Confusing Confidence With Arrogance

Today I want to talk about confidence and arrogance because most people think they're confident when they're actually just arrogant and understanding the difference between these two things are going to determine whether or not you succeed or fail at pretty much everything that matters in your life, your business, your relationships, your career, all of it. I want you to think about the last meeting you were in, the last conversation you had with your partner or your spouse, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, last time you gave advice to a friend. Here's my question. In that meeting or that conversation were you being confident or were you being arrogant and most people don't realize and this is going to sting a little but we've been confusing confidence with arrogance for so long that we can't tell the difference anymore and that confusion is literally costing us everything. So today I want to talk about what real confidence looks like, why most people get it completely wrong and how this one distinction, very important distinction is going to make or break your career, your relationships and yes, your bank account and then we're going to talk about some frameworks for building genuine confidence and daily practices that actually work. There's also morning signs that I've seen that are telling you that you're slipping from confidence into arrogance. Now let me paint a picture for you before we get started, maybe this sounds familiar. You walked out of your last meeting at work thinking you absolutely crushed it, you had an answer for everything, you shot down all the weak ideas, you explained why your idea, your approach was obviously superior, you dominated every conversation with all your expertise and you felt good and you felt confident but here's what actually happened while you were feeling so good about yourself. Sarah stopped contributing after the third time you interrupted her. Mike started checking his phone when you launched into your brief explanation that lasted about eight minutes and your boss made a mental note about your so-called collaborative skills that weren't so great and that promotion that you were expecting, the one that you've been telling yourself is just a matter of time, it just went to someone else again. Now I know what you're thinking, you think the problem is politics or office favoritism or people who just can't handle your direct communication style but what if I told you the real problem is something completely different. The real problem is that you've confused arrogance with confidence for so long that you can't tell the difference anymore and before you turn this podcast off and you tell yourself well this doesn't apply to me because that's exactly what an arrogant person would do just hear me out because most people make this exact mistake, they think confident people know everything, they think arrogant people just act like they know everything and both of these definitions are dead wrong because the truth is that confidence is earned through competence and arrogance is actually just borrowed from ignorance and that loan that you've been taken out it's destroying everything you care about. Now let's talk about the psychology behind this. I want to explain why this happens in the first place, why do we screw up confidence in arrogance because understanding the psychology behind this will help you recognize it in yourself. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Krueger discovered something fascinating about how the human brain works. They found that people who scored in the bottom 12% of competence tests mean they were not good at what they did consistently estimated that they were in the 62nd percentile. Basically that means that they thought they were very good at what they did even though they scored in the bottom 12%. Now think about that for a second. The worst people are at something, the better they think they are at it. A little bit strange right and this isn't just lab psychology this is your daily reality. For example the crypto trader who's been at it for six months and gives advice like Warren Buffett or the middle manager in your company that read good to great and now dismisses decades of industry wisdom or the startup founder who just watches a lot of podcasts never actually built anything real and ends up raising 10 million dollars on pure charisma. See this is how the trap works. When you know nothing about a topic or a subject you're accurately pessimistic about your abilities but as soon as you learn a little bit you read a few articles you watch some YouTube videos you listen to some podcasts something dangerous happens your confidence skyrockets while your competence barely moves and you start to mistake familiarity for expertise and you start giving advice instead of seeking it and you start to confuse this little learning bump is a little bit of information that you've accumulated from mastery and a lot of people get stuck right here at this stage. They never push through to genuine expertise because pushing through requires something uncomfortable admitting how much you still don't know and this isn't just a psychological quirk there's actual neuroscience behind this and hopefully if you understand what happens in your brain this helps you recognize when you're slipping from confidence into arrogance so there's been studies done with FMI scans and they reveal something incredible. Genuinely confident people they show enhanced activity in brain areas associated with long-term thinking and collaboration but arrogant people their brains light up in threat detection regions which means they're not confident they're scared so think about that colleague who dismisses every idea that isn't theirs who interrupts constantly who takes credit for the winds but blames other people when something doesn't go so well their brain is literally in fight or flight mode they are actually scared they are treating collaboration as combat and this explains