Stoic Principles For Unstoppable Confidence Ryan Holiday ~ Chris Williamson

from you is self-belief is overrated. Generate evidence

Yeah. I, I say I don't believe in myself, I have evidence. Like, I know what I've done because I have done it, and I can see it and it's real. And, like, when people talk about trusting the process, um, it's much easier to do when the process has paid off for you. It's hard to trust the process when you've never seen it work, but when you've seen it work over and over... Like, I now know in my soul what it feels like for a book to not be coming together, and I know how if you stick with it and you keep going, it does eventually come together. I know the rhythms of the process. I know all the different peaks and valleys of it. So I don't think that much about it. I just show up and I do the stuff, right? And, and that, that's a... Your, you... The more you do it, the more reps you get. You just have this confidence of, like, I can handle anything 'cause I've handled everything up until this point.

Mm.

That, that's, that's what, to me, what confidence is.

So do you have more self-belief now than you did five years ago than you did 10 years ago?

I guess it depends on what we're saying. Like, to me, belief is, uh, uh, you know, is faith without evidence, right? I, like, I have an understanding of what I am capable of.

Mm.

But the, the, the paradoxical part is, like, how do you know you can do something that you've never done before? This is where it gets interesting. Um, when I sat down to write my first book, I did, I, I was confident that I could do it, uh, because I'd done hard things before, because I'd worked on similar projects. I had an awareness of, like, the positive traits that I brought. But I didn't know I could do it. To know I could do it would be belief in something that I did not have, uh, I, I could not actually say.

I suppose the-

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. I suppose the alternative, uh, to know that you could do it would be that the task that was in front of you was so unchallenging to you-

Yes

... that there was no way that you could fail. There's a great Seth Godin bit about how, uh, imposter syndrome is just a natural byproduct of you stretching your limits each time that you do choose to do something which is so far beyond what you've done before. Like, what would it mean to not feel like an imposter?

Yeah, if you're not afraid, you're not reaching, right? And, and, and you're not... You're, you should be putting yourselves in, in positions where you're not sure if you can do it. You hope you can do it.

Mm-hmm.

You have confidence that you're not someone who quits when things are hard, and these are, these are what allow you to, to make a rational bet that it's not a totally reckless thing to do.

You know what was cool? I, uh, I, we were talking before we started about the live-

Yeah

... things that I was doing. You've got some live shows coming up this summer. Australia?

Yeah.

Australia. Um, and I did this last year and, you know, I had a phenomenal first show in Dublin on a Thursday night, and it was classic sort of slightly rowdy Irish crowd that had had a few drinks beforehand, and it was... I mean, I got, like, a 500-person standing of it, which was totally, like, like,