You’re at a family dinner. One of your cousins is saying grace. Everyone bows their head solemnly. After a well synced amen, your family starts eating. After some time, you hear your grandfather muttering something. Your family tenses up. The dining room is on high alert. You can’t catch every word, but you can distinctively hear “Obama” in a very disgusted tone.
“Grandpa, you can’t say that!” implores your younger sister. “Why not?” your grandpa insists? “Back in my day, a person like him would have never been anywhere near the White House.” Your mother tries to intervene. “Now now, like it or not, he is the president. Can you please pass the green beans?”
Your grandpa dutifully passes the dish over. After he does, he suddenly exclaims, “well he certainly isn’t my president!” An awkward silence fills the room. Suddenly, your cousin starts talking about the upcoming playoff game, and others rush in, eager to change the subject to anything else.
Okay, so maybe you’ve never had a scene like that play out in your family, but you can picture it fairly well, right? There’s a decent chance that you’ve seen a variation of that scene in movies and TV shows.
One of my pet theories is that people are just as prejudiced now compared to any other age. It’s just that the things you can say in polite company vary from era to era. But, just like in any other era, there will always be people who are more willing to say what’s on their mind, with less concern of any potential consequences.
These people are generally in middle age or older, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think a lot of what these people have in common is that they’ve reached a point in their lives where they’ve internalized one very famous piece of advice.
Just Be Yourself
We’ve all heard of it in the context of dating, interviewing, or just any activity in which you want to make an impression on another person. This is usually in the context of an older, more learned guru giving advice to a younger inexperienced person who’s generally a ball of anxiety and insecurity.
The thing is, it takes a lot of confidence to just be yourself. Confidence that, in many situations, is frequently lacking. It’s very hard to be yourself when you feel intimidated, anxious, insecure, afraid, and you’re in a position where you feel like you have something to lose and you think you can mitigate that by being something other than what you are right now.
Looking back on my own life, there were a number of things that I did in order to fit in, or be seen as high status, or to stand out in some positive way that I wouldn’t have done had I not been trying to impress other people. I’m sure there’s countless more things that I did without even realizing it. It wasn’t until my late 20s and early 30s that I truly became comfortable in my own skin and lived for myself rather than some image I wanted to project to other people.
Ironically, as I started to do that, I noticed that I became more attractive to other people. I made more friends, gained more respect from coworkers, and was generally well liked by most people I had regular contact with. Learning to just be myself created a sort of confidence and charisma that other people recognized and gravitated towards.
People can smell desperation and phoniness from a mile away. They can also see confidence. And this happens in every type of social interaction, not just your personal or professional life. Increasingly, people are using confidence not just to sell themselves to other people, but to sell products and ideas.
Bread and Circuses
We see this all the time in public life. Contemporary politics has devolved almost entirely to telling the median voter what they want to hear at the exact moment in time they want to hear it in the most appealing way possible. Nowadays, the most appealing way is to be confident.
Regardless of your politics or personal feelings on Donald Trump, there is one thing you have to admit about him: he is one exceptionally confident motherfucker. He exudes utter confidence in the moment, regardless of what he’s saying and regardless of whether or not it’s in direct contradiction of what he said previously. That takes balls.
Fundamentally, people admire and are attracted by balls, regardless of what you’re being ballsy about. As the saying goes, game respect game, whether you see it in an ally or an adversary. This is precisely why his supporters love him and why his detractors are so maddeningly dumbfounded. His opponents are constantly thinking to themselves “he can’t keep getting away with this!” while his supporters are thinking “fuck yeah, he’s getting away with this!”
Confidence is attractive. And we look for it instinctually in our politicians. A common refrain in politics is that the worst thing a politician can be is inauthentic. Because why would a politician be inauthentic? Well, just like a nervous guy on a first date, inauthenticity happens when you want something and you’re not sure you can get it by being yourself. Inauthenticity is the twin brother of desperation, and it’s something that voters can smell just as well as a woman can on a first date.
The politician who tries a bit too hard to please everybody, who constantly changes up their demeanor and their rhetoric depending on the crowd they’re trying to win over, frequently lose to the politicians who demonstrate confidence and authenticity. At its most fundamental, an election is simply an official popularity contest. And confidence is always popular.
Don’t Be a One Trick Pony
Of course, confidence alone is not enough to win friends and influence people. The homeless guy on the street confidently shouting about how the squirrels are conspiring against humanity is not going to be taken seriously. You need to pair confidence to at least one other element to make a positive impression.
Each new positive element you can mix in with confidence will compound your ability to attract and influence people. Confidence plus power is a classic, extremely seductive, combination. Add in intelligence, compassion, and wit? Stop it, you’ve basically created a person that everybody wants to be around.