why arrogant people are exhausting to be around you're dealing with somebody who's nervous system interprets your very existence as a threat to their self image meanwhile genuinely confident people's brains operate in a state that promotes curiosity over defensiveness they ask questions because they are genuinely interested they're not just gathering ammunition for their next argument so this is the psychological and the neuroscience behind it but here's what really matters what is this actually costing you in your real life if you are arrogant okay so what does this mean right because understanding the problem is one thing but feeling the pain is what actually motivates change so let's talk about what this is really costing you what arrogance yes i'm calling it arrogance is costing you right now today in your life so for work or if you're an entrepreneur remember that project that failed last quarter of the one where you blamed maybe the market conditions are bad timing or a team that couldn't execute your vision here's what really happened you were too arrogant to listen when three different people told you about the same critical flaw in your approach three different people same flaw but acknowledging their concerns would have met admitting that you missed something obvious so what did you do you doubled down you defended your position you made the failure bigger and more expensive than it needed to be and your colleagues they noticed they always notice but that's why they've stopped bringing you problems not because you can't solve them you probably can but because working with you feels like being cross examined by someone who's already decided you're wrong and that's why the promotion went to someone else instead of you not because that other person is smarter not because that other person is more qualified it's because people actually want to work with her meanwhile they're trying to avoid working with you you've become the person others talk about not too but the career damage is just the beginning the real devastation happens in your personal life where the costs are harder to measure but infinitely more painful because your romantic relationships follow the exact same pattern your last three partners and be honest with yourself here they didn't leave because you weren't successful enough or attractive enough or interesting enough they left because being with you felt like slowly disappearing every conversation becomes a lecture every story they tried to share got corrected or one-opt every feeling they express gets analyzed and solved instead of just simply being hurt and I bet one of them at some point even said something like you don't see me you see an audience for your monologue and they were right weren't they you spent so much energy being the smartest person in the relationship that you forgot to be a person in the relationship and now you're alone and you're wondering why you can't find somebody who appreciates your intelligence and isn't intimidated by your success but the truth is the problem isn't finding the right person the problem is that you've become the wrong person to be with and then the relationship damage doesn't just stop with the romantic partners if you have kids this pattern is probably affecting them too because if you have kids this one's gonna hurt because I want you to do something right now if you have children I want you to think about how they interact with you versus your partner when they have a problem who do they go to first when they're excited about something who do they want to share it with when they make a mistake who feels safe to tell right and if you're arrogant it's probably not you is it and it's not because you don't love them of course you love them but your version of helping feels like being graded and your version of sharing their excitement feels like being taught and your version of handling their mistakes feels like they're being prosecuted you've accidentally trained your own children to see you as the parent who always has something the correct instead of the parent who just listens they're learning that being around you means being told what they're doing wrong so they're learning not to be around you think about that for a second just really think about it and this extends beyond your family it goes into your professional and your social circles and some of these changes if you're an arrogant person they're going to be so gradual that you don't even notice them until it's too late and if you don't believe me do a quick mental exercise look at your calendar from five years ago versus today how many spontaneous social invitations do you get now how many people just reach out to you just to catch up how many relationships do you have where you're not doing most of the talking right your network isn't growing is it because you're arrogant people invite you to events where your expertise is needed they don't invite you to events where your presence is wanted you're the person they call when they need specific information you're not the person they call when they need a friend so you've optimized for being useful instead of being enjoyable and for being impressive instead of being connected in the result is a professional network full of transactional relationships and a personal life that is feeling increasingly hollow now if we zoom out even more what does arrogance cost you not just in your career not just in your family not just in your social circle but what about your business because if you're an entrepreneur being arrogant doesn't help either it gets very expensive and in business arrogance compounds in ways that can destroy everything you've built you make decisions with incomplete information because asking questions feels like admitting ignorance you ignore the market signals and you contradict your assumptions because changing course feels like you're admitting failure and you hire people who agree with you instead of people who challenge you and you create cultures where being wrong feels dangerous