IMHO, "Confidence comes before success" puts the cart before the horse, and often starts a vicious cycle

In My Humble Opinion
1

The constant refrain in society is that you have to believe in yourself and confidence breeds success.

While confidence can certainly increase your success, IMHO, this is putting the cart before the horse. People usually feel confident because they’re successful, not the other way around.

Using piano as an example - growing up, I noticed that many music students would go down one of two paths early on. Either their first debut performance was a success, and bred confidence “Yes, I’m a good pianist, music is something I’m good at” - and they’d get better and better - or their first performance (or first few) was humiliating and unpleasant, and the seed got planted in their minds - “I’m not good at piano, music just isn’t my thing” and they often quit piano after a short while.

Success begat success; failure begat failure.

Same with dating, for instance. People like to claim that “confidence is the most attractive trait a person can have” but how can any man or woman feel confident if they’re getting rejected all the time (and then they get even more desperate, which makes their vibe even worse)? You have to first have the affirmation from others that you are attractive in order to feel attractive (no ugly person can fool themselves into thinking they’re handsome or beautiful when society is a nonstop 24/7 feedback informing them directly or indirectly that they’re not.)

Ditto with academics, sports, anything else. How do you convince someone who’s flunked math all their life that they’re really in fact a calculus expert deep down and that math is really their thing? You can’t, unless by pulling off some amazing mental con-job sales pitch.

Now, of course, there are some people who are simply so dogged or intrepid that they are able to take 100 licks and keep on ticking. Some of the famous entrepreneurs-turned-CEOs come to mind. But they’re a rare minority. Most people who keep tasting failure in a certain area, will eventually be convinced that “This just isn’t my natural strength” and their lack of confidence will simply feed their further lack of success in that area.

2

While I don’t disagree with you, I think there are some people born with confidence. Call them arrogant, but they don’t need success to build up their confidence because it comes naturally to them. They just have it, and they flaunt it whenever they can. I used to hate people like that and thought they were just narcissists, but they seem to have a built-in confidence that most of us unfortunately, or fortunately, aren’t born with.

3

As a parent and youth coach, there is a lot to unpack there and it manifests in different kids differently (and adults too, I’m sure).

Two things that seem to be critical are:

  1. Focus on the success in the process of personal improvement. Everybody has successes, even if they seem trivial compared to what others are doing. If a kid starts a new sport and is much worse than everybody else, there are still ways to make them feel successful, which breeds the confidence needed to actually improve. Similarly in schoolwork and social skills.
  2. Avoid reinforcing ideas like “I’m naturally good at this”. Obviously everybody has strengths and weaknesses, but there is another vicious cycle I’ve seen with many kids. It runs: initial success, “I’m really good at this”, typical gradual improvement, exposure to others that are much better either due to innate ability or high levels of practice, “I’m not really good at this”, quitting without putting in the effort to actually develop innate strengths.

Confidence should come from success in the process of improvement, not reliance in innate gifts. That way it can be replicated to other areas of life easily. I’m not good at meeting new people? I can work on that and get good at it. I’m not good at this new software tool? I can work on that and get good at it. Etc.

4

@dolphinboy nailed the setup.

The OPs’ description is totally told from the POV of someone who lacks inherent confidence. That’s confidence about everything, not any specific thing. It’s a variation on optimism. And, like optimism, it can be warranted or unwarranted in any specific situation. But it totally affects how you (any you) approach every situation.

Yes, success reinforces confidence, which reinforces success. But the feedback loop is much more important for the not-inherently-confident person who has few reserves of innate confidence to build on at first, or to fall back on following setbacks.

ETA: And now reading @Jas09, I see they nailed the best rational response to that set-up.

5

While early achievements tend to breed confidence, early failures are often overcome.

Case in point: Albert Einstein for a long time was not an academic success (among other things, he flunked a college entrance exam), but that didn’t stop him from having a fairly successful career.

6

Yes.

When I was growing up, I was noticeably more intellectually gifted compared to my peers. My mom used to tell me I could achieve anything. This gave me a case of what I later labeled “smart kid syndrome” (I’m sure there’s a formal name in the academic literature, but I’ve never bothered to verify). Nearly everything came easily to me, and I enjoyed that feeling. But when I ran into anything where I wasn’t immediately successful, I shied away from it, assuming that was something I wasn’t good at and would never be good at.

