Never Lose Your Confidence

You can survive heartbreak. You can survive losing your job. You can even survive public humiliation. But once your confidence goes, the collapse has already begun.

Life will test you. Life hits hard, and often from strange angles. Just ask the two Astronomer executives whose affair at a Coldplay concert went viral. One moment they were riding high, the next, their careers and reputation are gone.

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But with self-confidence intact, you can weather these storms and rebuild. Without confidence, even minor setbacks can feel insurmountable. It’s the one thing you actually own. If you give it up, you're basically fucked.

But self-confidence is more than just helping you get through tough times. It's not just defensive. It's necessary to move forward in life. Most people you talk to aren't using their rational brain, they're reading confidence signals. We evolved to feel this stuff. We're suspicious of people who don't come across as confident. You won't succeed in many domains without it. This is just how humans work.

But confidence is a deep topic. A lot of what we learn about it is counter-productive.

Confidence As a Leading Indicator

Here's something I never see anyone mention, self-confidence is a leading indicator, not a lagging indicator.

Leading indicators predict future outcomes and can be influenced to drive change. Lagging indicators measure results after they've already occurred.

Natural systems are filled with lagging and leading indicators. Take the human body as an example. If you wear an Apple Watch, you'll see your heart rate spike one day for no apparent reason. You feel fine. Then a few days later you get slammed with a cold. The heart rate was the leading indicator. The cold was lagging. In nature, animals fleeing an area is a leading indicator. Animals can sense changes in air pressure, feel vibrations through the ground. They start evacuating long before humans even know there's danger. And then something happens. Like a flood.

It's the same with confidence. Think back to your worst periods in life. I guarantee the first thing that went was confidence, before everything else collapsed. Self-confidence decline predicts future problems, depression, job loss, relationship issues. The erosion comes first, then everything else falls apart.

You can see it coming if you know what to look for. Before depression fully hits, you notice self-doubt creeping in, that internal voice getting nastier. Before job performance crashes, you start second-guessing every decision, avoiding anything challenging. Before relationships deteriorate, you become withdrawn, stop asserting your needs. Before anxiety peaks, you begin avoiding situations, catastrophizing everything.

By the time the actual crash happens, the breakdown, the firing, the breakup, it's already a lagging signal. The system had been eroding for weeks or months. The confidence went first. Everything else just followed.

Most people focus on treating the lagging indicators, but the real key is recognizing when your confidence begins to erode. It at least gives you a fighting chance to intervene before the downward spiral accelerates.

The problem is, despite being such a crucial predictor of well-being, our modern environment is actively engineered to undermine this vital resource.

The Consumer Economy and Confidence

Your self-confidence sits at the center of a massive economic machine designed to first destroy it, then sell it back to you.

Marketing departments spend billions studying how to make you dissatisfied with your current existence. Social media platforms engineer feeds that make you feel inadequate compared to some influencer's curated highlight reel. Fitness influencers make you feel ashamed of your body, then sell you their program. Business gurus convince you that you're a loser for having a normal job, then offer to teach you their "secrets."

The confidence economy doesn't want you to actually become confident, that would eliminate you as a customer. It wants you perpetually insecure but hopeful, always one purchase away from the person you could become.

Andrew Tate takes this message to comical levels, but it exemplifies the point.

So what do you do with this knowledge? Start monitoring your confidence like a vital sign. When you notice that internal voice getting more critical, when you start avoiding challenges you'd normally take on, when you begin catastrophizing minor setbacks, that's your early warning system. Don't wait for the depression, the job loss, or the relationship collapse. Intervene when confidence starts to erode.

And stop feeding the machine that's designed to destroy your confidence in the first place. Unfollow the accounts that make you feel inadequate. Skip the courses promising overnight transformation. Build something real instead of chasing the endless cycle of manufactured insecurity and marketed solutions.

Your confidence is the foundation everything else is built on. Protect it like your life depends on it, because it does.

In This Newsletter

1) Low Confidence Can Make You Evil: Low confidence destroys more than just yourself. It turns you into a menace to everyone around you.

2) The Extrinsic Self-Confidence Trap: Most people's confidence is hostage to their last win. Ancients understood this was insane. They built confidence differently, around things no one could take away from you.

3) The Danger of Over-Confidence: If low confidence makes you dangerous to yourself and others, overconfidence makes you blind. That’s what the ancients feared most.

Low Confidence Can Turn You Into a Menace

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