Less-Confident People Are More Successful

I would have to disagree a little. The majority of successful people I have come across have always seemed really self confident.

However, I am not saying someone with low self confidence can not be a success. In fact I think that can work in their favour also - They are spurred on to be a success to prove to themselves (or others) that they can succeed.

Let alone the studies, show me one person that has low confidence and makes more than 5k a month.

I bet you can't because you can't find someone with LOW CONFIDENCE that is going through all the challenges that a business has.

Maybe I'm wrong, I hope that you can prove what you just said.

Let's take a sales person for example. Would you buy from a person that has low-self confidence and that's really nervous when presenting the product for you? I would rather buy a 2,000$ watch from a person that seems to know very well what he is talking about and that has confidence in his abilities (not cockiness) than buy a 1$ pice of gum from a person that seems to have no idea what he is talking about.

According to the article the three main reasons are:

1. Lower self-confidence makes you pay attention to negative feedback and be self-critical

2. Lower self-confidence can motivate you to work harder and prepare more

3. Lower self-confidence reduces the chances of coming across as arrogant or being deluded

I've always felt that confidence was a key factor in risk taking. For example, the more confident one is, the more likely he or she will take risks. And as a result, this can lead to success. Because of this, I find it difficult to believe that those who lack confidence can be more successful than those who have it.

Yes, low-confidence folks can be successful; but because they lack confidence in the first place, I can't see how they'd be willing to do some of the things (ie: taking risks) that high-confidence people do.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. I'm far from a psychology major

The reasons above do make sense but still would disagree with the overall theory, because if you do have confidence then you will not take risks on, By me, on 7th July 2012. Patented.

I agree that someone with low self confidence will succeed more overall if they are in the right field for them. They don't expect success without hard work and a great product so they work hard and create a great product. That sounds like the formula for success to me.

ok. Studies...are just studies sometimes :-) That is theoretical based writings or, worse, statistically-based writings.
You need not be a psychologist to know the answer to that!
It may be the case of low-confident people who work hard to overcome this state of being, but it is no way a person like that could be more successful than a self-confident person.
Being low-confident you lack motivation and willness, you lack courage, you do not trust your actions and your decisions. So you need some support in order to become somebody else first! Building up self-confidence will bring success eventually!

I think if a low confidence person does know what they are talking about they will come out as non-cocky or arrogant when talking about a product or service. I have seen the most confident person fail on a sale and then the least confident person receive the sale. This is probably just a matter of how people connect with one another. I really think that most sales or services depends on how the people connect.

For instance, my fiance and I had this Kirby sales person come to our door at our apt. He wasn't very confident and you could tell he was still new but it seemed to us that he had learned the sale efficiently enough to convey his point. When his boss came in and we were talking the original sales person did let him take the reins which is reasonable in this type of sales. We ended up buying it because of the original sales person who we connected with though. Everything depends on relationships, if a person doesn't like the sales person they won't buy, if they do a sale will most likely be made.

So let me get this straight... you read ONE article and now you're going around telling the world to be insecure? Because they'll make MORE money?

Quite possibly one of the most irrational statements I've ever heard before.

Here is one more fact about research that you should never forget.

RESEARCH IS NOT REALITY! Correlation does NOT = causation.

That is WHY its called "research". They research to learn MORE about a specific topic. If an outlier like this is revealed by ANY test, it will then undergo MORE TESTS. Tests that usually debunk the original studies due to confounding variables.

There is also a study that claimed 80% of people drink premium beer. Then when a follow up survey was done, they found out 60% of people drink discount beer.

Research is NOT dogma. Its research. So please stop taking it so seriously.
NEVER read just 1 study then formulate a conclusion based on it. We were specifically taught in college to cite 10 studies for every ONE hypothesis.

That meant if we had a reason to believe something, we needed to find 10 other studies that supported that belief. If we did NOT, our research was often denied by the IRB. If we COULD find the studies, we'd run a new study, which was then TORN APART with contradicting research by our peers.

So please, never take anything you read in research seriously. Especially if you only have time to read just 1 study. Thats definitely not how formal research is conducted.

-Red

The OP only wanted to share his/her findings about the subject matter. IMHO, there's no need to tell everyone that this is a waste of a thread. It isn't good to tell everyone to stop taking this seriously as this is a public forum and they aren't charging you a dime every time they post on this specific thread.

Now, I believe, today's most successful men and women started with their first baby-step in the business with that 'low-self esteem' character. They have developed and hone their skills to elevate that confidence level. No mountain climber has ever started at the peak. You need to start from the mountain foot to reach the peak.

I read this article and found it pretty interesting. Sure, it's just the author's opinion, but it makes sense to me in a lot of ways.

