Confident Humility

WHAT GOLDILOCKS GOT WRONG

Many people picture confidence as a seesaw. Gain too much confidence, and we tip toward arrogance. Lose too much confidence, and we become meek. This is our fear with humility: that we’ll end up having a low opinion of ourselves. We want to keep the seesaw balanced, so we go into Goldilocks mode and look for the amount of confidence that’s just right. I came to see this as the wrong approach.

Humility is often misunderstood. It’s not a matter of having low self-confidence. One of the Latin roots of humility means “from the earth.” It’s about being grounded—recognizing that we’re flawed and fallible.

Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself. Evidence shows that’s distinct from how much you believe in your methods. You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence.

We become blinded by arrogance when we’re utterly convinced of our strengths and our strategies. We get paralyzed by doubt when we lack conviction in both. We can be consumed by an inferiority complex when we know the right method but feel uncertain about our ability to execute it. What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem. That gives us enough doubt to reexamine our old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.

When people reach this point of confident humility, they learn to interpret doubts differently. Instead of seeing doubt as a sign that they lack the ability to succeed, they treat it as a cue that they need to improve their tools. Uncertainty primes us to ask questions and absorb new ideas. It can help us check the overconfidence that sometimes accompanies a lack of competence, as described by the Dunning-Kruger effect. As Icelandic presidential candidate Halla Tómasdóttir reflected, "I have come to welcome impostor syndrome as a good thing: it's fuel to do more, try more. I've learned to use it to my advantage. I actually thrive on the growth that comes from the self-doubt."

Her campaign was a masterclass in this mindset. While other candidates relied on conventional media coverage, her uncertainty about her tools made her eager to rethink how campaigns were run. She worked harder and smarter, staying up late to personally answer social media messages, holding interactive Facebook Live sessions, and learning to use Snapchat to reach young people. Deciding she had nothing to lose, she ran a positive campaign in a field dominated by candidates smearing one another. This resonated strongly with voters who were tired of negativity and delighted to see a candidate treat her competitors with respect. Although she never received the front-page interviews or large budgets her three male opponents enjoyed, she stunned her country by winning more than a quarter of the vote, finishing second overall and trouncing a former prime minister.

Halla understood something fundamental: knowledge is best sought from experts, but creativity and wisdom can come from anywhere. Her confidence wasn't in her existing knowledge—it was in her capacity to learn. This mirrors the story of Spanx founder Sara Blakely. When she had the idea for footless pantyhose, she believed in her ability to make the idea a reality, but she was full of doubt about her current tools. Her day job was selling fax machines door-to-door, and she was aware that she didn’t know anything about fashion, retail, or manufacturing. She spent a week driving around to hosiery mills for help, and when she couldn’t afford a law firm for a patent, she read a book and filled out the application herself. Her doubt wasn’t debilitating—she was confident she could overcome the challenges in front of her.

This approach is both teachable and practical. In one experiment, when students read a short article about the benefits of admitting what we don’t know rather than being certain about it, the percentage seeking extra help in an area of weakness rose from 65 to 85 percent. They were also more likely to explore opposing political views to try to learn from the other side.

Confident humility doesn’t just open our minds to rethinking—it improves the quality of our rethinking. In college and graduate school, students who are willing to revise their beliefs get higher grades than their peers. In high school, students who admit when they don’t know something are rated by teachers as learning more effectively and by peers as contributing more to their teams. At the end of the academic year, they have significantly higher math grades than their more self-assured peers. Instead of just assuming they’ve mastered the material, they quiz themselves to test their understanding.

When adults have the confidence to acknowledge what they don’t know, they pay more attention to how strong evidence is and spend more time reading material that contradicts their opinions. In studies of leadership effectiveness across the United States and China, the most productive and innovative teams had leaders who combined confidence with humility. The most effective leaders scored high in both. Although they have faith in their strengths, they’re also keenly aware of their weaknesses. They recognize where they need help and remain willing to learn.

Plenty of evidence also suggests that confidence is just as often the result of progress as the cause of it. We don't have to wait for our confidence to rise to achieve challenging goals; we can build it through achieving challenging goals. Great thinkers don't harbor doubts because they're impostors. They maintain doubts because they know we're all partially blind and they're committed to improving their sight. They don't boast about how much they know; they marvel at how little they understand. A mark of lifelong learners is recognizing that they can learn something from everyone they meet.

If we care about accuracy, we can’t afford to have blind spots. Arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses. Humility is a reflective lens: it helps us see them clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses.