Cockiness, arrogance and smugness are a few of the negative character traits associated with over-confidence.
Why do people act like this to the detriment to their social and professional life? Nobody likes a braggart, but they are so common.
And, turns out, it’s a trait that is predominantly male. Makes sense – when you think about it – being that these behaviors are very much testosterone driven…
It’s a wonderful hormone, giving you courageous emotions, energy, drive…
It gives you assurance – makes you feel like you’re good enough take over the whole entire world. It assures that you are just as good or better as that other guy. It assures you victory, so that you will make an attempt at just about anything.
But it can make you quite irrational.
It’s no wonder the “hold my beer” meme is of a man.
Sometimes, in a testosterone-fueled delusion we may forget that the world is going to fight back and win sometimes. Somebody it will beat you. You will fail.
When we fail to be humble, and we jump into things like business ventures, or athletic endeavors before contemplating our preparedness it leads to failure, and then self-doubt. In which we will need to cope with by being even more over-confident – more brash and thoughtless. A vicious cycle.
How do we avoid being over-confident and have a more measured and precise way of doing things?
Reflection Before Action
It is especially important that we, as testosterone-filled beings, constantly reflect upon their weaknesses and counteract that insane, overconfident, and impulsive nature.
Before we can excel in anything we need to recognize where we currently are. We need to be honest and humble so we can look carefully and examine what needs to be done.
I see over-confident men downplay those who are excellent so that you can continue to live in their delusions. They make excuses and stories when they fail and belittle those who are further than them so they can appear to be closer in status.
This is not the right way to approach anything we want to be good at.
In these delusions we can continue to not act right – to take the path that is expedient, and that gives us lesser results.
People like this are smug as shit, too. It’s true, they can rule over their tiny worlds with that testosterone-driven aggression. Maybe they gather a few others to join them. But they’ll never be universally loved in their niche… or even in their community.
Maybe people will put up with being around them. But there are often too many liabilities – too many actions that end in chaos and disaster for them to be truly attractive.
Arrogant and smug behavior ensures that competence is out of their reach.
These men are the haters of the world. Those who want to feel better before they get better… and they thought the best way to do this was to create an imaginary world where they actually are.
A world where people who got rich were just lucky. Where critics are just people who have bad taste. Where strength and fortitude are virtues that are ignored.
They can thrive in this world – they have something rationalized… victorious to hang onto. They can feel an illusion of confidence. These are all but ego-driven delusions.
And to do this is not without sacrifice – it’s an immersion into an emotional-landscape that is full of resentment and vengeance… and eventual disaster.
Reflection
If a man immerses himself further into the delusion, he will continue to be over-confident… fail to get better… and he’ll take the whole world down with him.
To think there has to be a critical-mass of sorts, where we have enough people that are living in delusional stories about themselves in relation to the world to make it so that nothing progresses and nothing good gets made again.
This is why it is important to constantly reflect upon the excuses we make to ourselves when we feel pain, regret, and depression.
We have to be able to make sure that we are not creating rationalizations to only serve to make ourselves feel better. Doing so means we avoid the truth and fail to actually get better.
It’s very easy to call a professional athlete a cheater because he does steroids because it makes it seem like we have something over him. The pain of jealousy and envy creates a judgment of character. Of course we’re not as good as him, we’re not cheaters!
Having a bruised ego, we may spend hours upon days interacting with people like this. Constantly painting negative narratives for others and ultimately for ourselves. Feeling overconfident about ourselves by lowering how we perceive others.
Instead, we should put more focus upon, not how we are better than others, but what we are missing. Upon where we are weak and where our future-selves can have something over this weakness.
We need to constantly look at what needs to be optimized. What should we spend more time doing? What should we spend less time doing? Who should we talk to? Who should we stop talking to?
How should we act so that we can do things better?
Before entering into any arena, overconfident and full of testosterone-driven motivation, we need to get into this reflective zone… So that, eventually, we can take proper:
Action
After making it a practice to constantly reflect on our thoughts, and optimizing them for effectiveness instead of rationalization, we can take those actions that will make our life better.
An aspiring musician will feel jealous when he sees someone whose made it. It’s inevitable. What he does with that emotion will determine how close he gets to reaching his goals.
Overconfidence in his abilities will cause him to blame his lack of success on luck. Overconfidence in genuineness will cause him to criticize other’s taste.
Instead, he should be seeing how he can fine-tune his musical knowledge. Ask himself if he can even get to the level of those he aspires to be, and what it will take to get there.
Is he avoiding practice? Is he avoiding the fact that he eats food that ruins his ability to focus? Perhaps he is lacking knowledge of pop culture chord progressions?
Only he can know what to ask himself. Only he can discover which actions to take. What to fix. But he must fix them if he is to improve and move closer to his goal. He must fix them so that his community will respect him and, more importantly, he can respect himself.
If he lets feelings of insecurity motivate him into action, like practice, or training and studying, he will eventually make everything around him better.
If he rationalizes them away, with feelings overconfidence, or vice, things will get worse and he will continue to exhibit behaviors that annoy or even anger others – until there is nothing left.
The choice is his to make.
Conclusion:
Ironically, over-confidence is a sort of defense mechanism we have against feeling inferior… and it makes it so that we end up being inferior.
Over-confidence can lead to prioritizing the wrong activities – neglecting important ones. So used to using irrational coping behaviors to soothe our pain of failure that we don’t have a clue as to what we actually need to do.
Instead of rationalizing away these negative emotions with arrogance and smugness, and displaying cockiness towards others, we need to constantly reflect upon why they are happening and be humbled about what they mean.
Only then, can we move on to proper action and true confidence.