Liu Jin, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business2024-02-18
On the first working day of the year of Jiachen, the start of work is auspicious!
Today I would like to share with you an article about self-confidence. Roosevelt once said, "If you believe you can do it, you're half the battle." In the face of the rapidly evolving business world, self-confidence is a very critical force in dealing with uncertainty; It is also a positive psychological cue that supports you through the hardships and moving firmly towards your goal.
How to build rational self-confidence? I hope today's article by Professor Liu Jin can help you meet the challenges of the new year with confidence.
Author |Liu Jin.
* |The Economic Observer
Liu Jin. Professor of Accounting and Finance, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.
Director of the Investment Research Center.
Self-confidence is a kind of strength, and we can call it "self-confidence".
Self-confidence is very important if we want to do things well. Lack of self-confidence poses two problems:
One is that we lose a lot of opportunities because we don't dare to try;
The second is that even if we try, we are full of self-doubt when doing things, so we can't concentrate and avoid distractions, and in the end it is difficult to achieve the best state.
When an athlete plays football, the best chance to get in is to take a penalty, but if you are not confident, even a king like Messi can kick the ball away.
Alibaba's Peng Lei recalled that in the early days of Alibaba's business, Ma Yun went out to raise funds 34 times, but was rejected. But he came back and said that he had deceived the team by rejecting thirty-four investors who wanted to invest money in Alibaba, in order to bring confidence to the team. Imagine if the team knew that so many attempts were all failures, would Ali's eighteen Arhats be less?
Zhuge Liang in the Three Kingdoms sang the empty city plan, and he could scare Sima Yi so much that he turned around and ran away alone, what kind of confidence is it? Yue Fei of the Song Dynasty was a fledgling and led troops to fight, and he could break 100,000 from 800 to 100,000, what kind of self-confidence was he had?
Now it seems that these self-confidence levels are indeed too explosive, so there is a high probability that they are not real, and they should belong to fiction in literature. But it is enough to see how many people later thought that self-confidence played an important role in the competition.
The key to self-confidence is that the world is full of uncertainty, and in order to deal with uncertainty, everyone must master a system of thinking that can be used to process information, make judgments, and find certainty in uncertainty.
Self-confidence is these certainties in cognition.
Self-confidence can be about one's own perception or its knowledge of the world.
Ma Yunneng has been rejected 34 times and has not given up, first, he believes that the Internet and e-commerce are the future, which is a judgment of the world; The second is to determine that Ali's eighteen Arhats are the team that can win in the Internet wave, which is a judgment of oneself.
Is all the certainty in cognition self-confidence? Not really. In addition to self-confidence, certainty in cognition can also be a manifestation of stubbornness.
So, how do you tell the difference between stubbornness and self-confidence? Obviously, stubbornness is a negative trait and a disadvantage, and self-confidence is a positive trait and an advantage. Stubbornness is the unconditional paranoia of a certain cognition, and self-confidence is the trust in one's own cognitive system based on practice.
The environment changes, the conditions change, and for the stubborn person, the perception will remain the same; But for confident people, this change can lead to a realignment of cognition. So stubbornness is an irrational behavior, while self-confidence is rational, scientific, and a deep trust in one's own absolute and relative abilities.
For these reasons, stubbornness does not stand the test of practice, and often leads to setbacks and failures; Self-confidence can make people perform at their peak level, and in the long run, it can lead to more success and success.
Self-confidence is rational, and rational thinking has two foundations:
One is the correctness of logic;
The second is the consistency of theory and data (empirical correctness).
Self-confidence must meet both of these conditions.
Stubbornness can be due to the lack of logic in cognition, or it can be the absence of empirical correctness, or even the absence of both.
A large number of experiments in modern psychology have found that human rationality has boundaries, is limited rationality, and has many irrational aspects, so it is not surprising that there is one more "stubborn" irrational behavior.
Stubbornness has a lot to do with the resilience of the human brain's thinking. People with low thinking flexibility will admit death once they form cognition, and it is difficult to make adjustments. Therefore, the growth experience of these people is very important, and if they are profoundly influenced by certain ideas during the critical period of cognitive formation, it is easy to form a fixed thinking pattern that cannot be changed.
People with high flexibility of thinking will be full of curiosity about new thinking and new models, and often compare and contrast practical experience with these thinking and patterns, so they will continue to produce cognitive breakthroughs and adjustments, so as to achieve dynamic rationality.
It's not easy to gain self-confidence. The most common method used by people is to be well prepared, to do the work carefully, and to make it home. Be vigorous, be prepared for danger in times of peace, and take precautions.
This way of improving the fundamentals is certainly the most important: the most important active factors for Messi to be the king of the ball are high ball skills, good health, and hard training; The internal factors of Jack Ma's entrepreneurial success include strategy, execution, team, culture, and a series of things that can be learned through hard work.
In addition to getting the fundamentals right, psychological adjustments are equally important and get twice the result with half the effort. Psychologically, what we have to do is to overcome constant self-doubt about ourselves, but at the same time not go to extremes and enter into stubbornness.
