I’ll tell you a story about self-confidence.

When I was 20 and in driving school, I thought it would help to boost my confidence by giving myself suggestions such as “I’m going to do great”, “I’m going to succeed” and so on, before the driving test. As you can imagine, I messed up the test and failed.

This was quite a shock to me, in a sense that I really took the time to think about what happened and learn the lessons. The next time I took the test, I focused on doing every particular thing right, and nothing else. As a result, I passed the test and got my driving license.

This coloured my thinking about self-confidence, and, now that I think of it, about ego, to this day. Basically, if you want to do anything properly, there is no place for you in the process. Thoughts about success or failure are mere ego-musings and are irrelevant. What matters is to see what the situation requires and do it to the best of your abilities. Everything else contributes to failure.

The only self-confidence that matters is a result of having done many difficult and possibly dangerous things over the course of your life; you succeeded at some, failed at others, and you have a healthy attitude towards things – basically, you’re going to try very hard and be completely focused on it, but you know that either success or failure are not really up to you, at the end of it. To be very proud of your successes leaves you vulnerable to feeling humiliated by your failures, and I see little use for either.