Steph Curry might be the best shooter in basketball history.
Long before he had the record for most three-pointers made in the NBA, he was a poorly recruited kid trying to live his basketball dreams.
He was a 3-start recruit, he didn’t get picked up by any of the college basketball powerhouses. No one believed that this little (in the basketball world) skinny kid would amount to anything.
Fast forward and he is two-time MVP, seven-time All-Star, and three-time Champion.
So what got him there, was it his confidence or his competence? The answer is both.
Competency
Basically, how good are you at something.
Ideally, this can will be on an objective scale. If you are Usain Bolt, you can run 100m in 9.58 seconds. This is a set distance where you can assess your time decreasing or increasing.
Subjective measurements are harder to define, who has the better brush stroke for instance? Would you say, Da Vinci or Picasso?
Confidence
Is the belief or feeling that you can rely on something or someone. You have faith that your brakes will work in the car when you need them. You believe your friends will turn up when they say they will.
What Is More Important?
The classic – know thy self. Your level of self-awareness of both will be a huge factor in the successful application of your skills.
Confidence without competency is fool-hardy. Competency without confidence is a waste.
You need to have both for continued success. Someone with a lot of confidence could shoot a lot of three-pointers and might make some with luck. However, you need someone with competency to make them consistently. But in order to take the shot, you need to believe you can make it, so the question is what comes first?
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The trouble with understanding if you need confidence or competency is that we are a terrible judge of ourselves. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where the less you know, the better you think you are, and then as you get better you realise the size of the mountain you have to climb to get any good.
The classic example is that amateur chess players overestimate their skills and think they will do better in an upcoming chess tournament than more competent competitors.
What To Do?
Focus on what you can control. Work on your skills. Practice, Assess, reassess, practice some more. Spend time building up your competency using as objective measures as you can.
America’s Got Talent is a perfect example of people believing in uncredible feedback about their skills. They have all the confidence in the world but can’t hit a note to save themselves.
Practising builds your belief in yourself. Repeatedly seeing the results you are aiming for will build the confidence you need to do more of that task. The better you feel about it, the more you will do it. The more you do it, the better you will feel.
Organizational Psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzie said in his book Confidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get it – “Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, and Roger Federer did not achieve total domination of their sports because they felt good about themselves. The reason these exceptional achievers have confidence is that they are exceptionally competent.“
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 