 Confidence is not "I know what I'm doing." Confidence is "I know how to find that out" and "I know how to learn new things" and most importantly "I know when I don't know what I'm doing, so I stop and find someone who does" Obnoxious blowhards rely on people not understanding this distinction. And they amplify it by framing actual confidence as weakness. This may be a useful thing to talk about with certain people in your life who are being fooled by fascists. 18 comments
@prlzx @TechConnectify Also related - taking the time to make sure you understand what question you are answering/problem you are solving before diving in. @TechConnectify Don't forget "I know how to #$%^ up well and how to recover." Failure has brought me more confidence than success ever has. @johnelamb Yes, but there are also people who just don't learn from mistakes. Which is, if you have the wrong blend of self-esteem, rather easy to do - just find some reason it would have worked that wasn't related to you, and you can happily make the same mistake again and again! @TechConnectify @johnelamb Strong optimists can also fall into that, everything will work out etc. and if it doesn't, it's the fault of an external factor... @tux @TechConnectify huh. Interesting. I am a bit of a pessimistic optimist “half a glass of water and air” kind of person. Thanks for pointing this out.  @TechConnectify Obnoxious blowhards also rely other placing their confidence in them. Knowing when you should actually rely on someone is at least as important as knowing your own limits.  @TechConnectify Confidence is, in fact, knowing what you are doing. It is also knowing when you don’t know what you are doing. Wisdom is knowing the difference and knowing what to do when you don’t know what you are doing.  @TechConnectify@mas.to What about if you genuinely know what you're doing though? And willing to learn from your own mistakes. There are many that can not do that, so they double down and blame others. It is never their fault. I'd add: admitting openly the limits of one's knowledge. There's a German politician (Habeck), who's always trying to lay his cards on the table, explaining the trade-offs, risks and assumptions behind his decisions - and he's getting ridiculed for that. It's bonkers. You can disagree with him, make different trade-offs, perfectly fine, but ridiculing openness is just morally wrong. @TechConnectify my mom who has a phd watches fox news and is a catholic. she has been touting a lot of the talking points more and more lately. she can also be arrogant and thinks she is smarter then she really is.  @TechConnectify Yes! Or it can be simply "I don't know." Obnoxious blowhards would sooner make up an absurd bullshit answer than admit that they don't know or were wrong about something.  @TechConnectify Oddly enough, the pretengineers who stride with confidence, and have to be picked up after like incontinent elephants, are part of that base. A very large part of that base. Striding confidently into a Walmart with an AR-15 "for protection" shows a lack of confidence. Like peeing your pants whenever you see a spider, but driving an exterminator's van. |
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Warning that a proposed approach has downsides or talking about pitfalls of a similar experience should not be waved away as "negativity" or "being a blocker".
Wanting something to work well without doing everything twice is not "being obstructive about agile".
Saying that there is not enough time to test the proposed solution in a development environment before going to production is not "you're the reason we will miss the deadline that the new manager promised".