Confidence
Recently, I finished Don A. Moore’s Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely (2020).
Moore is a professor in the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, where his research focuses on how overconfidence shapes negotiation and decision-making.
As his book title suggests, Moore’s goal is to instruct readers in the fine art of acquiring—or tempering—what is known as “confidence.”
Although it is usually considered in conjunction with success, Moore argues that in fact, confidence requires a more nuanced consideration.
In particular, Moore argues for finding what he refers to as “the middle way”— a path of “well-calibrated confidence” that “requires you to understand yourself and what you are capable of achieving” while also “requir[ing] that you know your limitations and what opportunities are not worth pursuing” (212).
As his phrasing suggests, Moore seeks to “bust the myth that confidence is a matter of gut feelings or self-esteem,” and argues instead that confidence “is a practice to be mastered” (210).
Perfectly Confident offers readers a wealth of suggestions for how to master the practice of confidence, by offering practical strategies for both boosting underconfidence and curtailing overconfidence.
Although we tend to favor overconfidence, as Moore points out, “Actually being overconfident exposes you, your organization, and your investors to a whole host of risks, especially if you let it bias your forecasts and impair your decisions” (200).
Obviously, this is something that we currently see playing out on the political stage on a daily basis.
I picked up Moore’s book because of my own interest in the philosophy and dynamics of decision-making , and because, as a student of human nature, I often find myself wondering why we do the things we do.
Moore’s account of confidence offers a compelling glimpse into a complex facet of human behavior.
When people are underconfident, we lose out on the benefit of their input and expertise.
But when they’re overconfident, we’re held hostage to a vision or set of beliefs that may in fact be erroneous or completely misguided.
Perfectly Confident describes a set of skills and strategies that we can work to acquire and pitfalls that we can learn to avoid as we rethink what it means to display “confidence.”
