Hey, confidence is a broad topic made up of a lot of skills, habits and forces. Think of it as an ecosystem of parts... To speak simply, it comes and goes. Like waves. No one is 100% confident all the time. You're 'secure' around people you hang out with because you're comfortable around them the same with the area you focus on. That's not confidence. Confidence is elusive and reacts well with the unknown. You cannot play safe with confidence. You have to go outside the barriers and push limits further than you can imagine. No one can guarantee confidence, but you, its a road of bumps and bruises. Hit the gym, work on your appearance, take daily risks and expand your knowledge, you'll feel better about yourself to harness the power and responsibility that comes with confidence. Which most don't. Most people fake it to make it. This doesn't work. It's like building a robust program. Strong code, strong functionality, Great User Interface. You got a hit. Fight for something in your life. That's a huge one, that's where passion lives.
Check out a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Those are the 13 skills to master to become confident. Real World Experience that you can use immediately. Books on Leadership is another great resource.
Think and Grow Rich is a classic and I'd also recommend reading it. But it's less about Confidence and more centrally about Drive. What makes this a good recommendation though is that Drive, in my experience, renders Confidence essentially moot. If you're sufficiently driven, you won't let low confidence or low self-esteem get in the way of getting what you want/winning. But that said, Drive doesn't help you be more successful/participatory in a team meeting.
I think Drive and Confidence are mutually exclusive. Being confident without drive is being smug and complacent. Being driven without confidence teeders on the line of reckless arrogance Think and Grow Rich is for people who have lost all hope. It was written in the Depression era. The secret ingredient, that he doesn't refer to that all the 13 principles add up to, in my opinion, is Confidence. Confidence to save money, Confidence in creating desire in yourself. Even people who have lost their limbs and continue to be self-sufficient, it's confidence. Check out a book called StartUp Leadership by Derek Lidow, Drive doesn't always have to be Forward and Determined.. It's more of Letting your actions of taking a project or helping a project being the best it can be. Team Drive is extremely powerful. Hence importance of Culture in organizations... Where in Canada are you from? I'm From Calgary,AB
Interesting perspective. It would be interesting to try to understand which of our biases led us both to each of our conclusions. I really felt/feel strongly that the book was about Drive.. but anyway, that's not exactly a discussion to have on HN haha.
To answer your question, I'm originally from Toronto but living in Montreal now. You should consider moving out here :) (I would say that to anyone from Calgary haha)
I loved the part when he mentioned money, sex and social status as distractions...This is such a claustrophobic way of thinking about the stereotypical hacker.
FWIW, one of the most commonly believed things about Japan (domestically and internationally) that I believe is dangerously false is some variant of "Japan is not good at coming up with original ideas. It is good at perfecting ideas made elsewhere." There exist fields/time periods/etc where Japan has clear sustained leadership in innovation, just as there exist fields/time periods/etc where the same is true of the US.
"CRUD web applications between 2004 and 2014" has not been a particularly great example of Japanese technology leadership. Videogames in the 80s/90s/2000s or "Every mobile music device prior to the iPod" or "Robots, 1970 through present, excluding drones 2010-2014" or "Cell phones considered as hardware artifacts, prior to the iPhone turning them into software platforms" are all good examples.
>FWIW, one of the most commonly believed things about Japan (domestically and internationally) that I believe is dangerously false is some variant of "Japan is not good at coming up with original ideas. It is good at perfecting ideas made elsewhere."
Did anyone ever really believe that? When a company is new to a market or behind the market leader they tend to copy the leader and add their own small innovations. That's what the Japanese did in the '70s and '80s. When they took the lead in an industry they were the ones doing the innovation, for the most part.
I remember the "Japan is going to take over the world!" days. American companies (and workers) were fond of saying the Japanese never had an original idea, but even then it was obviously sour grapes from incumbents facing determined competition.
You hear the same thing about China today, and it's just as wrong.
It was common in the 80s and 90s when JIT and other efficiency ideas were actually exported from America to Japan, when unions ruled American automakers. As history shows, the Japanese took this margin and crushed American carmakers for decades; the pendulum is only recently swinging back (and that's with government intervention to avoid US automaker collapse due to their own incompetence).
It's not true, but that was a big driver of the sentiment.