so people stop taking risks and they start covering their asses and then your competitors they're not just beating you because they're smarter they're beating you because they're learning faster while you're defending yesterday's assumptions again because you're arrogant and all your competitors they're just adapting to today's reality because they don't have the ego they don't have the arrogance and how does this play out in real business well there's some names that you're going to know that sound familiar Elizabeth Holmes she was arrogant you know this story she raised 945 million dollars for Theranos based on technology that fundamentally didn't work and instead of admitting the problems and pivoting she doubled down she created a culture of secrecy and fear she started lying to investors and patients and employees and her arrogance didn't just destroy her company it destroyed lives patients got incorrect medical results investors lost hundreds of millions employees had their careers ruined and now she's serving 11 years in federal prison Adam Newman convinced investors that we work was worth 47 billion dollars while burning cash with no sustainable business model and his ego told him that normal business metrics didn't apply to his revolutionary idea and is it revolutionary vision and when investors finally demanded basic financial transparency the valuation collapsed under 10 billion in a matter of weeks thousands of employees lost their job billions in investor money just vanished so yes we get it arrogance is very bad right but let's talk about the solution the solution to arrogance is genuine confidence it helps avoid all of the things we just spoke about but what is genuine confidence why is it so hard for people to be genuinely confident why do we fall into arrogance well genuine confidence actually follows a very predictable developmental pattern that most people never complete because they get stuck trying to skip steps so i'm going to talk about what this means in a second but researchers have actually mapped out confidence like how do you actually become confident at something and when you understand this framework and when you understand the steps and the stages to confidence and then you understand not just where you think you are in terms of confidence on a subject but where you actually are this can actually change how you approach growth and technically it can change how you approach life too so there are stages to true confidence and there's four stages and the stages are conscious incompetence conscious competence unconscious competence and then meta competence let's break down what these mean and just to be clear again these are the four stages to actually become confident and competent at something because competence equals confidence this is very important so stage one is conscious incompetence so this is where most people start anything a new job a new relationship anything at all this is where you know that you don't know so this is where you're asking a lot of questions you're just consuming a ton of information you're making a ton of obvious mistakes think about when you start a new job right you don't you don't know anything now this stage feels really vulnerable because your ignorance is visible to everyone obviously including yourself and most people hate this stage because it's uncomfortable but here's the thing this discomfort it's the price of admission to real competence and confidence everybody has to go through the stage if you start a new job you don't know everything day one then come stage two conscious competence so stage two is when you start to develop some skills through deliberate practice the results become predictable but they do require a little bit of focused effort um you're building systems you're building processes you're learning you're making mistakes but you're just making few fewer mistakes and by the way this is applicable to your business your career your relationship like these are things this is how you approach all of life right you start something you're not great at it you know you're not good at dating when you first start dating you're not good at your job when you first start your job you're not good at building a business when you first start building a business but then you start to try things you start to figure out okay how do I uh how do I become a good partner how do I become a good employee and over time you get better and it takes a little bit of effort but you do get better and this is the second stage conscious competence this is where the real work happens because it requires some humility because even though you're learning things the more you learn the more you realize that you actually don't know so when you start a job you learn a few things you're like oh damn I'm gonna need a lot more to become I'm gonna need to know a lot more to be good at this job you start a new relationship you're like wow it's gonna take a lot to not only date and sort of be a good partner but to marry this person and be a good partner not just for a year but for the next 30 40 50 years right it takes a lot now after stage two then come stage three which is unconscious competence so stage three is where skills start to become automatic intuition kicks in you can start to recognize patterns instantly and then you can start to teach others and that feels natural because you've gone on this journey you've put in the reps you understand not just what works but why it works why does this work in your career in your job in your business in your relationship you start to just intuitively know how to do things in life and this is also where most people think that expertise ends but there's actually one more level which is stage four which is meta competence so meta competence is when you don't just understand your subject but you understand how you learned your subject and this allows you to break down some of the most complex ideas and skills for others because you understand learning itself which also helps you build