3 Minute Monday

Hi friend,

I’m back in Austin!

Had a great few weeks back in the UK but back out here now and locked in for a big few months to finish off 2022.

“You don’t become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.

Outwork your self doubt.” — Alex Hormozi

Hooooooo if that isn’t bang on the money.

I couldn’t have summarised my experience with confidence over the last 5 years any better.

There’s two questions that are useful to ask yourself around confidence:

1 Am I trying to be more confident than my competence level?

2 Am I more competent than my confidence level?

The first one happens early in your journey, the second one a little later.

The first challenge is relatively simple to fix – just complete more successful iterations of your pursuit.

Create a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.

If you have little proof that you can do a thing and you’re frustrated that you don’t have self-belief then you’re not asking for confidence, you’re asking for a fantasy.

Confidence without competence is delusion.

Depending on your predisposition to confidence, this might be 2 years or 5 years or a thousand training sessions.

Or 500 podcasts.

In my experience, confidence through competence takes about 2-3x longer to arrive than you think it should, but is much more robust when it arrives. Stay patient.

The second challenge is more subtle and comes about at least in part due to Imposter Adaptation.

Imposter Adaptation is the tendency for a lack of self-belief to persist even as you continue to disprove it with success in the real world.

No matter how many times you succeed, even though you were hugely unsure if you were capable of succeeding, you still don’t seem to arrive at a place of genuine faith in your own abilities.

Your confidence is yet to catch up to your competence.

Here’s the truth:

There are only so many times that you can disprove your own imposter syndrome in the real world and that imposter syndrome continue to persist before you admit that it’s got nothing to do with your capabilities and everything to do with an addiction to not feeling like you’re enough.

You’ve crushed all of the challenges you’ve faced so far.

You’re continuing to grow and improve and get better.

And you STILL don’t feel confident in what you can do?

It’s no longer about your competence, it’s about your own self-image.

Some strategies to help this:

Take 2-3 minutes to reflect on successful events shortly after they happen, take deep breaths, allow yourself to think about the emotions and hard work and good feelings you’re getting (taken from Rick Hanson’s Hardwiring Happiness).

Organise celebrations for things you do well in – subscriber milestones, sales targets, kids going off to primary school, anniversaries with partners.

Find a community of likeminded, supportive, positive people within whatever domain you’re trying to become confident in and speak to them regularly to get external validation, feedback and reassurance.

Proof eats belief for breakfast. You don’t need faith in your abilities, you have evidence.

Outwork your self doubt.

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MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast which has had 60 million+ downloads. You should subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Russ Roberts – a lifelong economist explains how to make life’s biggest decisions like who to marry, how many children to have, what sot of person to be and where to live. Really good.

Thursday.
Catherine Salmon – the Media Class love telling women what they should be attracted to, but what actually turns women on? Includes a breakdown of Catherine’s brand new study where men and women reacted to photos of people with jizz on their face.

Saturday.
Matthew Cobb – just how sophisticated is gene editing? Can we actually create Captain America super soldiers and select the hair colour and IQ of our kids or is that just a media panic? What about bioweapons?

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THINGS I’VE LEARNED

1.
​Boys are really falling behind in the classroom.

“In the span of just a few decades, girls and women have not only caught up with boys and men in the classroom—they have blown right past them.

Half a century ago, the landmark Title IX law was passed to promote gender equality in higher education.

At the time, there was a gap of 13 percentage points in the proportion of bachelor’s degrees going to men compared with women.

Today, the gender gap is a little wider—15 percentage points as of 2019—but the other way around.

For every three female college students, there are only about two men.

The trend worsened during the pandemic.

College enrolment as a whole declined in 2020—but that decline was seven times greater for male than for female students.” — Russ Roberts

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2.
​It’s not about brainwashing or indoctrination.

“The goal of propaganda is to control what you think other people think.”

— h/t Rob Henderson

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3.
​Smart people + ideology is a terrifying cocktail.

“When intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology, their intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking, and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their own delusion, and to very cleverly become stupid.” — Gurwinder Bhogal

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LIFE HACK

2nd Pret at Gate A3 in Heathrow Terminal 5.

Pret A Manger is great.

The queues for it in Heathrow are not.

I wanted to get 10,000 steps in before flying back to Austin on Saturday so explored every corridor of the terminal.

There’s a second Pret next to Gate A3 with much lower competition for meatball wraps and cortados. Enjoy!
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Big love,
Chris x

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PS
I wonder how many Exerpeutic Exerwork 2000i Static Bike Desks have been sold after Thursday’s Life Hacks episode.