I just left my job as a high school teacher to work online full-time. But I can definitely say from anecdotal experience that my students who had a huge amount of confidence were rarely the hard workers in my class. They were often cocky and thought they knew everything already. Not ALL of them, but a lot.

My students who had less self-confidence often worked harder, were willing to take constructive criticism better, and tended to have better grades and higher quality work.

I know for me starting in IM right now, I lack a lot of confidence (mainly because I haven't had a lot of success in this field yet). What that means for me is that I'm trying really hard to pay attention to what others are doing right and paying attention to my own mistakes. Hopefully that will lead to success.

Interesting take on this subject. I always enjoy hearing/reading different points of view.

Guys, just because you do not have self confidence, doesn't mean you can't sound confident.
My business partner hates public speaking, wouldn't rather have anyone else with me on 3 ways. She makes a crisp $22,000 per month by the way.
It is important to seem confident yes, but confidence is all a matter of personality. When it has to become a mind set it is a mask.
There is nothing wrong with being who you are.

I knew it!

I think the reason why so many disagree with the notion that low confidence people are more likely to succeed is because most of the successful people we know appear confident and self-assured. And think of this: which doctor are we more likely to trust with our lives - the one who seems to know what he's doing or the one who seems uncertain and hesitant?

But many of the confident people I know hide a deep insecurity, whether it's about money or their ability or about competition - and that's what driving them to greater and greater success. The theory would be correct for some cases if insecurity = low confidence.

As for the doctor - well, someone who acts confident does not necessarily mean he is more able, just that he has learned better bedside manners to assure his patient!

Just my 2 cents.

I think it's depend on the faith and God's will..............

I would like to know where they got that from. I would assume that less-confident people are insecure and price their items very cheaply... no matter how they market themselves.

not being confident seems to be what is holding me back, not helping me. Its made all the information ive gathered scrambled together and none of it hardly makes sense anymore!

I am also agree with you because excess of anything is not good.So over confidence may cause fail.

So,less confidence may help people to reach his or her goal.

What wesd22 quoted about self confidence, is right to me. Because people who are over confident, they can make some negligible mistakes which can lead their hard works into vain. On the other hand people who are less confident, they think hundred times to perform a task and they always try to be sure that what they are doing is right. The difference gets bigger from here.

And Internet Marketing and Direct Marketing is not the same.

Wow, you must not believe everything you read. Before anything else let me ask you a question:

Do you even know what confidence is?

Confidence basically comes from successfully doing something, it comes from past reference experiences.

For example I am very confident while Swimming because I have past reference experiences in my mind of successfully swimming.

On the other hand if I will play tennis I will surely get self conscious, its just because I have never tennis played it before, I have got no reference experiences.

So If you consider this concept in terms of business
A person who is successful will automatically become confident, because his mind will say its familiar "I have done that before".

Ever heard the expression "Success breeds confidence".

If a person continuously fails at doing some thing say making money online he will start loosing his confidence and will become more self conscious while talking or thinking about it.

BTW,I am that guy, I failed for 2 years in Internet marketing, so now what happened was whenever someone asked me what I do? I started to get self conscious and all nervous.

Did that helped me in bouncing back in IM?

NO

In fact I started to see more success when some of my friends showed trust on me, they made me feel I am good and I know this stuff and success is only the matter of time once I start taking action.

I felt confident once again and started doing what it takes, and then after few days I saw my first sale.

Did you notice what's happening here?

I am not saying it's the same for 100% of people but I can say its very close to that.

The authors opinion is flawed. Even if a person is less confident, eventually (after consistent action) it becomes inevitable that they will indeed become more confident at doing a certain thing. They will get better and better and better and so on. This also means they will become more confident in what they're doing. It seems to me, the better you get, the more confident you become. You cannot have success without first attaining confidence in ones ability to complete certain tasks proficiently.

Simply, you cannot achieve success without gaining more confidence along the way.

Condifence , does not matter low or high , a mixed of confidence , perseverance and a bit of luck is the key of "success". Depends how you see it ,this success, if you want to be a billionaire i don't know anything in that area, because i`m not a billionaire.And only the ones that are billionaire knows "some secrets".Without confidence there are ..........0 chances to achieve something.

Totally agree with the article. The appearance of self-confidence is not necessarily evidence of self-confidence; and may actually be evidence of a good liar.

There's another word for extremely high self-confidence: narcissism.

I agree and disagree with this statement. First of all there are different degrees of confident, or should I say personality traits. A low confident person can be as competitive and and ambitious as anyone else, these aren't traits only reserved for "the confident". And as far as success, I dont really like to generalize, a great, innovative idea can come from anyone to be quite honest.



just look at the creator of facebook... does he look very confident to you?

