These past two weeks there were the local elections in my home country of Bulgaria. I can go on and explain how sad is the whole political picture, but sadly with the advent of social media, the vast majority of people are so easy to be fooled in virtually every single country that it seems like the picture is quite sad all around the world.
As one would expect, most of the candidates were absolute jokes. I don’t follow politics as I treat it as a waste of time and don’t know the actual results, but as usual, people vote for some self-obsessed idiot who then starts to believe even more in himself/herself and confidently abuses his powers in order to do the best for his people. It’s a bit like when a hot dumb girl chooses to date the drug dealer because he’s so cool and then a month later cries her eyes out because he’s beating her. 1:1 situation, self-obsessed confident guys win the hearts of the stupid.
Why? Very often, the most intelligent people are the most humble and have low self-esteem because of what makes them intelligent – their drive to improve.
As much as IQ tests are incomplete pictures of one’s broad intelligence, they at least show some part of the picture. Nowadays we can determine one’s IQ by analyzing their speech. The PM of my country, the guy with the most power, he’s certainly not above 100. In fact, he’s probably the only PM in Europe or may be even the world who doesn’t speak ANY second language! He’s just an Average Joe, but when you give Average Joe some strong narcissistic tendencies, suddenly Average Joe becomes Confident Joe. Our nature is such that we believe confident people. There are many people who are faking confidence, but they are easy to be caught out. Especially by women, I call women “walking bs detectors”.
But when people’s confidence comes from the inside, unless you engage your logical mind and let’s be honest, most of us don’t use it as much as we think we do, then you simply believe that person.
So here comes the person with huge ego and confidence, who never doubts himself and promises you the world. The person who’s self-critical with a growth mindset, which of course relies on this self-critical nature of the mind, they’re just dumbfounded and can’t show they’re always confident, because they either have to fake it which isn’t easy or can’t fake it all!
So our Confident Average Joe just walks through Self-Critical Joe, and the average people prefer him over his more intelligent opponent. At the end of the day, a growth mindset isn’t something very common in people, quite the contrary!
In the case of that dumb fuck the Bulgarian PM Boyko Borisov, he was a fireman who turned to racketeering people in the 90s. He was shaking people in our capital of Sofia, and later on, the citizens of Sofia elected him as their mayor. Confirming our nation’s slave mentality. I mean, the average Bulgarian is the most gullible person ever… Of course, Bat Boyko as he’s known, he’s sooooooo deep into NPD. He’s the kind of guy who would never admit a mistake and would never ever doubt himself! His confidence is so massive, that I had a girlfriend who was telling me how she would fuck him even though he’s fat af, because apparently, he was so confident(or full) in himself.
Here is Boyko playing against Boris Becker in a charity match with his distinctive fashionable outfit. He thought he would beat Becker. No, seriously he did! After the match, Becker asked if he was mad? To good ol’ Boris, Boyko’s efforts were quite obviously laughable.
Who are the people with most NPD(NarcissisticPersonality Disorder)? They’re mostly in jails or should be in jails. They’re your cheaters, jerks, and bullies. None of them usually is associated with any academic prowess or intelligence. But are they associated with confidence? Hell YEAH!
I had a classmate who was winning many math competitions, he’s got Ph.D. and his little brother is the same. Now there’s a middle brother, apparently, he didn’t follow his big bro’s footsteps. He was a wild guy, more into body-building and in fact once the big brother told me how his little brother told him it’s good to carry a baseball bat in your trunk in case some accident happens!? I mean, wtf? Carry a baseball bat!
Now my classmate, who almost went to MIT on a full scholarship, once told me that years later when he went to Harvard and MIT, he was convinced he wasn’t one bred for an academic career there. On the other hand, I know a couple of rich kids who finished those esteemed institutions and have nowhere near his intelligence. In fact, they’re so inspiring that you think anyone can finish Harvard or MIT if they got the money!
That’s my classmate with his self-criticality going up to the point of self-pity thinking.
His brother though, the baseball bat guy, he’s got none of this. He’s the body-builder type of a guy and he was one of the candidates for municipality advisors, there were posters around town for him, etc.
