Confidence

Is confidence saying "I don't care what anybody thinks, ever!"?

Some might say that's arrogance. I'd say it's an outsider's view on the topic. Every newcomer to a new thing sees the big parts and confidently extrapolates them to encompass the whole thing...yet when he has gotten a closer look, he realizes that what he thought it was bares a sparse resemblance to what it actually is. Some of us naturally gravitate toward the subject and understand its nuances instinctively... the rest make do with tools at their disposal.

Many times, when I am being 'confident', I am playing the part of a confident man intellectually. I do not normally feel it in my bones and it does not ooze from my pores... it is an affectation. I am doing something that I think ought to be done. And there it is: for me, it is an intellectual endeavor. Of course, from time to time, I am genuinely confident but on the whole, it is something I put on to the benefit of social grace.

And in these practices, I make enormous blunders such as the opening of this post: "I don't care what anybody thinks, ever!" It is an egregious inflation of the confident personality. Yet, to my lay-mind, it seems like a logical extension of the philosophy. And so it goes... perhaps someday I will understand.