by Serguey Shinder
For a good part of my career, I equated confidence with competence, in myself and in everyone else. The people who spoke with certainty seemed to know things. The people who hedged seemed to be covering for not knowing. And I trained myself, quite deliberately, to sound certain, because certainty was what got listened to, and being listened to felt like being right. I got good at conviction long before I had earned it.
The trouble is that certainty and correctness are not the same thing, and they are not even reliably correlated. Some of the most confident statements I ever made were wrong, and they were dangerous precisely because I had delivered them with a conviction that discouraged anyone from questioning them. My certainty had not made me right. It had made me unchallengeable, which is a much worse thing to be, because it removes the very scrutiny that might have caught the error.
I began to notice that the people I trusted most, over time, were not the certain ones. They were the ones who could say, cleanly and without embarrassment, that they did not know, or that they were not sure, or that they had been wrong. Their hedging was not weakness. It was calibration, an honest report of the actual state of their knowledge, and it made the things they were confident about worth taking seriously, because I knew they only claimed certainty when they had it.
What I had been doing, by contrast, was performing a confidence I did not always possess, and the performance had a cost I only slowly understood. Every time I sounded certain about something I was actually unsure of, I made it harder for anyone to help me, harder for the truth to reach me, harder to change course when I needed to. I had built a persona that could not afford to be wrong, and a persona that cannot afford to be wrong cannot afford to learn.
So I have been trying, unglamorously, to make my confidence match my actual knowledge, to say I am not sure when I am not sure, to distinguish out loud between the things I know and the things I merely believe. It feels weaker. It sometimes gets listened to less, in rooms that reward volume over accuracy. But the things I am now certain about are things I have actually earned the right to be certain about, and that has made my certainty mean something again.
The hardest part was admitting that the confidence I had cultivated was partly a costume, and that competence does not sound like certainty. It sounds like a precise account of what you know and what you do not, delivered without shame about the second part. Real competence includes knowing the edges of your own knowledge, and those edges are exactly what my old confidence had been hiding, from everyone, including me.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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