The older I get, the more I’m coming to believe that confidence is an over-rated quality.
When I was younger I thought that it was a positively magical element. If you had it, some process of alchemy would take place, and through sheer force of will, anything you touched would be yours. Thousands upon thousands of golden opportunities would unfold before you, and suddenly, you’d have the ability to pick-up beautiful women in the grocery store.
Tom Cruise of the 80’s and 90’s was emblematic of this. Back in the 80’s, when I saw him in the movie Risky Business, I hated him immediately. It was evident to me that there was no inner core in the man, and the confidence he projected out into the world was a mask. It was something he was selling, and it existed only as it related to the audience, having no home but in the imaginations of other people.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love people who are self-assured, but I consider that to be an implicit quality, whereas confidence is explicit. There’s a sort of evangelism to the abundantly confident. They walk into a room and immediately, and often intentionally, seize leadership. Offering unbidden solutions and direction, they confine the rest of the people to subordinate roles, who must either get out of the way, or dutifully follow the script that’s being sculpted. I don’t know, it’s the sort of thing that just seems so focused that it obliterates everything else around it. Confidence is rarely empathetic.
At any rate, Tom Cruise, now sliding toward 50, is widely seen as insane and desperate. Once you hit 40, I think, a virile excess of confidence seems kind of deluded and over compensatory, like dying your hair and wearing skinny jeans.
And when I see some 45 year-old guy, his eyes gleaming, still trying to convince me that he’s going to bend the world to his will, well, all I can think is that he hasn’t been paying attention—which may well have been the case. Whether we want it or not, life teaches us humility, be it through our failures or our successes. We’re small things in this world, frail and vulnerable in ways we don’t even understand. I prefer the company of those who look out and see beyond themselves, and apprehending something larger than their ambition, feel some uncertainty, and compassion for those who share in that uncertainty.