new competencies faster because you've developed a system for developing systems again in every part of your life now this is what separates confident people from arrogant people confident people consciously go through these four stages they start off with conscious incompetence they go to conscious competence they eventually go to unconscious competence and then if they really pay attention they can go to meta competence they go through these days they don't skip shit they don't skip anything arrogant people they don't like going through the stages because if you if you go through these stages properly it requires removing the ego and admitting what you don't know at each stage arrogant people they try and skip stage one entirely they're never they're never incompetent and then they jump straight to pretending that they're at stage three or stage four and the result is they never actually even reach stage two so they really never develop competence at anything but they act like they do they act like you know investing is just second nature because they watch a couple youtube videos but they never learned the basics they act like they're a great partner just because they've been dating and they've been toxic their whole life but they've been dating so many times how could they not be a great partner even though they've never even put in the work and actually learned how to be a good partner they're just going to say hey I must be a good partner I must know how good relationships work because I've just been doing it for so long no time in the game does not actually mean that you're good at it just because you've been in a job for 10 years for some people it means they're good at it it doesn't always mean you're good at it if you never go through consciously go through these four stages if you are arrogant you are jumping stages and this is also why genuinely confident people are comfortable saying I don't know without being all stressed out because they've said it thousands of times while building real competence so it doesn't threaten their identity anymore but if you're arrogant and you are scared of saying I don't know it's because you never really built any competence so by saying I don't know it's threatening your identity it's threatening your ego now this is great it's theory and understanding theories one thing but how do you actually rewire years of arrogant thinking patterns and communication it requires a framework it requires some deliberate practice you can't just decide to be more confident and more competent you need systems that gradually shift how you process information and how you interact with others so this is the framework these are the ideas to help you move from arrogant to competence back to having true confidence so I'm going to break these ideas down you don't have to do all of these but these are great ideas that can help you move from your arrogant thinking and your arrogant communication again to true competence which will lead to confidence so things that you can do daily you can do a daily ignorance audit so you can write three things down that you don't know but you should and it's not for self punishment it's just to identify the opportunities for you to learn next thing you can do in your conversations daily is flip your question ratio meaning you should ask more questions than you make statements 70% of the time when you're speaking with somebody you should be asking questions 30% of the time you can make statements but you want to be asking more you want to be learning more and lastly every single evening if you journal I want you to go through an exercise of asking what did I learn today that I didn't know this morning what assumption did I have that was challenged so you can do these things daily they take two seconds weekly here's three ideas that you can take with you first you can seek out feedback so once a week in your relationship once a week in a professional context ask somebody a boss a mentor a peer a spouse a partner a friend just ask somebody what's one thing that I could do better and the hard part for arrogant people will be to listen without defending or explaining without we have to do you have to listen to the advice what's one thing that I could do better the second thing you could do weekly at the end of every week you could just confront the mistakes that you made during that week so what because even if you're arrogant and you outwardly act and communicate your arrogance you still know when you screwed up doesn't mean you're ignorant just because you're arrogant it just means that that's how you portray yourself to the world as somebody who knows everything but you still know when you screw up so at the end of every week write down what did you believe when were you wrong what was actually true and what caused you to believe the wrong thing so I just want you to start to be aware that not everything that you know is a hundred percent accurate and lastly do an audit of your expertise what does this mean throughout the week you're going to give advice you're going to make statements you're going to say that I'm a hundred percent sure that this thing is right or that thing is right so every time you do that I want you to look inside reflect a little bit and say hey this advice that I gave have I actually done the thing successfully have I shown repeatable results that would allow me to give that piece of advice would I bet money on this advice or am I just saying it with absolute certainty and arrogance because whatever reason ignorance I don't want to sound wrong that there's a variety of reasons why we give bad advice but have you given advice the answers probably yes and is that advice that you really should be giving so you can go through these sort of little self reflective tasks weekly and monthly a couple things you can do monthly first you can do a skill assessment so pick one thing that you're really good at or that should be your core competency rate yourself on a scale of one to ten then find someone