Self-Assessment Biases
There’s a long list of what psychologists call “self-assessment biases.” There’s The Dunning-Kruger Effect: the tendency of people who have low ability in a particular area to overestimate their competence in that area. And vice versa: highly talented people tend to underestimate their abilities, taking for granted what comes naturally to them. Related, there’s the Curse of Knowledge: experts struggle to comprehend the knowledge gap between themselves and others. Essentially, the self-assessment biases tell us that we’re terrible at objectively evaluating our capabilities—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
A Little Mental Jiu-Jitsu
On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for the record producer John Hammond. Hammond had signed icons like Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes. “I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen writes, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself.” “I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing, so I’ve got nothing to lose…If nothing happens, I’m going to walk out of here the same person as when I walked in.’” With this mindset, Springsteen said, instead of panicking, he walked into the audition feeling confident. He performed his song, It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City. “When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen writes, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records…That was wonderful.’” Springsteen signed a ten-album deal and would go on to record with Hammond and Columbia Records for the next fifty years. Four months after the audition, John Hammond was interviewed by the magazine, “Record World,” and he was asked, “What are you doing now?” “Well,” Hammond said, “I latched onto a young folksinger a few months ago who I just think is going to be absolutely a giant. He’s Bruce Springsteen…He’s one of the greatest talents I’ve ever come across.” Hammond could see, after just one song, what the nervous Springsteen himself couldn’t: that Springsteen was a generational talent.
Shame On You, Tom Hanks
In high school, Tom Hanks took drama classes and acted in school plays, but he never considered an acting career. About a year after graduating, he ran into an old friend. “Are you still doing plays?” the friend asked. “No,” Hanks said. “I’m a hotel bellman.” The friend said, “Shame on you. You should be taking drama classes, and you should be doing plays. Shame on you.” “That really rattled me,” Hanks said. Prior to that exchange, Hanks didn’t see himself as someone with unique acting abilities. That this friend, who once saw Hanks perform in a high school play, just assumed Hanks would still be acting—“That’s when this gong when off in my head,” Hanks said. “That was really the beginning of thinking I could be an actor.” Days later, Hanks signed up for a drama class at a community college. After two years at the community college, he transferred to California State University at Sacramento, “the only institute of higher education that I could get into where you could do plays,” Hanks explained. He dropped out to join a professional theater company, the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. For his performance as Proteus in Shakespeare’s “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Hanks won a theater critics award for Best Actor. A year later, he made his Hollywood debut, the beginning of one of the great acting careers ever.
Your Lack of Confidence Is Insulting
Randall Stutman, an executive advisor and the founder of Admired Leadership, had a talented employee who wasn’t confident in her abilities. He did different things to try to get her to see herself as he saw her: extremely capable. Nothing worked. “Finally,” Randall said, “I had a very honest conversation with her. I said to her, ‘I feel insulted by you.’ She was shocked—she said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘I have all this confidence in you. What you’re telling me when you lack confidence in yourself is that I’m stupid, that my confidence is unfounded, that I’m not a good judge of talent. And I find that insulting.’ She said, ‘it never occurred to me that someone else could be insulted by my lack of confidence.’ And that was the thing that shook her up. She was able to say to herself, ‘If Randall thinks that highly of me, I better think that highly of me. Because if I don’t, I’m basically not believing in him. And I definitely believe in him.’”Sometimes It Takes Another Person’s Belief
When Steven Pressfield first submitted his manuscript for his now classic epic novel, Gates of Fire, his agent told him flat out, “Steve, I can’t sell this. You have to cut three hundred pages.” Three hundred pages? “I was shell-shocked,” Pressfield writes. “I fell into depression and despair.” But then he got a hand-written note in the mail from Tom Guinzburg, then the president of Viking Press, one of New York’s most prestigious publishing houses. Guinzburg got his hands on the Gates of Fire manuscript. “There is a first-rate novel in here,” the note said. “I am confident you will pull this off.” “Sometimes it takes another person to believe in us,” Pressfield writes. “That note changed my life. I taped it to the screen of my [computer] and took courage from it every day of the six months it took me to get three hundred pages out of that manuscript.”
It Never Hurts To Say A Good Word
Once in an interview (well into his NBA career), Bill Russell made a comment that he never got any positive feedback from his college coach. The coach heard the comment and wrote to Russell, saying that Russell had so much talent he didn’t need positive feedback. “The hell I didn’t,” Russell said. “[Everyone] wants to be told they are doing a good job…It never hurts to say a good word.” Everyone is terrible at objectively evaluating their abilities. It never hurts to say a good word.