Now you see the difference, both his brothers are successful competitive mathematicians, but he’s the one who’s got the confidence! If my classmate was up for this job, which btw is paid and you basically need to go to one meeting per month, he would probably be the most educated and smartest person. But I’m sure, he never thought about such a thing. He was most likely startled when his lil bro announced his intentions, but he would never think of fighting for such a position himself because he wouldn’t feel good enough for this position. He knows how much he doesn’t know. He doesn’t feel good enough and this drives him to be better.
So, here comes the question. Do we need to lower the confidence of such personalities, which is quite a tall order and almost impossible OR do we have to develop or at least massively readjust our levels of self-confidence and eliminate self-doubt?
As far as I know, NPD is extremely hard to be treated by modern psychology. So our only chance left is to find ways to lift our confidence, speaking for those who love to learn, push themselves and have in general a growth mindset. I’d say, we MUST do it! Because we owe it to the rest of the world. We should even fake confidence if needed. Why?
Read about Jim Kwik, he was supposed to be the slow kid after sustaining a brain injury in kinder garden, but now he’s a mental coach. Well, even IQ is massively improvable. It’s more or less the speed that your neuronal networks fire signals. Your intelligence is the complexity of your neuronal networks and even if we are old, we still have a massive ability to learn. Especially if one has the correct diet and takes some nootropics, then they can improve themselves massively. For myself, I know that I can be ANYTHING. I can learn to do ANYTHING as good as 98% of the people and then I can add some creativity mixed with my experience/knowledge from many different fields to be very, very good. To explore approaches others have not thought of.
I remember that my second love after racing and F1 as a kid was basketball. But I’m short, but hey… look at Muggsy Bogues? He played against Michael freaking Air Jordan and Magic Johnson! I’ve no excuses really, and Muggsy is actually shorter than me. In fact, a player who was 5’7 once won the NBA dunk contest in 1986 – Spud Webb.
Muggsy was 5’3, that’s kind of short even for a girl! But he learned to compensate for this by jumping way higher and being super agile on the court.
It’s all about how much effort you put. Even for being at the very, very top with legendary status.
When Ayrton Senna had his first wet race, he was lapped. He was a joke. But then he decided that he’ll learn and turned into the best wet weather driver in history. We all got it inside us, our brains are incredibly adaptable machines. We can learn to do with our bodies stuff that looks crazy and impossible. Self-doubt, once you got your growth mindset in full blast mode is a useless and dangerous concept. It’s only stopping us from chasing ventures that others much less qualified are easily willing to take. Self-doubt amongst the intelligent part of our society is hampering our progress by giving a chance to a bunch of narcissistic lesser-developed people taking important decisions and ruling our lives. It’s up to us to stop this. Just like social anxiety where we are afraid to go and speak to someone we like, self-doubt is something that is unnecessary in our current society for most of those who have it. We should abolish the burdens of self-doubt and earn our freedom in which our creativity can thrive.
Humbleness, from the good kind. This is something that we must keep always in ourselves. Being humble is the thing that allows us to grow from our mistakes because it’s so easy to blame factors outside of our control and stay the same. When we have a humble attitude, then we can see the outside factors, but we can also look inside ourselves for ways to improve.
The Lewis Hamilton combination of supreme confidence and humbleness to boost the reasons you truly have to be confident is yielding for him incredible results. Last week he won his 6th F1 World Championship and no doubt, given his age and the strength of his team, Lewis is most likely going to break Michael Schumacher’s record of 7 titles.
Lewis is both managing to be an inspirational person, someone who has a 1500 person team behind him, but also be super confident and tough while racing the best drivers in the world. The mind games and pressure in Formula 1 are just immense, it’s incredible. Yet, Lewis manages to be an always evolving personality with a superior sense of self-confidence that is frightening to his opponents. When he’s down, he’s always fast back up. Nico Rosberg more or less retired after he managed to beat him once and saw how much mental effort and dedication were required from him to accomplish this task.
It’s our duty to toughen up, stop this self-doubt, adopt our confidence pose, do our best and contribute to making the lives of others better! Otherwise, we are leaving the lesser of us ruling our lives. The Boykos of this world. Are we willing to do this or are we up to this challenge?
Be strong, always evolve and no doubts! Success always follows smart & hard work.
Ivan On Racing 