Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

And you can close the gap between how good you are and how good you want to be anybody who is an elite professional kind of athlete and sports knows it.

Failing that there is a alternative, which is to be overconfident, overconfident people in general, but more so men than women.

often have an ability to persuade others that they're better than they actually are.

So if you're interviewing for a job, let's say, and you have two candidates, and one is quite self-aware and says, ooh, I've not done this before, and it will be tricky, but I think I can learn it, and I will do it this way.

But right now, I have no experience.

So you get an honest, self-aware candidate

candidate whose confidence is aligned with their ability and who doesn't engage in deception.

And on the other hand, somebody who says, I'm amazing, I'm the best thing since sliced bread, hire me, whatever.

They're not even lying to the interview panel.

They're lying to themselves.

Guess who will get the job more often than not?

And the science on this is very clear.

The correlation between

Confidence, how good you think you are at something, and competence, how good you actually are, is 0.3, which means there's like a 9% overlap.

So a lot of the times, if you pick the most confident person, they're going to be totally inept.

And maybe the more interesting one, if you pick somebody who is a little bit anxious, insecure, and suffers even from imposter syndrome, they're going to be the most competent person.

So in an ideal world and in a logical world, it really wouldn't matter that much how you think about yourself and how you evaluate yourself.

You're either talented or not.

You're either competent or not.

You either have expertise or not.