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Confidence by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

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I read this book because I got curious about what this kind of books is and why people read so many of them. This book claims that it can help you by overcoming low self-esteem, insecurity and, self-doubt. That is a very confident thing to say, but here is what food for thought the book offered to me. First of all, competence over confidence! That is probably the slogan of the whole book. Probably, out of 220 pages this book has, 205 contain these 2 words. The author's idea is that low confidence and high competence is a better pair of characteristics than high confidence and low competence. He tells us about high confidence being a very dangerous thing in high amounts. People become sure that they will always be lucky. For example, stars that have the most recognizable faces on planet Earth are very often the ones involved in drama like cheating on their partners. This happens because they have very high confidence and think that "Everything will be fine. I got this, don't worry". Or a social experiment with students. The students were supposed to give self-evaluations and then, they were supposed to be rated by other students. The results were actually quite embarrassing for high self confidence students who were rated on a quite low level. And vice versa. This means that high confidence does not compensate competence. Same thing in healthy lifestyles. Let's say a forecaster told two men about their health condition. He told one of them to expect a good life with no health issues while the other one would have to live with severe health conditions all his life.But in the end both forecasts would still turn out wrong. The "healthy" man would take advantage of his good health and waste it all on substances and junk food, while the "unhealthy" man would take care of his health and avoid anything that would worsen it. That is because the "healthy" man is confident that nothing will happen to him. This is why confidence is not actually such a good character trait. It doesn't prevent you from doing stupid stuff.

My overall reaction to the book is:

9/10


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