Confidence In Your Face

Who is Max Bronson?  He is someone who had the confidence to alter his name because he wanted to.  Do you have this confidence?  I won’t say yes or no, but either way, he does.  For reasons he mentioned in this article, he is now legally called by a different name than he used to have.  This is a step that he could have been too scared to take, and he might now be disappointed with his own weakness.

We have to applaud people who take steps we didn’t take.  In fact, we already do this indirectly.  When we are amazed regarding someone who went to Harvard, we are not too concerned with their experience there.  We mainly think about how they took the steps necessary to beat out all the 1000s of other applicants.

Who is another confident person?  The Farnoosh who I mention at times comes to mind.  She very recently made the big move of quitting her corporate job at Cisco to focus on her site and related efforts like releasing her fear-crushing travel guide.  To quit willingly for the potential of something greater is a risk few will take.

Another example is of someone I know who is running an entrepreneurial venture.  While I will leave him unnamed, he has a healthy buying and selling operation in place that is quite profitable.  This shows big confidence to me because he took a big risk getting inventory and setting up the business, but I know it is running more smoothly now after the hard initial months and many sleepless nights maintaining the sales and responding to customers.  (If you didn’t like how long that last sentence was, too bad.)  A very small minority of people even attempt ventures of this type.

Another good example of a certainly confident individual is Glen from ViperChill.  He writes about marketing and make money online material, and his tone is very easy for me to pick out from the crowd.  It is a subtly cocky type of writing that leaves you thinking he has already conquered the world, and that he is sharing his wealth of knowledge after the fact.  This is somewhat annoying when you recognize it, but not so bad when you don’t.

Another thing he does that shows confidence is that he brags about his accomplishment while making it seem like they are not a big deal.  This leaves the reader thinking he is always ready to conquer the next hurdle.

Why do we gravitate toward confident people?  Well, part of the reason for this is that we are most afraid of what they will do.  They are our biggest competition.  When we are next to a plant and there are ten flies and one bee circling it, we watch the bee most closely because we are worried about its sting.

We also like confident people because they motivate us to push further.  They do this by pushing further first, and breaking social norms.  We then break social norms to keep up.

One of the things that confidence does for you is open up opportunities.  If you have the balls to approach someone, you just might make their day or evening worthwhile.  I just talked with a random woman I met named Jill and learned various things because I had the balls to go and talk to her and others didn’t.

This sounds like a simple concept, but imagine how two minutes of your time can impact another person for hours.  Taking this even further, maybe they could provide you with a connection, or with a job opportunity.  The list goes on as to what you could gain from a single meeting.

Your confidence can also take you from knowing a couple of people to knowing 20 people in a short period of time.  It’s not like there are limits to the amount of people you can know somewhat well.

I started rambling a bit about confidence there, and I know you may see it as rambling because it lacks people examples, and you love people-based examples.

Just to add one more, your confidence can allow you to shrug off rejections because you know you can easily overcome them.  This will add to your resilience and ability to handle difficulties.

To close this post, I’ll just list more examples of confidence:

Tynan was confident to write this post about how he got rejected from Y Combinator, because most people hide their rejection from the world.

I’d say Gretchen shows confidence each time she goes on another show like when she went on the Nate Berkus show last week.  Going on TV to represent what you have put on your site and in your book requires confidence in your material.