Confidence . . . a nd Overconfidence
came to guitar groups. (We could even claim he was overconfident in expressing a view of underconfidence, a hair-splitting argument that illustrates the deeper problem—overconfidence can be used to mean almost anything.) There’s another danger when we attribute failures to overconfidence, and it’s potentially the most serious of all. Accusations of overconfidence carry a moral overtone. When we charge people with overconfidence, we suggest that they contributed to their own demise. We imply that they at least partially deserved their fate. They committed one of the seven deadly sins, sometimes called pride or vainglory. We think: They were too sure of themselves. They should have known better. They got what they had coming. From there, it’s a small step to imagine that if we can simply avoid the sin of overconfidence, we won’t meet the fate that befell others. After all, most people don’t think that they suffer from excessive pride or vanity. Others might exhibit overconfidence, but we don’t imagine the term applies to us. And so we comfort ourselves with the notion that we have little to worry about. Did Netflix blunder because Reed Hastings was overconfident? Too bad for him, but I won’t make that mistake, because I’m not overconfident. Those disasters that befell KFC and Home Depot? If they were due to overconfidence, I can rest assured they won’t happen to me. We may even experience a bit of schadenfreude, taking pleasure at the misfortunes of others. The irony, of course, is that those people didn’t see themselves as overconfident, either. At the time, they believed they were being appropriately confident, and that their actions were bold and decisive but surely not excessive. It’s only after things turn out badly that we hear the term. We’ll never learn from the errors of others if we attribute them to overconfidence. We end up fooling ourselves.
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