The more I think about it, that word confidence is a needle mover. Because if you look at the great business builders, if you look at an Elon Musk, if you look at a Jeff Bezos, if you look at a Phil Knight, if you look at a Warren Buffet… I recently watched a great documentary called Becoming Warren Buffet.
All of these great masters had one thing in common, and it sounds very obvious, but it’s acutely high levels of personal confidence. And so literally they came up with an idea for the iPhone. They came up with an idea for the incandescent light bulb. They came up with an idea for Amazon. They came up with an idea for Tesla, an electric car. They came up with an idea for SpaceX. They came up with an idea for a polio vaccination in the case of Jonas Salk. They came up with an idea to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling so that it was one of the most beautiful act of artistry in the history of humanity, in the case of Michelangelo.
And everyone laughed at them and they faced the naysayers and they hit the walls. But it’s
because of the confidence they had built. Maybe it was through reading, maybe it was because of a mentor who believed in them, maybe it was because of meditation, maybe it was because of such a ferocious mission that they would take a bullet for it. They kept on going. And I’ve mentioned the work in the past, Angela Duckworth at University of Pennsylvania. She’s found that the most successful people are not the smartest in the room, but they have the most grit, which is simply persistence, which is simply a form of confidence.