Getting as close to rationality as possible is the only way for us to gain self-confidence, but it is very difficult to deal with uncertainty rationally.
On the one hand, if we are overly cautious and stay away from risks at all times, we cannot gain a tolerance for a certain amount of uncertainty, so we immediately lose confidence as soon as risks arise.
On the other hand, if we are overly radical and take too big risks, when something extremely negative happens in reality, causing us significant economic, physical or mental losses, we often can't bear it, and then completely abandon rationality and choose a set of thinking patterns that make us comfortable.
For example, some people will find a religion and outsource their self-confidence to an ethereal god; Some people will find a person, outsource their confidence to this person, and let him help them make all the decisions; Some people will find an organization and pay their self-trust to this organization ......When a person loses confidence completely, he or she will either not be able to make any judgment, or he will easily accept judgments that are not supported by logic or empirical evidence.
So to gain self-confidence, we need to learn to take "controllable risks".
"Controllable" does not mean that there is none, so we do not lose the opportunity to improve in the workout. "Controllable" also means that if the risk causes us real-world losses, those losses should be within the limits of what we can tolerate.
After we have experienced a series of mental pressures to resist risks, and endured losses and failures brought about by a series of risks, our spirit will naturally become stronger and will naturally produce greater self-confidence. Nietzsche said, "If you can't kill me, make me stronger", that's the truth.
An important aspect of self-confidence is the sense of control over risk, and the core way to improve that sense of control is to use conservatism in practice to increase the probability of success.
This conservatism has two aspects:
On the one hand, they deliberately lower their estimation of their absolute and relative abilities. By underestimating some of our absolute abilities, we will be more cautious in what we do, so we will be much less likely to suffer failures and negative shocks.
While this practice will cost you some opportunities, it is possible to maintain self-confidence based on reason. For an airplane to be able to fly, one engine and one electronic system are sufficient, but once an accident occurs, the plane will be destroyed and people will die. So we had to install two engines, two electronic systems, and if one broke down, we could use the other. So that we can be confident when we fly the plane.
In competition with competitors, underestimating one's own relative ability, or overestimating the relative ability of one's competitors, can enhance self-confidence. This conscious underestimation of one's own relative abilities allows oneself to avoid uncertain competition. For example, in a war with the enemy, needless to say, the enemy is strong and we are weak, and it is definitely necessary to preserve our strength and wait for the opportunity to move;
Conservatism can also avoid uncertain competition when the ability of friend or foe is equal. Only when our side has a great advantage, do you join the battle, so of course you will be full of confidence, and you will win more and lose less.
It is rational to underestimate one's self-confidence in doing things and in competition; Overestimating oneself brings the opposite effect, blind confidence, and a mistake in judgment.
How much should I underestimate my abilities? It depends on the importance of the matter and how much self-confidence plays a role. If things are important, human lives are at stake, and nothing can go wrong, we should underestimate it to a great extent to maintain a "margin of safety" to be foolproof.
If the matter is not very important and the role of self-confidence is not very large, we can underestimate the degree of very little, and try to achieve unbiased estimates.
Another approach to conservatism is to lower one's own expectations of the outcome. The degree of psychological success of people is not purely determined by the result, the better the result, the more successful; Rather, it is determined by the difference between the outcome and the expected value.
With a good outcome, if the expectations are higher, it may feel like a failure; With a bad result, if the expectations are low, it feels like a success. So, the higher the expectation, the greater the psychological risk, and the less confident we will be. Conversely, if we can lower our expectations when doing things, we will have a greater probability of success, and the magnitude of success will be greater, so we will naturally be more confident. Because we're more confident, we're able to perform at our peak and we're more likely to get better results.
Messi kicks the ball like a man, kicks a free kick with great skill, can go around the human wall, avoid the goalkeeper, and kick from twenty or thirty meters away to a small space half and a half meters square to enter the goal. But when a penalty kick is taken, it is so close, there is no wall, there is such a big gap, it is often kicked off or saved. Why? It's expectations that play a role. It's hard to take a free-kick and the expectation of a goal is low, so there's no pressure when you play, and the better the technique, the higher the probability of scoring.
When taking a penalty, if Messi thinks it is too simple and must be scored 100 per cent, what awaits him will only be failure, because there is always the possibility of not scoring the goal. Under this kind of pressure, even the king of the ball will feel unconfident, people will hesitate, their movements will be deformed, and they will be more likely to be defended by the goalkeeper. An ordinary player who is not well-known does not have such a psychological burden, but can achieve a high hit rate.
Imagine Jack Ma back then, if his expectation for obtaining financing was to meet a total of ten investors, he would have given up a long time ago. But if his expectation is to see 100, 200, and be rejected by 34 investors, it is not a fatal thing. He can still hold on with confidence.
It is not difficult to see that if we follow this logic and keep the expectation to zero, we can achieve the greatest confidence and get the best results.
The ancients have long said that we must "do things for the sake of not fighting", because hard work but not pursuit is an important mental method to achieve things.