I usually see successful people more self-confident than unsuccessful ones.
And self confidence only comes after success, otherwise how can it be?

Don't always trust writers, journalists, column editors and people.
They always try to catch reader's attention and they find all the ways to do it.

See you soon,
Alessandro

I find that hard to believe.Almost every successful business person I know has a lot of self confidence and demonstrates great leadership

How in hell can low self-confidence can achieve success? If you don't believe in yourself then nobody else will.

Wouldn't matter a jot to me if a salesman had confidence or not. I would just look at the facts when buying something. The most important thing is honesty and value for money.

Competitive pushy sales people are the worst. Much rather speak to a genuine person even if they have flaws.

I am guessing the most successful people out there are the people who can take a knock and then bounce back again and again. It does not follow that if you lack confidence that you are incapable of doing this - as the research shows

I come from a family of salesman. All of my older brothers are very confident/successful at what they do. Do they have things they get nervous/anxious about? Absolutely, but I wouldn't say any of them have "deep seeded" insecurities.

Thats just what insecure people tell themselves to feel better at night.

I'll keep it simple, I've ALREADY SEEN in my life how INSECURE people perform vs SECURE people, there is ALWAYS a pretty major difference.

In sales, the insecure people have no idea how to speak. They're too afraid to open their mouths always worrying about how they sound etc etc. They close far less jobs, and don't last long in our business (its a fact if you are insecure you are NOT cut out for sales).

Then when I use to teach dating many years ago, insecure guys could never approach women. NEVERMIND pay attention to their needs, they were always too scared to even get to that part. So I would wind up approaching the women for them, just to get them speaking to them so they could feel relaxed in an anxiety provoking situation (I still get anxious anytime I speak to a stranger [you will never fully lose that imo no matter how much talking you do] but I just don't let the anxiety influence my behavoir. Like that book by Susan Jeffers "Feel The Fear & Do It Anyway" GREAT BOOK)

Insecure people are often paralyzed by fear anytime they have to make the smallest improvements in life. Lacking confidence cripples you in this world and I don't care what anyone else believes about this.

An insecure person will NOT beat a secure person when it comes to business/sales. I would die just to be proven wrong here thats how sure I am about this.

I'm not saying this because I am the most secure person in the world. I am definitely not. Confidence is uniquely bound to money in the respect that all the power/control in this world goes to those with the biggest balls.

So if you don't have confidence you're just not going to get far imo. The more insecure you are, the worse it will be.

Thats life and just another reason why people need to believe in themselves. More than anything, I feel like almost everyone is insecure to an extent when they're younger. I was fairly insecure about they way I looked up untill I turned 23. Somewhere around turning 25 I just realized I no longer care what people think about me.

I don't call it confidence I think it has a lot more to do with anxiety than anything. We judge confidence by the anxieties a person has (I believe this is why so many older folks seem confident). If they have anxiety with doing the most normal things, we call them insecure. When on the other hand someone who might not get anxious about public speaking, we tend to think they're secure/confident.

The reality is everyone gets anxious about different things so its really hard to judge who is TRUELY confident and who's not. The ONLY way to get to really learn that is by spending a lot of time with someone. However, the insecure people always tend to get anxious (like I said) over taking the smallest most simple steps. Thats WHY I say they have a major disadvantage.

Confident people simply do better. They are more prone to face their fears and overcome them rather than an insecure person getting frozen in every decision they try to make. I believe this is because they deal with less anxiety overall. Doesn't mean they still don't get anxious about things they just don't feel the need to obsess over it. Insecurity leads to indecisiveness which leads nonaction imo.

-Red

hmm...

I think some confidence is needed but I can see how less confidence equals more success rolls out. Particularly with the points made. but then you have to think about confidence vs arrogance or cockiness.

Thanks for the insight.

Cheers,
Karson

Less confident people are usually more careful when they take the first plunge. Over analysing and trying to get everything just perfect. Confidence can lead to errors because the original 'fear' is over.

It may have some truth. If a person with less confidence is going to venture into a business, he will make sure that he did everything right for the first time. He do not want to mess around. If he has self-confidence, it may lead to disaster especially if he thinks he is very good at all the things in his life. Then, later on he may not distinguish that what he does in his life every single day is different from starting off a business. In business, you are going to think about capital, income, profit/loss, salary of the employees (if any), taxes and all sorts. All these might be too much to handle for a confident person.

Interesting read - I am much more driven that way without constant anxiety pushing me I don't think I'd get anywhere.

