Confidence should be integral part of anyone. Without confidence, in the human society or in nature, you are doomed. Other words for it are courage, bravery, initiativity. It is the lack of fear of failure. Whatever you do in the majority of cases except areas like extreme sports, driving fast cars, going to war, the chances of you getting death is very, very minimal. So the things you are actually afraid of are – other people’s opinions, losing little money in some risky work, getting embarrassed, failing to archive something. So what? It is actually failing a lot of times – the path to competence. If you don’t have enough confidence, you’ll quit. You’ll take deep other people’s opinions, and will contribute some more with your own negative thoughts.
Competence is when you know what you are doing because you’ve studied the area, have a lot of practice and already proven to the world with some kind of measurement, results that you are good enough. The last thing is not 100 percent required. I for example don’t have medals from dancing, I don’t have endorsements from some salsa teachers or whatever, that I am good. My own measurement is – having fun, making the ladies have fun, enjoying the dances, the music, keeping everybody around me and the partner in the current dance from not hurting when there are too much crowd, but mostly having fun. Having titles is no measure of competence especially in a changing world like today.
Understanding and taking advantage of human psychology or just how things work. Having the confidence to try new things, be an adventurer, having the passion for something and diving deep in some area is not enough or at least if you’ll plan to live within the human society. It may take you a lot of time (or even never reach your targets) and you may find the need to implement workarounds when or if you do not understand how things work and you don’t know how the human psychology works and what are the tricks that the so called successful use.
First – if you just understand how things work it will save you a lot of time of trial and error. It will give you the confidence and the tranquility and patience to do the thing you do. If you are planning to live outside of the human society, you’ll know how to grow food, domesticate animals, recognize and prepare for the different seasons and variations in the weather and nature. Same is also true for the things inside the mental hospitals called cities. Knowing how the cars work, how and with what material the buildings are best build with, know about electricity, the laws, the economic system, the travel rules, when is the rush hour and how to avoid it, what products are actual food and what is junk, and also how the computer systems work when going online etc.
All the above may give you the common sense or the actual intelligence, not present in all people drown in meaningless shit in the matrix, but will not make you “successful”. Knowing the “Human Psychology” and especially knowing how to use it in your favor is “the Hack” that has nothing to do with IT. Here I have several examples.
Attention arbitrage has existed in the past, but it become really scalable in modern times with the help of technologies. The idea is to grab the attention towards you in some way – dancing, playing music, talking about esoteric, popular, controversial subjects, being funny, entertaining, or even just knowing about some specific area and sharing it.
In the past there were traveling circuses, painters, singers, actors. But because of economics, they were gravitating mainly around the elite the big cities and less frequently around the low income masses.
Today things has changed. There are famous people that have used the old route, but there is also social media “influencers” that have managed to use some tricks to attract a following, people that watch them on newer channels – video sharing sites, blogging platforms, podcast audios etc. Many use tricks like – using numbers in the titles, triggering feelings, touching latest news – subjects, using words like – secret, free, money, millions, sex, “you don’t know”, using people’s greed, lust, desires etc. Very used tactic is drowning the auditory with stories of the past of individuals, telling the stuff people fear, and talking vaguely about your solution, forcing this way people into the funnel. And once one influencer has enough viewers, he could monetize them in numerous ways – offer information packages, offer products made made himself or by others – t shirts, books, affiliate links, information packages like 25 videos of tutorials, non-free events etc.
Another widely and wildly used thing is Sex. Sex sells. Promoting beautifully shaped bodies or parts of the body and offering solutions about what have made the models like this – sport programs, eating regimes, spiritual practices, etc. This includes both sexes – how to become like the models and for the opposite is just pure lust by bringing up the physical, animal brain, the desire for sex and companion in people.
In some other areas some individuals grab global problems and package something around it. Several big businesses has grabbed these global things as personal goal – just the carrot to make you run. For example Tesla with all the products around energy and transportation.
There are several other ways – like promoting recycling materials or recycled products, the vegetarians measure how much CO2 goes for animal farming and also use the “Global Warming” problem to promote plant based diet and products.
Another thing the Elon Musk has done is paint a magical dream of exploring new worlds. There are a lot of adventurers in the world, who just need a triggering point to go crazy. Having a backup plan for humanity is no small idea.
Also – the thing about too much advancement in technology he is involved with. In not so distant future, probably a lot of the jobs will be even more delegated to technology and this will rise the problem of employment and the role of the human being in the matrix – how to make every individual relevant in all-tech world.
Mark is an example that you don’t need to be super edgy confident – in the area of talking too much, be present in all events being a super high self-esteem person. Knowing people psychology and getting them to interact with your thing is just enough. You don’t need to be everywhere when your personal technology is everywhere and you record everything.
Mark is also an example like the politicians that talking doesn’t mean sh*t. Any word is just a label that could, or it may not describe the real – the true reality. The CEO of Facebook apologized almost every year about the practices that his system has mostly around privacy and no matter what he said – every year appear new proves that some data is going out of the control of the corporation – contractors, platform app developers, special advertisers, political, the private special services, outside hackers etc.
He knows the cracks in the system (corporate, legal, vulnerabilities). For example – Whatever is not written rarely could be used in court, saying half truths etc. You could present yourself as a corporate entity and fail as a legal entity and not go to jail for doing the wrong thing.
The confidence in the human character has no relation to the other dimensions that any individual can be described – altruistic, competent, truthful, honest, integrity. The “not giving a f*ck” mode gives a confident individual freedom to say, write or do whatever he wishes so to bring him back some benefit. This benefit may be altruistic, returning to him just the legacy and the knowing that he has done what is right and it may be – rising up rating, personal popularity, motivation in others to follow, even money. He says and does what he wants, knowing (or maybe not) all is temporary, the words are just tools that does not mean nothing, like the software and the money, all is illusion and to rise in the game, you just have to play and not stand alone in the corner.
Jordan Peterson is in favor of the idea of hierarchies of competence. You want to be treated by the best doctors, have the best repairmen, builders, the best musicians, workers, accountants etc to be compensated economically so that they could continue to give their best to the world. To be up in the hierarchy of competence for some reason an individual has to posses all three qualities – competence, confidence and understand human psychology.
One special case is when you have confidence and competence only in human psychology. Politicians are like that. Most of the things most of the time have no effect outside of just keeping the fight with the “enemy”, and entertaining the masses that way. Many CEOs and owners of companies are like that. Understanding human thinking could help them bring paying clients and then, the same will help them get and keep good and talented employees that will keep the clients happy (most of the time), enough to free the managers from the necessity to do the actual work.
This is how human mind works. There is a need to value yourself, push beyond your own well being and go to others and manipulate them with best intentions to yourself even if you are truly altruistic. The mind focuses on the non-working stuff, the non-normal, or the funny and entertaining. To promote something even truly good does not save you from the need of psychological packaging. You must also not tremble because of some other person with a lot of money, confidence and strong opinion. And when you understand and recognize the tricks used in psychology of manipulation you’ll be deaf to the shallow sell schemes that are in most part win-lose and the lose is for you.