TL;DR
Sustainable self-confidence is built by consistently collecting evidence of past successes, much like how Real Madrid’s culture of relentless determination and comeback victories instills unwavering belief in their fans and players. To achieve this, one must gather both similar experiences for depth-based confidence and varied experiences for resilience-based confidence, ensuring readiness for both predictable and unpredictable challenges. This approach contrasts with temporary boosts from motivational content, emphasizing a more enduring and data-driven foundation for confidence.
“I believed in myself. But BELIEF in yourself has to be earned.” ~ Roger Federer
I bet you know one or two people in your life that seem to have an abundance of self-confidence in every situation. They never seem to run out of it, and they only keep getting better. I think that such sustainable self-confidence is all about collecting data, about stacking the evidence that convinces us that we can do the things we say we can do.
Let me tell you a story.
One day in 2014, my brother and I became madridistas. We stumbled on a football game. As people who had hitherto watched football when Cameroon was involved, both teams were new to us. For all we could tell, the team in the red and white stripped shirts was leading the team in white, and the latter never seemed to give up. In the very last minutes of the game, the team in white took the lead by four goals to one, and to this day the marvel and excitement my brother and I experienced are unforgettable. We learned that the team in white was called Real Madrid Club de Fútbol, and since then we have been passionate madridistas.
Perhaps we were only fortunate to witness the start of an extended period of remontadas that became a club identity, but the ten years following have created in my mind (and I guess in the minds of many other madridistas) a very strong association between the name Real Madrid and never giving up.
When people ask me why I support Real Madrid, I often say that it is because the club represents certain values around which I hope to build my life; the relentless pursuit of excellence, creative freedom, the importance of always assembling a team of A players, fighting to the very end, doing whatever it takes to achieve objectives, and realising that sometimes it is okay not to be at your best all the time, so long as you are good enough for long enough to achieve your objectives.
If you visit Real Madrid’s website, you will not see any of the things I have written above. Yet that culture (if we were to call it as such), is the creed of every Real Madrid player and trickles down to all levels of its academy. Just before the 2024 Champions Leage return leg against Bayern München, Real Madid academy players who were probably between the ages of 8 and 10 lined up to send off the senior team. One of the boys was recorded saying: “It doesn’t matter if we’re losing in the 90th minute because we will score in the 94th minute.” A couple of weeks later, after Real Madrid emerged victorious against Borussia Dortmund, reputed world chess champion, Magnus Carlson, who is an avid fan tweeted: “Winning is way of life. It’s in your blood. On the biggest stage, you just can’t not win. You have to. Hala Madrid.”
Why does this seemingly sustainable self-confidence and believe run within the ranks of the club?
Because they have lived (for some seen) it over and over again that they do not doubt it. If you asked a Real Madrid fan if they thought their team will win a tough match, a significant number believe that it is not done till the final whistle goes. And why not? They have reference to the miracle of La Decima, they have reference to when no one thought they could win the Champions League twice in a row (they went on to win it three times in a row), they have reference to the magical 2017 season of La Liga remontadas, they have reference to the magical 2021/2023 Champions League run that had miracle after miracle; against PSG, then against Chelsea, and the unforgettable one against Manchester City. It is clearly an example of what Behavorial Economists call the “hot hand fallacy”, but when we remove ourself from the context of pure random events and enter that of zero-sum games, such a fallacy could be the difference between who keeps fighting and believing till the end.
Sustainable self-confidence is very similar to madridismo in that it is built on a backward reference to past actions that inspire the hot hand fallacy. Interestingly, we order our lives as such when we are younger. As young students, we had to practice the math questions, and with more practice, our confidence to tackle any question in the exam grew astronomically. But then as we grow older, we read motivational books and forget the basics.
If you want to build sustainable self-confidence, you will have to do so as many things as you can, sometimes without seeing the end goal or connection with the other aspects of your life, such that when fate throws a random event at you, you can pull out a past event from your database and say: “I did that before, I can certainly do this too”.
In this sense, building sustainable self-confidence is about collecting data and making associations.
One can choose to collect similar data points, or data points with great variations; both approaches have their advantages.
When you collect similar data points, you build the sort of confidence that Real Madrid players have when they run out of the dressing room. By over coming similar challenges several times, you can build the confidence that you can keep overcoming similar challenges - talk about a classic example of the hot hand fallacy. This sort of confidence is good when you can predict the challenges you will face with some sort of certainty, and is exactly what athletes and students (professional exam takers) do when they talk about practice. This is the sort of confidence that madridismo is about.
But the real world is not so predictable and challenges are more amoeba-like than they are identical twins. As such, we need to collect a resilient data set, one that can aggregate simimngly unrelated data points to mirror challenges in whatever form they appear (this relates especially to those type of challenges that are so rare that they can be described as black swans), but can also provide the depth-based confidence that is needed for challenges we encounter with high frequencies.
I am tempted to try to argue that one mode of self-confidence is superior to the other. My vote is for the dynamic, resilient sort of self-confidence that helps us overcome black swan, amoeba-like challenges simply because it is more rare than its counterpart, and by the law of demand and supply, you may agree with me that it is higher in value. However, its value is directly linked to the probability that black swan challenges happen to start with, and that when they do occur, they are distinct from high-frequency challenges in a way that necessitates the resilient sort of self-confidence as opposed to the depth-based. On the other hand, we can easily think of a situation in which the depth-based sort of confidence is more valuable than its resilience-based counterpart: whenever the reward of overcoming a challenge is clearly high and the data points are so hard to collect that collectors are rare.
Which confidence should one be building? What sort of data should one be collecting - similar data points for depth, or seemingly unrelated data points for resilience? My answer is both; you want to have confidence to perform at the edge, but also the confidence to face anything that is thrown at you.
My current hunch is that if you collect data points that are seemingly disconnected but not too far away from each other, you can very easily build a good amount of both modes of confidence in a given domain. The resilient-based type of confidence depends more on your ability to make sense and connections out of data points, and the depth-based confidence depends on the number of data points that you have. Both approaches are not mutually exclusive, and you should be doing both.
Every now and then, consuming something motivational can give you the adrenaline rush you need to do something that should otherwise be scary. For the big moments of your life that might work. But what about the small, insignificant moments that are nonetheless consequential? Those moments during which you don’t necessarily realise that you are at a precipice, and self-confidence is crucial? You will most likely not have the luxury to consume anything motivational and your actions will be gut-driven. It is in these moments that sustainable self-confidence makes the difference, and to build it, you have to become a data collector; you have to stack the evidence that convinces you that you can do things, you want to give up (not in too many aspects of your life) to the hot hand fallacy.