who's a little bit better at it been doing it for longer I mean there's a variety of ways to measure better but somebody's been doing it for longer more successfully than you whatever and ask them to rate you at that thing and then compare your scores just see if how you perceive yourself is the same as how someone else who's a little bit better at that thing perceives you the second thing you should do is a relationship health check so look at your closest relationships your work relationships and your personal ones are you doing most of the talking are people actually bringing you their problems or are your friends your peers your boss your spouse are they avoiding all the difficult conversations so just to get a barometer and a sense of how healthy your relationships are are they transactional or are they true genuine relationships if you are arrogant there's a good chance that people are shying away from bringing you problems are shying away from difficult conversations and you're probably doing most of the talking and if that's the case it's a good red flag that you have a lot to work on and lastly do a little bit of a learning portfolio review remember how do you beat arrogance you actually become competent at things so monthly what are the new things that you're actually working on what are the skills that you're developing versus what are you just talking about developing are you talking about going to a therapist to improve your relationship are you talking about learning how to sell to close more business in your company are you talking about learning how to be more collaborative in meetings are you actually learning the skills are you actually doing the things required to be better at all these things so what new skills are you actually developing and the actions that you're taking to become better at things become more competent at things versus what are you just talking about developing saying oh I'll get better at sales oh I'll get better at collaboration oh don't worry I'll show up better in my relationship so these are some daily weekly and monthly practices again you don't have to do all of them but they all will help you understand if you're arrogant understand how to become more competent and ultimately help you become more confident now what's the point of getting this right right beyond personal fulfillment I mean there's a lot of benefits to being truly confident and not being an arrogant asshole but there's a real compelling business case for choosing competence over just performance and arrogance because in the world that we live in right now a lot of people are optimizing for looking smart and genuine competence is becoming disproportionately valuable and what a lot of people miss is that in a world full of overconfident looking smart sounding smart people genuine competence becomes a massive competitive advantage while everyone else is just defending their position because of their ego they're arguing online they're pretending to know everything they're optimizing for the looking smart you can focus on learning from your mistakes on building real skills on admitting knowledge gaps on optimizing for getting smart not just looking smart gents in Huang right he's the CEO of Nvidia a two trillion dollar company but one of his famous quotes is that no task is beneath me any jokes about cleaning toilets and this isn't false humility it is genuine confidence that doesn't need superiority for protection Sachin Adela transformed Microsoft's culture from know it all to learn it all when he made public mistakes early in his job he apologized openly and he used them as huge learning opportunities and fast forward Microsoft is a two trillion dollar company warm buffet one of history's most successful investors built his fortune by admitting when he doesn't understand something his famous rule is never invest in a business you cannot understand this constraint and it's born from this intellectual humility it's made him one of the richest people alive remember the humble learner the person who values competence and becomes confident beats the arrogant expert every single time so the way that I see it you have two choices here if you are arrogant you can keep doing what you're doing you can wonder why that promotion went to someone else again you can wonder why people seem to cut conversations short with you why every piece of feedback feels like a personal attack or you can do something that's going to sting a little bit you're going to admit that you've been getting this whole thing wrong that the way you've been approaching learning and just interacting and speaking with people it's not actually working when you do that you have to realize that you're gonna have to change a few fundamental things instead of always having the answer you can start asking better questions instead of teaching everyone around you you can start learning from them and instead of trying so hard to be impressive just try being genuinely curious about other people and this isn't about becoming some doormat who never speaks up it's about becoming someone people actually want to work with someone who can get things done without steamrolling everyone in the process when you really just look at confidence versus arrogance it's quite simple confidence equals accurate self-assessment plus skills to improve what needs improving arrogance equals inaccurate self-assessment plus ego to defend your inaccuracies one compounds positively over time the other collapses under its own weight and the people in your life they're not asking you to be perfect they're asking you to be real real enough to not know things real enough to be wrong real enough to grow so that arrogant person that you are pretending to be is preventing you from becoming who you could actually be and the hardest part about transitioning from arrogance to confidence it's not admitting that you don't know things it's admitting that you've been wrong about thinking you knew them but that admission is where the real growth begins