Oct
18
The Weakness Of Overconfidence
Filed Under Career, Entrepreneurship, Health, Money, Relationships, The Bigger Perspective | 34 Comments
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The Weakness Of Overconfidence
We’ve all experienced it before. You take a test that you think is ridiculously easy, so you put it off until the last minute, and end up getting a B. You get into a relationship and start taking your significant other for granted, resulting in a breakup. You invest in a stock thinking there’s no way it’ll go down, and lose a big chunk of your money. It’s just so easy to make these mistakes, even after years of training to guard against it, as I recently experienced in A Negative Score On A Homework Reveals Some Interesting Things About Myself.
Why Is Overconfidence Bad?
Confidence is a great thing. It allows us to get past our doubts and take action. So why is slightly too much of it so bad?
Well, let’s first take a look at why we get overconfident. Generally, if something requires the full extent of our abilities, we find it challenging and need to use all our resources to overcome the problem. That’s a really hard thing to do, and we generally feel not too confident about it. When things are at about our ability level but don’t strain it too much, we find it interesting and maybe even a bit relaxing. In this case, we can feel confident about our ability to accomplish the task, but know that we still have to work decently hard. However, when the task is extremely easy or below our abilities, we may often feel that it’s barely worth our time. That is where the danger of overconfidence becomes a menacing threat. Since it’s so simple, why not just put it off? You can just finish it with minimal effort later… right?
Well, kind of. The key thing to realize is that the task is only easy assuming you use your resources and ability fully. You might think walking across the street is an easy task, but what if I tell you it has to be done within 5 seconds and you can only use one foot? It suddenly becomes a much harder task!
That is exactly what happens when you start to procrastinate on these easy tasks! By putting it off, the amount of time you have to finish is decreased, increasing its difficulty level. By not concentrating on it fully, the chance of making a mistake goes up significantly. It’s like only having half your brain available to you, making the problem harder. Additionally, resources that were available may no longer be available to you later. For example, if your task was to travel from NY to CA on the 4pm flight, it’s pretty easy to do at 3:00pm. It becomes a much, much harder task at 4:01pm.
Let’s look at some examples of common areas of overconfidence, to see if we can avoid these problems.
Overconfidence At School/Work
You start taking a class or start a project that is so easy you can laugh. It’s practically child’s play. You already know what to do and how to do it. A few weeks pass. The old work starts piling up, as you scramble to do them. Suddenly, it’s not so easy anymore, as there is a time constraint on finishing all that “easy” work. Additionally, the project/class has been getting harder throughout the last few weeks, and now the material requires your full attention. Instead of spending the few hours you needed on this class/project, you’d spent tens of hours on some other harder class/project.
An extra 0.6 on your GPA is the same whether it’s in a hard class or easy class, but that extra 0.6 may only take 2 extra hours a week in the easy class while it may take an extra 15 hours a week in the hard class. Wouldn’t it be such a shame to not get those points from the easy class?
Overconfidence In Relationships
You start out as two happy people, considerate of each other’s feelings and making an effort to connect. Then, as the relationship progresses, you forget the reason it formed in the first place. You figure, “Oh good, the other person’s going to be with me forever, so there’s no need to do the nice things I use to do anymore”. You stop providing value to the other person which was the reason for the relationship in the first place. What happens then?
The relationship starts to rot. The two people start to disrespect each other, and soon, they part their ways.
I speak of this from personal experience. I had a friend who I shared ideas with for a few years. As we communicated differently, mutual respect allowed us to overcome some behavior barriers and learn from each other. One day, however, he indicated to me that he longer wanted to talk in my frame of reference because he liked his better. It wasn’t long before that resulted in communication where I didn’t feel understood. Soon, I end all communication for exactly that reason.
Relationships are about an exchange of value. No matter what the agreement is, when that exchange stops, the other person can and probably will leave.
Overconfidence In Poker
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve experienced this. You sit down at a table thinking that you’re better than everybody. As a result, you’re not thinking about what other people have or why they’re doing what they’re doing. You shove globs of money into the middle, being overaggressive, because you think you are better. Soon enough, most of your money is gone.
Another common variation of this is that you have been lucky or skilled and have won a large stack of chips. However, all that winning has made you very “loose” and you start taking unnecessary risks because you can’t seem to lose. Before long, your huge stack of winnings dwindles to just a smallish stack of winnings. Hey, that’s even worse than losing your small stack from the first scenario (even though you won a little bit of money, you still lost more money)!
My friends and I refer to this phenomenon as “win tilt”.
Overconfidence In Investing
“That stock can’t go down! Warren Buffet bought it!” Or maybe you did two weeks of research and learned about all sorts of technical analysis tricks. Of course it has to go up right? Um right… down it goes. This isn’t exactly new to anyone who has ever invested in the stock market. Yes, stocks go down. They can always go down.
How To Overcome Overconfidence
Remember that when things are easy, you are expected to win. From an emotional perspective, when things are hard, it’s okay to lose. No one makes fun of you for not being able to solve a hard problem. However, how does it feel to take a 1st grade arithmetic test and get a 90? Yeah, you’ll probably get at least a couple of chuckles from your friends!
Logically, working extra hard on the easy tasks is also very important. If you are hired for a job, there are assumptions about what you know or what you need to do. If you demonstrate that you don’t actually have a fundamental grasp of the most basic concepts (even if you actually do), it could have severe negative effects with your boss, much more so than being unable to solve the latest hard problem.
