Confidence vs. Ego

Recently, someone (let’s call them Person X) told me that my biggest strength was my ‘self-confidence’. It was the first time I was described that way.

I was flattered but I also treated the compliment with skepticism. I experience an enormous amount of self-doubt, and anyone who knows me well knows that the only real constant that can be found throughout my life is that of its instability.

Typically, an unstable life and self-confidence are like oil and water. It is difficult to be assured with yourself when the state of your life can be wildly different between one month and the next. But stopping and thinking through what that person said to me helped me think about what being confident really means.

Let’s start from first principles. Most people will say that the definition of confidence is the quality of knowing that “no matter what happens, you’re going to be okay.”

This is a decent definition on its own and widely accessible. However, I disagree with it. Many times, you won’t be okay if something goes wrong. Soldiers go off to war and are on deployment knowing that if there’s a little oopsie, an oopsie that could not even be under their control, they will die and never see their families again.

Yet soldiers still have the ‘confidence’ or at least the self-assurance to go through with their tasks. So what is the correct definition for their confidence? Perhaps an improvement on the definition we came up with earlier is that confidence is that you’re willing to do what you need to do no matter what, consequences be damned.

But is this new definition describing confidence or is it just being unhinged? I believe Person X was referring to this definition when they called me self-confident. I have been described as blunt and straightforward for most of my life, perhaps my communication style makes people perceive me as confident.

So it’s possible that Person X was wrong, or they were trying to butter me or blow smoke up my ass. I’m grateful they said that to me, though; It got me thinking about what being self-confident really means.

“What makes a loser a loser? I’ll tell you… here’s the simplest definition of a loser. It’s when somebody, who when … forced under truth serum to talk about themselves says completely different things from what they say not under truth serum. …. That’s the simplest definition, that’s a loser. Someone [going through tough times] is not a loser. Well [you might say that’s just a liar?] I’m not talking about liars. I mean the person who projects an identity, [someone who is] incapable of not bullshitting themselves. - George Hotz

George Hotz is nuts (love him), but this was not just a simple contrarian definition opposed to society’s typical definition of a loser, it was insanely profound.

Listening to George Hotz say that made me realize something very important about confidence. (This is the part of the essay where ego comes in).

Confidence is inherently linked to authenticity and self-respect. It is the property of ascribing to who you are unapologetically and not letting external stimulus that you don’t really value control your actions.

So then, many people will say that being egotistical is linked to confidence, right? I mean it sounds similar, egotists are typically unapologetic and typically uncompromising. I completely disagree.

Egotists are tyrannical: your schoolyard bully who sucker punches you from the back to say he beat you up, the police officer who relishes the opportunity to use his gun and lay down retribution, the coworker who is overly eager to show you that your code or procedure is wrong. These are all extreme acts of egotism. However, egotists are all around you. Egotists pursue outward acts of ‘confidence’ to bolster the lie that they continue telling themselves, that they are ‘good people’, ‘real men’, and other descriptors.

An egotist seeks evidence of their self-assurance and status in the world. They treat others as toys to be used for their indulgent purposes. They gain a little speck of pride whenever they are able to display that they are superior to others through material conditions. They gain joy from knowing that they graduated from a better university, make more than you, have a prettier partner, et cetera.

However, it is all empty. The most simplistic way of defining the contrast between egotism and confidence is that confidence exists in a vacuum, whereas egotism requires a surrounding environment. Egotism lacks substance, reliant on parasitically consuming the environment around it. Confidence is a shining star, burning brightly off its own fuel, even when surrounded by darkness.

A confident person falls off a boat and starts swimming. An egotist falls off and grasps for debris, for any external element that could help them keep their head above water.

Egotism is a substitute for confidence, and a poor one at that.

We really lambasted egotism, huh! Perhaps I did due to personal experience. I can think of no person who has impacted me more with their egotism than my father. His egotism helped destroy my childhood and negatively impacted my family enormously. His constant need for self-assurance drove him to bully me and my mother for much of my childhood. I witnessed the stark contrast between egotism and confidence as I learned that his actions were not propelled by true superiority, but by a need to make himself feel superior to others.

It is only after I grew up and began standing up for myself that my father stopped letting his egotistic impulses affect our family. He backed down because he realized he was losing his only son. My success encouraged a defensive reflex against those I saw as egotists, using their own tools against them. This reflex dominated my social interactions, and then my life.

One who wields hammers only sees nails, and everywhere I turned I saw egotists. I hated them, and in my process of hating them, I gradually corrupted myself into an egotist, a meta-egotist, if you will. I became so eager to step on the necks of egotists that my self-worth was predicated on ‘sticking it to them’ and ‘destroying their superiority.’ When I got into UChicago with a full ride, I felt like I stuck it to everyone who thought I was an antisocial and bad student (even though I was all of those things)! I was proud of the fact that I got into this ‘top school’, and that others didn’t. I clung to my acceptance as a proof of my self-worth, and I descended further into egotism.

Then something happened: I fell off the boat. I was in shock, reaching out to find anything I could cling onto so that I could keep my head above the waves. There was nothing there; I drowned.

When an egotist drowns, they typically either die or learn how to swim back up to air.

However, I’m still here; I must have learned how to swim. So how did I do it?

Self-improvement articles suck, so I’ll just succinctly describe what I did. I read a lot and ripped everything out of my identity that ‘kid David’ wouldn’t have been proud of. I burned everything and started everything over again at 20, deciding to live life according to how I wanted to live it as a child.

I became someone who furiously declined the chains of money, prestige, or comfort when they were presented to me. For the first time in my life, I became slightly generous, donating part of the salary from my internship to the cause I care about the most (Slava Ukraini). I abandoned everything external that motivated me and returned to wanting to be the uncompromising optimistic, naive, and well-meaning kid that I used to be. I stopped trying to be something I never really wanted to be, and I rebuilt myself from first principles.

That was the me that Person X described when they called me ‘self-confident’.