How to be the Most Confident in the Room

what's up everybody mark manson here and back in june i asked you all to ask me any question you want that's right i said i'm gonna do an ask mark anything video it was amazing there was an outpour of questions dozens and dozens of people responded and there was a real theme to the questions a lot of people wanted to know about confidence and um yeah that was like three months ago and i didn't [ __ ] answer anything i guess you could say that i'm confident that you all would wait so here's the video you've been waiting for we're gonna talk about confidence we're gonna talk about how to be confident and uh how to not be a lazy shitty youtuber like this guy check it out [Music] all right the first question the most upvoted question kind of just sets the tone for the whole ama video somebody asked how do i be more confident here's kind of if you take away anything from this video here's like the main lesson here people think confidence is related to success not true confidence is related to your relationship with failure being confident doesn't mean you think you're gonna win all the time or you're gonna do things the best or you're gonna be [ __ ] great every second of every day being confident is understanding that you're not always gonna win that you're not always gonna be the best and that you're not always gonna be great every second of every day see when you see somebody who's like talking about how amazing they are how they're gonna win everything how like they're the best [ __ ] thing that's ever happened on the planet that's not confidence that's over compensation in fact the person who's saying those things feels a need to say those things because they feel so inconfident inside and they need to cover up those feelings of anxiety and insecurity on the other hand somebody who's actually confident is totally comfortable with the prospect of failure they have experience they've been around the block they understand like hey things don't always go your way but it's still worth trying anyway so confidence it's not the belief in success it's about the comfort with failure next question can you talk about all the benefits of all the emotions that we humans are unwilling to deal with or that we avoid in our daily lives yes yes i can talk about this i've written about this extensively i i recommend an article on my website titled [ __ ] your feelings go to markmanson.net slash [ __ ] dash your feelings i've got a very long article all about this goes into a lot of depth has a lot of psychological research but the summary for you here is that emotions are not good or bad like every emotion exists for a certain purpose like anxiety evolved to keep us safe from danger anger evolved to help us overcome obstacles or make changes sadness evolved to to help us appreciate the meaning of things that we cared about the emotions are never the problem it's the meaning that we attach to our emotions it's the fact that we decide that being anxious makes us a loser or being angry makes us irresponsible or dangerous there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these things and by the way i should i should note that this applies to positive emotions as well feeling joy is great like everybody loves to feel joy but if you start attaching meaning to your joy like yeah i'm feeling joy because i'm better than all these other [ __ ] people or yeah i'm feeling so much joy because my life is just like the best and everybody should be like me you know like that's when you start getting into trouble so the challenge the constant challenge is to embrace each emotion for what it is without attaching all the meaning to it without attaching all the judgment because it's just emotions are gonna happen some days you wake up and you just feel shitty and like nothing happened you just feel shitty and then some days you wake up like you feel great like everything just seems to go well you feel wonderful our natural reaction is to attach meaning and narratives to all these different feelings and that's dangerous that starts to get us into trouble we start wrapping our identity around how we're feeling we decide like oh i'm such a guilty person and i shouldn't feel guilty all the time man i have shame issues i should like go and get like three months of therapy to work it out like sometimes you just feel bad [ __ ] it [ __ ] your feelings next question is it better to be good at many things and possess different skills or should you not be a quote jack of all trades and simply focus on one thing this is a really good practical question and i think this is useful with the confidence conversation because a lot of confidence comes from experience a lot of the reasons we feel unconfident is simply because we have not experienced the situation much before and so the first argument for focusing on one thing for a long period of time is you simply develop confidence in that thing because you've had many many experiences of failures and setbacks in yada yada yada so i'm going to give this answer as short as possible the world today because of the internet because of how fast things scale to be really really good at one thing there is disproportionate rewards for that so like if you're in the 90th percentile at a skill you'll be rewarded but like being in the 99th percentile it's not 10 times more reward or 10 percent more reward it's like a thousand times more reward so just the way the world works right now that difference between being at 90 and 99 is a huge huge gap so that makes me want to say that it's you know find something and specialize and get really really really excellent at it but there's a caveat here research shows that generally people who become excellent at one thing they don't just do that thing they're also decent or good at a number of other things so like if you look at some of the top professional athletes they don't just play their sport like 12 hours a day every day they play other sports basketball players will play a lot of golf or top swimmers will run track for fun and like all these these different kind of related activities but that also kind of synergize with the one thing that they're excellent at there's a really good book by a guy named david epstein called range and he talks about this he talks about how excellence in any particular field it's not just doing that field for 10 000 hours it's it also requires being above average or knowing what you're doing in a few different related areas so yes do one thing extremely well build that confidence in one area but the way you become excellent the way you go from being like very good at something to being excellent at something is when you're able to cross-reference knowledge from a few different domains of life you know