Therefore, it is even more important to work hard when the task is easy than when the task is hard!
Just be extra careful when the task is easy to guard against overconfidence. After all, working through an easy problem 6 times probably takes less time than working through the hard problem once. That and they’re generally worth about the same!
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Very interesting perspective – not a view usually discussed.
Confidence is a great thing. It allows us to get past our doubts and take action. I speak of this from personal experience. I had a friend who I shared ideas with for a few years. As we communicated differently, mutual respect allowed us to overcome some behavior barriers and learn from each other. One day, however, he indicated to me that he longer wanted to talk in my frame of reference because he liked his better. It wasn’t long before that resulted in communication where I didn’t feel understood. Soon, I end all communication for exactly that reason. The article is very nice and it is useful to upcoming generation
thank u
thank you very much sir…this was extremely helpful…sorry unable to make donation but im obliged with this..
Interesting read indeed. It was hard to accept at first, but now I have seen all the symtoms and will make an effort to change my attitude towards people and tasks which I think have lesser strength than me. And these has been a journey of finding my truth.
Thank you, ngiyabonga..!
I am a substance abuse counselor and I dea with my clients being overconfident on a daily basis. Yet these same clients also relapse frequently. Their overconfidence is astounding. I plan on doing a group on overconfidence very soon.
I have always been looking for the reasons why I most of the time perform average in simple tasks and achieve well in hard ones, but could not find a good answer. I have always done good in what I thought was hard for me; but if it is an easy task, I either get overconfident and ignore important details or over-magnify it in my eyes and look for far-fetched solutions when the good one is just in front my eyes. After reading this article and several bitter failures, especially with people, I realized that I was simply overconfident and that almost always lead me to bad surprises and disappointments. I know now that I have a counter-productive overconfidence that I shall work on even if this does not seem to be an easy task.
I had average grades in easy classes compared to hard classes of which I got high grades. Now I know that this was brought by overconfidence.
Overconfidence is good to me, because I’m going forward without looking behind, I find excuses to runway in order to meet more men and have many sex experiences, also seduce many men older than me, I like that very much. I think that previous men are after me, even if they say that I’m running alone and NOBODY IS FOLLOWING ME. But I think it’s wrong, because I’m sure that they ALL WANT ME.
i was very upset on the day of my p.t.m because with many praises i also got a remark from my english teacher that i should try to keep my confidence in a limit . now when i have realized what to do i feel that i can keep the words of my teacher
Thank you so much sir, am most grateful.
hey , my husband is overconfident and that’s hurting me, he always thinks that he can absolutely do everything because he is soo strong soo clever and soo and sooo, I am not comfortable with such person, I start to be nervous everytime he starts talking about himself in front of people, that’s not good, let people talk about you, please how can I tell him to stop that in a good way
I just wanted to say that I have been in an argument with a friend of mine for three years over the subject of confidence vs. overconfidence. He says overconfidence is better, but I say confidence is. This article is AMAZING because it shows exactly what I am trying to say to convince him. Thank you for it. i hope some day to convince him that I am right and show confidence is better!!!
This article is amazing. Thank you so much. My friend, however, is too overconfident to even read this article. He thinks it is a waste of his time. Hopefully we can reach out to all of the overconfident people and make the world a better place
Excellent article.Amazing reality ant surprising facts.I’m a teacher by profession and can help students with this “syndrome” after reading this!
Great article. I am dealing with a high school sophomore student who just received Bs in 2 critical tests in math. I had to point out that knowing everything is not enough, being able to demonstrate what he knows this is more important. To ensure that he is able to demonstrate this over and over again – practice and perseverance is equally important. He kind of had an “aha” moment – which was good and am hoping he will follow through on this.
it is really valuable piece of information as per from because u i suffer from ths overconfidence thanks a lot to the person who wrote this as i now would definitely change myself
It helps me a lot. Due to overconfident,i have lost almost an year.i.e. I changed my profession in to another way.lost so much money,time..i can’t express the loss.i think this all(overconfidence)come through my lonely life..
Many thanks for this perspective. I think it should be discussed more. I suffer from overconfidence too resulting in: being rude, disrespectful, poor interpersonal skills and generally burning bridges with people. Shame really – but hopefully with ideas like this such overconfidence can be dampened.
Hi. I’m a reporter for Women’s Health. We’re doing a story on overconfidence and I’d like to ask you a few questions. Please email at above address. Thanks so much.
Michelle Hamilton
Hello, very useful text. Keep it up!
Thank you for posting this article. I am at a darker time in my life right now, feeling so empty. And I just realized, that all along I have been overconfident as a person overall. Must be very annoying for people around me. If I may share, I think part of this over confidence is built because I have no fear of losing. I have no friends – nobody to criticize me; I own a small company – nobody to fire me (I am not wealthy though); I get compliments for my look (I’d been scouted to be a model many times when I was younger); and I think I’m smart, my iq is really high; Just reading this alone might have already turn everybody off. Now I’m going to see a psychologist to get some help. I’ve ruined my life enough, my head has gotten so big I let the man I love the most slipped away from my life.
Zoe,
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I was doing an essay on this topic. This article really helped me understand the term over confidence.
When you said “It’s like only having half your brain available to you, making the problem harder.” I wanted to correct you because we only use 10% of our so being able to use 50% of your brain would be making the problem easier.
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