On projecting confidence.
If there is a thing I’ve learnt through the MBA program that is not technical, it is the soft skill of practicing the performance of projecting confidence. It is a useful and necessary skill for winning case competitions. It’s called a projection because essentially the envisioning of success, behavioral power posing, the process of gaining self-awareness through self-reflection begins internally, in the mind, prior to the external state of being confident. Confidence is, therefore, a signal you have the right attributes to get to the most correct version of success.
Social signalling, anyone?
A founder once shared an illuminating insight: higher education credentials (for instance, a MBA from an accredited research university) mainly serve the purpose of social signalling. Perhaps our understanding of reality mirrors the way our technology works. Our personal information is fed into search algorithms, professional online networking sites, social media sites so that our attributes can become signals that serve the purpose of providing us recommendations and suggestions we want. Does this mean we need to be arranged into confidence clusters?
Is this true confidence? Or is it self-belief?
Venture capitalists should be confident in their own judgment when choosing startups to invest in. They have the money and the foresight to enable what the future looks like. They help enable startups to make their vision into a reality. They also have the success track record to prove that because they have been right before, they will be right again. I’m pretty sure even if venture capitalists end up being wrong (when you consider the percentage of startup failures), they’re still going to persist in being confident. You can’t really erase a track record of making startup visions into reality. You can call it an attribution error or survivorship bias; even the participant wants to have a credit in a success scenario. Do these startup founders have such a strong and unwavering self-belief that they can go against the laws of nature (Covid) and emerge to be the winner?
Being realistic
Most of us know that there are a lot of unknowns that we personally don’t know. And yet, we still make decisions everyday. We’re still confident in our ability to use pre-existing heuristics or methodology or framework-based rationales to make decisions. We’re still realistically confident. If we’re wrong (because our hypotheses are incorrect), we still think it is a good thing because we’re now collecting new, valuable data that can guide us toward generating the right hypotheses. A cynic will say that we work (or get starry-eyed venture capitalists to fund) our delusions until they become reality.
Subjective perceptions
Let’s look at other terms that are equally harshly judgmental. You can call confidence by another name: arrogance. I’ve found that “arrogant” characters are well-liked on television. It is a personality archetype hoarded by doctors, detectives, and in reality, investment bankers. These characters are men. Subjective perceptions are shaped by media and cultural expectations. Have you noticed how few female lead characters are “arrogant” and liked by their audience? Well, hopefully most of us have moved on from high school and are not getting into politics where popularity contests are real.
About self-empowering
That’s it. That’s the point, really. Confidence can be interpreted to be a signal. It can also be a self-generating ingredient to help us create new recipes of success, much like startup founders who are required to pivot their products and businesses in these unforeseen trying times.