Eventually I figured this out and began a lifelong process of unwiring myself and developing healthy learning habits. But it’s not easy.

The upshot is, I now have two very smart kids of my own. But I do not tell them what my mother told me. I do not tell them they can accomplish whatever they want in life, because I know that’s a formula for frustration and paradoxical personal limitation.

Instead, my message is this: You can achieve anything in life that you are willing to work hard to achieve.

You don’t start anything with the assumption that you will be good at it right away. Some things, yes, that will be true. But many things, when you start, you won’t be successful. This is normal. But you should have the confidence that if you stick to it, work at it, practice and grow, eventually you will be good at it.

So far the message is working. My older girl is on the gradual climb to piano mastery, for example, and doesn’t let the slow pace and frequent mistakes frustrate her. My younger girl doesn’t have the same goal-oriented kind of project, but when she gets irritated at errors on school tests, I can hear her talking to herself, reminding herself that these are not things she’s stupid about, they are signposts to the things she hasn’t learned yet.

I think this is probably the second-most important thing I can achieve as a parent (after the establishment of trust in our household as safe and loving). Their confidence should be in the value and outcome of sustained effort, not in some imagined perception of personal superiority.

7

My college roommate (I also knew him in high school) was an interesting case study. He was smart and funny, but also short and relatively unattractive. Nevertheless he was extremely successful with women who were, by almost any measure, out of his league.

As a roommate I got to see him at work. The difference between him and everyone else is that he wasn’t just confident, but also that failure didn’t bother him. It wasn’t just with women. When he got sick junior year, he missed a couple of weeks of classes and his grades went down. Didn’t bother him at all, he just picked up a couple of classes in summer.

It’s not really about confidence, it’s about resilience.

8

On the other hand there is impostor syndrome. Lots of people who should be confident aren’t. Not being too confident can help sometimes.
There is a lot of “people read the last one, but that doesn’t mean they’ll read the next one” out there.

9

The way I heard it is “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to…” oh wait, that was Yoda. What I actually heard by an instructor is that practice leads to skill and skill leads to confidence.

It is probably a little bit more nuanced than that thought. When you start that first practice of whatever it is, and you come out of feeling like you managed to learn something, then the next practice to further improve it is easier. Eventually, if you practice enough, you feel like you have the skill in order to succeed. Then of course comes the actual event, and if you view your success or failure as a result of your practice, or some inherent skill, how you evaluate what happens is going to be different. If you see a failure as a lack of some ability, then you will take it harder, than if you view it as not having practiced the right thing, or known the right thing, which is something you can remedy.

//i\\

10

This is a big thing in education world; the buzzwords are “growth mindset” and “grit”. Like many things, it can be taken too far. There’s also the “10,000 hours” thing. If the rate of improvement remains glacial, it can get extremely frustrating. To someone with an aptitude for music, or whatever the skill, the 10,000 hours will probably go by a lot faster. For me it’s one of those “true up to a point” things that can easily devolve into someone being told “you’re just not working hard enough.”

11

My dad, an amateur boxer in his teens, was very found of the mantra that you win by getting up one more time than you get knocked down.

Knowing how to fail and to accept that failure is essential to eventual success … that is more important to have than innate skill.

12

I wouldn’t say I can get good at it, but I can get better at it than I am now.

13

I think it has to do with in you heart of hearts, whether you believe that you’re awesome, or a loser. If it’s the former, it’s a lot easier to look inward and just dismiss the outside world, because you know, you’re awesome, and they just don’t know.

Conversely, it’s really easy to interpret everything negatively, if you believe deep down that you’re a loser and not worthy.

I tend toward the naturally confident, but I believe it was more of a result of my parents/family fostering an environment when I was a child where I could try and fail, and realize that the vast majority of the time, the consequences are low, and the people who count still love and support me anyway.

So it’s really easy to not dwell and overthink the possible consequences of failure- there’s usually a good chance that I’ll succeed, and if not, the consequences are not very dire. So why NOT do whatever it is?