you can't just sit in your bedroom 16 hours a day practicing you know violin or whatever like you got to go play with an orchestra you got to play some jazz you gotta watch some movies try to write a score for a movie like get good at improvising you know it's like all these related skills that will feed back into your primary skill to get you to that that very top level next question what is one question that most people avoid asking themselves this is this is so easy this is so easy because because nobody asks themselves this very few people ask themselves this that question is what if i'm wrong how likely is it that i'm wrong especially on the internet nobody [ __ ] asks themself this nobody actually stops to say like hmm maybe this [ __ ] tweet i'm writing maybe i have no idea what i'm talking about nobody thinks about this and this is the funny thing is because i think this is one of the things that gets gets lost on the internet there's something about being in person let's say i'm arguing with somebody in person there's something about seeing their physical and emotional reaction to something that i say that kind of like just naturally makes me stop and think hmm maybe i'm the [ __ ] here whereas like you go online you you might as well just be like spouting something into the void right like it's you don't get that physical presence and kind of that emotional energy from interacting with somebody you can have the same argument online and you're just like man i am [ __ ] dunking on these idiots they are so [ __ ] stupid being online it allows that illusion to perpetuate and to bring it back to the theme of confidence i think there's something inherent about the mediums of interaction online that makes us overconfident i think also this is why podcasting has has unexpectedly become so huge i don't think anybody expected 10 years ago that podcast would be this popular and i think the reason is is because podcasts are the only medium online that you actually get that sense you can hear people's tone of voice you can you can get a sense for for their mood for their the sense of doubt when they say things or maybe they're being self-deprecating or maybe they're a little bit unconfident you know there you get that intangible quality of people saying things with podcasting or with youtube videos that makes that that question far more likely you know it's like what if i'm wrong how likely is it that i'm wrong what are the consequences of being wrong i think in the written form and in written social media things like facebook and twitter it's just it's a [ __ ] show guys it's just i can't do it i can't do it anymore next question do you have advice for someone who isn't happy in her first job yeah [ __ ] quit you're young go do something else next question if you assume that life is meaningless and there's no objective morality or good basically that there's no objective reason to do anything and no objective reason to give you or other subjective feelings credence how do you select goals well that got philosophical fast look i i talk about this a little bit my second book everything is [ __ ] nihilism can cut both ways you can you can have a nihilistic attitude and say well there's no reason to do anything so why do anything at all if nothing matters but you can cut the other way too you can say well if nothing means anything and why do anything because none of it matters why not do anything if it doesn't matter why not do it in a cosmic sense i'm a nihilist i don't believe there's some overarching meaning or purpose to the universe or all of existence i believe that meaning and purpose are something that are psychologically constructed within the human mind it's it's a psychological mechanism that we evolve because it's useful like humans need to feel like their actions are purposeful that that there's some sort of meaning attached to them that's fine part of our responsibility being human beings is that we need to find meaningful pursuits we need to find things that create that meaning for ourselves so it doesn't really make sense to me to say like if nothing means anything why you know why i have goals how do you set goals it's like no no you set goals because that's how you find meaning the goals are what create the meaning not the meaning doesn't create the goals so not only can you have goals without any sort of cosmic meeting you have to have goals because there's no cosmic meaning like you you have to find some pursuit that feels worthwhile for yourself and you know asking yourself what is that worthwhile thing it's incredibly hard because there is no objective right answer there is no you know with finality this is the most important thing to do forever and ever and nothing's ever going to change it there's just not and so for me the things that feel meaningful tend to derive from a few places one is you know what what gives me a sense of growth and becoming a better person what gives other people a sense of growth and becoming better people and uh what is something that is worth sacrificing for and i just focus on those things you know improve myself improve others improve the world find something to sacrifice that feels worthwhile and that generates that sense of meaning that's that's not [ __ ] easy and there's no like right answer at the end of the test and that's part of the joy of being human you know you never fully know if what you're doing is right or not you never know if you're [ __ ] up completely which is why confidence is based in the comfort of knowing that you may fail that all of this may be pointless that you wasted a bunch of time made a fool of yourself but at the end of the day you're still all right with it because it was worthwhile the sacrifice was worthwhile so i hope your sacrifices are worthwhile if you'd like you can sacrifice yourself by uh subscribing to the channel liking this video maybe adding a comment what do you find meaningful and purposeful in this life actually that's kind of heavy for a youtube comment so [ __ ] it you know just like and subscribe and uh maybe next time i won't wait three months to answer so until next time this is mark getting the [ __ ] out of here [Music]

Channel: Mark Manson

Views: 750,534

Keywords: confidence, markmanson, how to build self confidence ted talk, self esteem, self help, life purpose, self improvement, self development tips, life choices, markmanson.net, inspiration, negative thinking, mindfulness, wellbeing, happiness, carefree, sense of self, spiritual, zen, confidence meditation, confidence motivation, confidence hypnosis, confidence ocean alley, confidence affirmations, confidence sanctus real, confidence song, confidence interval, Mark manson

Id: juPtFTifgvM

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021