99% of people who try fail. That is true no matter what anyone says. Now the 1% who make it some are just idiots and un-educated and don't follow the mold or give a dam, I have met like 100+ in person. So molds don't work that I know. Follow your gut and don't listen to sheep and for god sake don't read a university paper they don't have a clue or are in the real world, I would never listen to what they say. Just my 2 cents.

I could believe that less confident people are successful on the net as they do not have to interact with people directly

Im not sure that people in Harvard clarified this issue enough .
I think they took too seriously the picture of a too confident man having no successes in his business because he is too arrogant and has too much self confidence and a picture of a not confident man having a lot of money and a successful business ( which can be found in many comedy movies and such) and made the simple assumption based on that.
Really, stupid theories (yes this a nothing more then a theory) make me angry.
There are too many explanations of why this theory can be false and true at the same time, too many example of different variations.

Confident people only fail when they procrastinate....

I cannot possibly think of any feasible REAL-WORLD reason (forget research studies from reality-detached scholars) under which low self-confidence would actually be a positive characteristic towards success.

Usually low confidence people are those people who do not get satisfied with their works and efforts unless they see the results, so such people keep on working hard and putting efforts in work unless they succeed, so i will agree with the quote of wesd22on0 that success ratio of such people should be high... But in the real world it is not so... I don't know why.

I think that most people who are dismissing his findings are also missing
his definition of low self confidence and using "very low self-confidence"
to make their points.

The author does admit that very low self confidence is NOT productive
but the lack of confidence to the level that you will have some
humility to know that you can improve and therefore seek
to improve is what is helpful towards success.

Too much confidence is just as destructive and very low self
confidence.

He also indicates that his findings were researched and not
the cogitations of some detached university scholar.

That's why we always say TEST, TEST and TEST again.

What people intuitively think and what is reality can
be night and say apart.

-Ray Edwards

Where do you guys think the statement "Money can't buy happiness" came from?

I would have to disagree with this also.

I've found that the more confidence I've gathered over the years, the more money I've made in business and therefore the more confident I've become. When you go from zero to pulling in $250k in a week in the space of a few months it tends to boost your confidence :-)

But confidence is also something that you can foster in yourself rather than just garner from personal experience. It's like a muscle - the more times you feel confident and think confident thoughts the more confidence you will have.

Great conversation guys. I wonder why we argue whether it is confident or unconfident people that are successful. A person can have both depending on which areas of expertise that holds the conversation.

For instance I am confident in this area but not that area. An IM, at least the ones I have come across that are successful have been confident. However if I asked that IM to teach an arobics class or a dog training class they would not be as confident.

I have not been very successful in IM yet which is part of the reason I am on the forum but I believe that I have the knowledge. Than it is just the confidence of moving forward and not worrying about the 9 -5 "security" of my job or what people say around me. Some are open to it, most tell me it is impossible.

I think that less confident people are probably more successful on the internet. Primarily becuase there is not much pressure to get out there. From his/her bedroom a person could start a website and make millions without the need to really talk to anyone. If a person starts a bricks and mortar business, he/she has to get out there and be willing to do things that might make them look stupid, network, interact directly with all sorts of people on a daily basis etc

I was looking at a documentary about Donald Trump and
his rise in the real estate market. He ended up crashing
with $900 million in debt. He was able to convince his
creditors to lend him more money and was able to
pull himself out to where he is today--worth billions.

But he himself admitted that he ended up in a mess
because he was too confident and felt that he could
never lose, so he made bad deals.

Here you are talking about Donald Trump and he admits
that too much self confidence can hurt you.

-Ray Edwards

When people with low self confidence in their ability to accomplish something apply themselves anyway, they are obviously doing so because of a deep personal obsession with the task at hand. Maybe people in that situation have a higher likelihood of success.

I believe this author has mixed up the meaning of self-confidence with being stubborn and/or arrogant. True self-confidence comes from within - you CANNOT succeed long-term without this. Now, what the author is talking about is a false self-confidence...often people who have low inner self-confidence over-compensate by covering that fact with an arrogance and yes, I agree, that will stop success dead in its tracks...seen it happen to many people who are overly "outwardly" confident.

What is necessary is to have a strong inner confidence, an inner belief that you can succeed no matter what challenges come your way. If THIS is the root of your self-confidence then you will be open to feedback, will not appear arrogant and will be able to really use all of your true talents instead of hiding under a mask of arrogance that pushes people away.

Jeff

If you are starting with a low confidence and then build that confidence by achieving success, the statement make sense.

However, when you only have confidence without success to back it up, the result might can be scary in the long run.

People with low self-confidence are often driven to succeed in business to compensate for perceived deficiencies in other areas of their lives. Again, confidence and competence are not mutually exclusive. It's not that hard, folks. Psyche 101.