Influence Without Overconfidence

You Don’t Need to Promise Success to Be Inspiring

A friend of mine recently started a company developing apps to help people with depression and anxiety. He’s a probabilistic thinker who strives to be well calibrated, and he’s not blind to the long odds facing a new company. I asked him if his realistic outlook made it hard to get employees or investors excited. “No, you can get someone psyched up in a lot of ways,” he replied. “You don’t have to psych them up by lying or by being overconfident about the chance of success.”

You can set ambitious goals. You can paint a vivid picture of the world you want to create. You can speak from the heart about why you personally care about this issue. When my friend is talking about his company, he likes to share real stories of people who struggled with mental health and have been helped by his app. All of those things can be inspiring, and none of them require you to make unrealistic claims.

On YouTube, there’s a rare example of an early video interview with Jeff Bezos from 1997, about one year after he founded Amazon. (Early enough that the interviewer’s first question for Bezos is “So, who are you?”) As Bezos enthuses about his vision for the future of internet commerce, it’s easy to see why investors found his excitement contagious:

I mean, it’s just incredible . . . this is day one. This is the very beginning. This is the Kitty Hawk stage of electronic commerce. We’re moving forward in so many different areas, and lots of different companies are as well, in the late twentieth century. It’s just a great time to be alive, you know? . . . I think a millennia from now, people are going to look back and say, “Wow, the late twentieth century was really a great time to be alive on this planet.”

It’s a speech that communicates vision. Conviction. Passion. And it doesn’t require Bezos to pretend that his start-up is a sure bet, or even that it’s more than 50 percent likely to succeed.

After hearing Bezos’s pitch, investor Tom Alberg discussed it with a friend before deciding to put in $50,000 of his own money. “It’s very risky,” he said, “but Jeff is for real. He’s obviously a smart guy. He’s very passionate about it.”

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In this chapter, we’ve covered three key principles of influence without overconfidence:

First, you don’t need to hold your opinions with 100 percent certainty in order to seem confident and competent. People simply aren’t paying that much attention to how much epistemic confidence you express. They’re paying attention to how you act, to your body language, tone, and other aspects of your social confidence, all of which are things you can cultivate without sacrificing your calibration.

Second, expressing uncertainty isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It depends on whether the uncertainty is “in you” or “in the world.” If you can demonstrate a strong command of the topic and speak with ease about your analysis and your plan, you’ll seem like more of an expert, not less.

Third, you can be inspiring without overpromising. You can paint a picture of the world you’re trying to create, or why your mission is important, or how your product has helped people, without claiming you’re guaranteed to succeed. There are lots of ways to get people excited that don’t require you to lie to others or to yourself.

That’s the overarching theme of these last three chapters: whatever your goal, there’s probably a way to get it that doesn’t require you to believe false things. From now on, whenever you hear someone claim that you need to self-deceive in order to be happy, motivated, or influential, you should raise a skeptical eyebrow. There are multiple paths to any goal, some of which involve self-deception and some of which don’t. It may take a little more care and practice to find the latter, but in the long run, it’s well worth it.

Here’s an analogy: Suppose a bully keeps threatening to beat you up and take your lunch money. You might think your choices are either (1) pay up or (2) take the beating. Framed that way, it might well be correct to give him the money. It’s only a few dollars; surely that’s better than getting a black eye, right?

But if you zoom out and look at the long run, it becomes less clear that handing over the money every time is your best option. Instead, you could learn to fight. Or you could devise a clever way to arrange for the bully to get caught red-handed. You could find a way to change classrooms or even schools. There are lots of ways to change the game board you’re playing on so that you end up with better choices, instead of simply resigning yourself to picking the least-bad choice currently in front of you.

We’re in a similar position with respect to the trade-off between scout mindset and soldier mindset, in which we have to sacrifice some of our ability to see clearly or else suffer a beating to our self-esteem, motivation, comfort, and more. You can accept those terms and say, “Okay, might as well pay up and sacrifice some accuracy, because it’s worth it.” Or you can say, “No, I don’t accept those terms,” and find ways to look good and feel good, while also seeing reality as accurately as possible.