Any real examples of this happening?

Again, there is nothing wrong with confidence, the problem may very well be those who interpret it as arrogance.



Will

Al, you are hardly the one to be throwing stones here.

And yes, critiquing trees and not people would be a pleasant change of pace for you.


Will

This is going to end badly.

"I think if all of us spent as much time on our trees as we spend on the forum..."

Now, that would be a novel idea!

I had to resurrect my old signature file...
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. -Charles
Darwin, naturalist and author (1809-1882)

This is a favorite quote of mine also. You might enjoy this article, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments."

From the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, "Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."

Of course showing the erroneous conclusions and unfortunate choices must come before making claims that they do not realize it.




Will

Interesting link, Will. It goes a long way to explain the paradox of "The more I learn, the less I know."

Thus, increasing confidence can also be logically paired with humility. Humble and confident are good together.

[EDIT] Reading further, I note that the humor portion of the study uses a scale from 1 to 11. This, itself, connotes a high rating on the humor scale, IMHO

pootsie

Good observation poots.





People who exaggerate their own importance? I'd bet we all do it at one time or another, depending on the audience.


(Matt, for the record if this does end badly, this is a three month old thread, and I didn't resurrect it....lol)

Brian

The reason for lack of confidence and hesitation in this art/hobby/craft/passtime/whatever, is fear of failure or of making a mistake.

As a ski instructor long ago, I learned that fearing and fighting a fall can get you more severely injured than just learning how to fall gracefully. I took that lesson with me.

I have a small painted Kanji message board nailed to the fence behind my trees. I got it after doing bonsai for about seven years and after being kind of humbled by the idiot mistakes I was making. It reads "he who makes no mistakes, makes nothing."

In other words, confidence is built more through mistakes than through success. You have to fail to learn and learn to fail.

Failure teaches vastly more than success. Don't fear failure in bonsai, embrace it. Screw up some trees. Learn why they're screwed up. Don't do that again...You'll find that sooner or later you won't be afraid anymore. You will be more cautious in making cuts, but you won't be afraid to make them once you know where you're going.

I'll get down off the soapbox now.

I agree with those who say that confidence equals lack of fear. You need to lose your fear to become confident.

It has nothing to do with knowledge. I've seen people dumb as a bowling ball and very confident. They were fearless. And I've met brilliant minds who could barely open their mouth out of shyness and insecurity.

To become confident, one needs to be humiliated a number of times, until humiliation loses its significance. Fear of humiliation is one of the greatest obstacle towards confidence.

I grew up in a place where streetfights were commonplace. And I was terrified to be beaten up, so I was a coward. To overcome that, I joined a boxing club and became a boxer. I was beaten up and humiliated almost every day, until I didn't even notice it. It became my job description. Before I realized it, things turned around and I started beating up others. I wasn't afraid of losing anymore.

Interesting article Will, thanks for the link. "Ignorance is bliss!"

The study group was certainly not representative of the population at large...all were Cornell undergrads taking part in the study for extra credit. A highly motivated subset of a highly motivated and competitive group!

It would be interesting to repeat the study with a broader range of subjects. (If you trust psychological research that is! )