That said, I did struggle with dating because I wasn’t confident. I broke out of that mold by starting small- I’d just ask out a bunch of women on Match.com, or in bars, or wherever. I reframed it as a “win” if I asked them out, not that I got numbers or a date or whatever. And if I did get a date, I kept it small- maybe a cup of coffee at first. Over time, I came to realize that there wasn’t anything to fear- “failing” was just not a big deal, and nothing to internalize and beat myself up over.

@DSeid’s dad is right- it’s not about how you win, it’s basically about how you don’t lose. Get up one more time than you get knocked down- that’s about how you don’t lose, not about how you win that fight. And it pays dividends; by getting back up every time, you know that you did that, and you can take pride in not staying down. Which will make you more confident in your next fight, date, etc…

14

Huh. Funny that you phrase it like that because there was another recurring dadism:

He was a WWII man and many Sundays were spent watching shows like The World at War, for those who remember it. His regular line was about how victory wasn’t based on brilliant strategies and tactics but on making the fewest dumb mistakes.

Same basic lesson I guess.

15

Makes sense if you think about it. WWII was rife with those situations- the Allies weren’t particularly inspired, but we did know what we were trying to do, and we doggedly did it. Meanwhile, the Axis was more scattershot and less disciplined- look at how many German tank types were developed vs. US tanks. Or airplanes, etc…

I think ultimately real confidence is built by letting people (ideally children) succeed AND fail, and bear the consequences of those actions. They’ll become confident in what they’re good at, and confident in knowing what they’re NOT good at, as a result.

Which is more or less how you get people who are confident and do things well.

16

“Excuse me. I know I’m not much to look at, but right now I seem to be the only man in the bar who is actually talking to you.”

17

I think it’s more complex than that. Like there’s different kinds of confidence. People should strive for what I like to call “positive confidence” - you set goals you want to achieve, take actions to achieve them, continuously and objectively review what went well and what didn’t and adjust accordingly. Essentially knowing that things are within your control based on the decisions you make and the actions you take.

Then there is what I call “toxic confidence” - arrogance, narcissism, entitlement, overcompensation. Internalizing you are a “loser” might cause you to try harder, but it might feed obsessive behavior. Similarly, thinking you are awesome without having earned it makes you look like a douche or may even prevent you from doing the necessary work.

18

To me the lesson was to not emphasize confidence in success, but to minimize the fear of failure. Partly by normalizing failure.

Returning to long past single days. Those afraid of failure won’t make eye contact, won’t approach. Meeting my wife required going up to her and her friend at a social event and asking … her friend … to dance, being shot down, and immediately then asking the woman I would later marry if she’d like to. I had no confidence of success. I just was not afraid of any consequences of failure. Failure is no disaster. It is simply part of the process.

19

I don’t think you can have one without the other though; even the most confident people aren’t going to continue to butt their heads against a stone wall if they’re not having any success.

Confidence is having that deep-down knowledge that you can handle/do something, including if it ends up that way, failing at it. It’s a combination of self-esteem combined with a willingness to fail.

And they all build on each other; you get that willingness to fail by trying and failing, and realizing that you can get back up and try again. And that trying and failing and being able to get back up and take another swing builds your self esteem as well.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s “positive confidence” and what’s “negative confidence”. Both can be obscured by cockiness/cocksure behavior, and sometimes just the act of being confident itself can be confused with being cocksure. Muhammad Ali’s quote that “It’s not bragging if you can back it up” is a great example. In one person, it’s just bullshit, but in another it’s just stating the truth.

But you are right in that there are a lot of people who are not actually confident, but fleeing their inner demons. Some of the most ‘successful’ people I’ve known have been that way- they’re FAR more afraid of failure than they’re actually enthusiastic about success. They’ve always been kind of sad in my estimation; they are driven by fear, and never really enjoy their successes, no matter how hard won.

20

Bumping this to add in a Browning quote that @Dr_Paprika shared in a different thread that I think is meaningful here:

As parents the hope is that our children learn to not be afraid to reach just a bit farther than they think is their grasps, and to know that failing with some regularity but sometimes not means you are reaching about right. My dad tried to teach that to me.

It come from a great bittersweet poem btw.