we do that?
Planting the Seeds of Wisdom
How do we apply this information to become more efficient and effective in daily life? As with many problems, it’s often easiest to break down this issue into smaller components that can be addressed individually:
| Do More, Fail Fast
Phil Knight, the creator of Nike, says this of his company’s beginnings:
“[m]y hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I'd fail quickly, so I'd have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons.”
Without taking action, you have nothing to reflect on. With nothing to reflect on, you drastically decrease your ability to become wiser. Cultivate a bias toward action, and you provide yourself with infinitely more opportunities to learn, and—therefore—increase your chance of success in whatever you choose to do.
Of course, there is a certain balance that must be achieved; don’t make bets you can’t afford to lose. However, by tweaking your internal risk-analysis framework, you become far more likely to learn the lessons that necessarily prelude mastery.
| Read, Think, and Reflect
Abraham Lincoln was onto something when he declared:
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”
Once you’ve gone out and done something in the world, you’ll be exposed to new thoughts and ideas. By reading the works of history’s greatest thinkers, you’ll begin to understand how your current problems are neither unique nor insurmountable. Armed with this knowledge, you can learn from the struggles of others and move forward with confidence and understanding as you face whatever adversity lies ahead of you.
| Be Humble
Unfortunately, you’re not special, or unique, or intrinsically more valuable than anyone else. This realisation may sting, but it should also give you immense clarity. Other people know things that you don’t know, and—by interacting with them with humility and kindness—you can learn from them.
On a broader scale, you should meditate often on the sheer scale of the universe. Watch the sun rise, or swim in the ocean, or listen to the signing birds of the morning. Come to terms with your own relative insignificance, and yet find the courage to face each day with compassion and curiosity. Only then are you in a position to move forward in the most productive and sustainable manner possible.
The Never-Ending March
If there’s one thing that you should take away from this, it’s that confidence should be earned, not assumed. The suggestions above can—at the very least—help you establish purpose, and can provide you with solid values to guide your interpretation of the world. It’s easy to read something and instantly forget it, but I implore you to consider: if you really set your mind to it, could you build a life that’s worth being confident about?
Never stop thinking.
- Will