On Confidence

When you lose confidence in yourself, the worst thing you can do is sit and wait for it to be restored. It won’t happen. You’ll feel worse.

Yet this is what we do; we despair because things aren’t going like we hoped. We feel down because of a ‘string of bad luck’ or fall prey to the insidious discouragement that comes along with ‘nothing good happening for a while.’

At the end John Fante’s book Dreams From Bunker Hill, the character, a writer, reminds himself that if he can write one great line, he can write two and if he can write two he can write three, and if he can write three, he can write forever. He pauses. Even that seemed insurmountable. So he types out four lines from one of his favorite poems. What the hell, he says, a man has to start someplace.

When explaining self-esteem to their patients, psychologists use the metaphor of two open cisterns that provide drinking water for nearby towns. When it rains, they both fill to the brim. But when it stops raining, one drains faster than the other. Why does one stay full while the other empties? It’s simple: it’s also fed by an underground spring.

We must find our own spring. And return to it when we need replenishment.

We can run a few miles as fast as we’re able. We can get absorbed in a book, so much that you forget the world around you. Or help someone. Have stimulating conversation. Go for a long walk. These things tap into something bigger than us and in the process remind us about that which is within us—what we are capable of. We simply need to seek it out.

The professional, Steve Pressfield writes in The War of Art, sometimes has to “throw down a 360 tomahawk jam from time to time, just to let the boys know he’s still in business.” The boys in this case are those little doubts you get in your head, the ones that tell you that you don’t have what it takes, that the project isn’t worth it, that you’re not up to the task. Go out and remind the crowd why you’re in the arena. Do what you have within you but take for granted or are saving for later. Silence them by doing it. Remind yourself.

A common theme from the ancients is that of great, supernatural forces. A swirl of particles. Time as a river. Flowing energy. Incarnation. It might have stemmed from their ignorance of certain scientific concepts, but that was a benefit rather than a curse. This makes it easier to imagine tapping into something out there, finding nourishment in it, being moved forward from it. These were streams that they could depend on, infinite underground wells to fill their cisterns.

As I struggle with confidence in my own life and on my own projects, it’s helpful to think of this. It is replenishing, a little bit more each time.