Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

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.

You're either capable of leading and doing the job and persuading a group of people to become a high-performing team or not.

But in the real world, it matters a great deal because how you think of yourself is kind of contagious.

And then if you're riddled with self-doubt and very anxious and you question yourself, you probably won't persuade anybody that you can lead.

And if you are on the exuberant side of the overconfident, kind of almost delusional spectrum, it's not very good for those

who you lead, but you might get the job.

So if you want to generalize, it's almost like the ideal instance is moderately insecure internally,

so you don't believe your own hype, and you over-prepare, and you have a little bit of imposter syndrome, and you're like, oh my God, I have this client presentation, this pitch, this interview, this promotion incident, and you over-prepare, great.

Elite athletes do this all the time.

But once you're performing, you manage to hide the neurotic ruminations and the voice, and you're like, I am the best in the world right now.

I have coached a lot of people in my life, and usually you coach them to manage their reputation and to present themselves in a way that is more favorable and more adaptive and more beneficial to them than others.