Every additional element you can add to confidence sends a signal to other people that there is a good reason you’re confident. It’s confirmation that you are right to be confident. The reason why confidence is attractive is because it is an indicator of some other kind of positive trait that a person has. That’s why we don’t take homeless guy’s confident rants seriously. But a well dressed, well spoken man in a suit will command attention everywhere he goes.
I’m particularly attuned to the stereotype of the intelligent, but nerdy and unconfident Asian guy. My favorite scene in an otherwise forgettable movie involves a clever inversion of that trope. The character’s aside to the camera turns him from an exploited nerd to a confidence man, in on the game. From meek to sleek.
Do the Work and Earn It
I mentioned that I didn’t really feel comfortable in my own skin until my late 20s and 30s. But that wasn’t some coincidence. What happened was a realization that I had done very well in life. I had graduated from a very good college (Go Jackets!), gotten a good, high paying job that I’m good at, developed a number of fulfilling and fun hobbies, and gotten through enough social interactions to develop proficiency at communicating with other people.
Each additional connection with someone new became vastly less significant. The stakes were lower, so I became more comfortable. The more comfortable I came, the more confident I was. The more confident I was, the more people liked me. It was a virtuous cycle that had reached its culmination: I had fully developed my personality and identity and became secure and satisfied with who I was. I had earned my confidence and was finally at a point where I could accept it.
Now, I’m not saying that you have to graduate from a good college, get a good job, and have interesting and fulfilling hobbies and pursuits in order to be confident. But in order to have earned confidence, you have to be good at something and then realize that you’re good at it. Once you have earned confidence, it’s a solid foundation that is very hard to break down. Oftentimes, you’ll find that it radiates out into other parts of your life.
The Confidence to Con
All of this is to say that our society suffers, paradoxically, from both an overabundance and a severe shortage of confidence.
Even before the pandemic, people have grown increasingly anxious. Then the pandemic happened, which poured gasoline on the fire. A record high portion of the population are feeling intense stress and anxiety and are taking medication for it. Anxiety is literally the opposite of confidence. So we have a record share of the population with a shortage of confidence, either about themselves or society at large.
Confidence is attractive. It is even more attractive among those lacking confidence. Because more and more people in this country are anxious, it has created a record demand of confidence. And people are getting it wherever they can find it.
Social media is full of cheery, confident influencers pushing this message or that product. Politics is full of people telling you with complete confidence that the reason you’re unhappy is because people you don’t like are ruining your country. TV is full of well coiffed, well spoken people confidently saying anything that they think will help them acquire and retain viewers. So many people have become confident talking heads. And an anxious society is buying what they’re selling.
Earlier in this article, I said how confidence is attractive because it’s an indicator of some other positive trait. But oftentimes those positive traits take a lot of time to develop. The infinitely easier thing to do is to simply project confidence and hope that you have enough of something else to have other people take you seriously.
We’ve become a nation of con artists and marks. The person most emblematic of this phenomenon is George Santos, who has lied about nearly every facet of his life and was successfully elected to Congress. He lied about his job, his identity, his accomplishments, but people so desperately wanted to believe what he was selling that his lies were taken at face value. He faked it until he made it into the US Capitol.
George Santos had a superabundance of unearned confidence. He carried himself like a person who had a wealth of earned confidence and was able to convince enough people that he was the real deal, until it all came crashing down on him.
It’s a Trick, a Shadow on the Wall
Ultimately, confidence is merely a signal that we send to other people. It’s not a substitute for the things that it actually represents: experience, competence, usefulness, wisdom, accomplishment, etc. But it takes a much longer time for people to discern those things about an individual.
I’ve repeatedly mentioned that confidence is attractive, but it isn’t the actual thing that people are attracted to. A confident fraudster can be extremely attractive initially, but once people see through the façade and realize there’s nothing there, the attraction is gone. Conversely, an extremely talented person can fail to evince confidence to others, but once they are able to showcase their talent, their attractiveness can go from 0 to 100 extremely quickly.
I’ve come across so many stories about women who were not initially attracted to their partners, but they had spent enough time with them (while dating, or as friends, or colleagues, etc) for them to demonstrate the actual values that confidence is supposed to indicate that they became irresistibly attracted to their partner thereafter (my favorite example was a woman who was feeling very ambivalent about the guy she was dating until she had witnessed him as a dungeon master for his group of friends and saw him demonstrate authority, charm, intelligence, and wit in the course of their D&D session).
We can all be fooled by an outwardly confident person. But we eventually learn that, at the end of the day, confidence must be earned, and we’re actually attracted to the things that earn confidence, not confidence itself.