Self-Confidence: A Philosophy. Charles Pepin

am a great fan of the saxophone improvisations of Sonny Rollins: they strike me as a symbol of pure confidence. Sonny Rollins ventures down paths that no one else has explored and creates heavenly, dream-like ballads of astonishing freedom. Recently, I came across an interview with Rollins where he described playing the saxophone at some points in his life for up to seventeen hours a day. His confidence was achieved with a huge amount of work. He had to practise scales on his instrument and master its techniques before he could improvise with such freedom. Among great artists, confidence comes first and foremost from constant, devoted, almost obsessional practice.

But the results of Anders Ericsson’s study should not be interpreted in a simplistic way. Not everyone is going to become a virtuoso just by sticking to his instrument for 10,000 hours. You need to take pleasure in the activity, which has to align with your aspirations, and have a basic predisposition for music. And you need to give those 10,000 hours your attention, be truly present to your art. Other factors probably enter into it as well. The study is interesting all the same because, through its different gradations, it shows how a skill can gradually be incorporated to become genuine confidence. After 8,000 hours, my capabilities are at the point where I can become a professional. Once I have passed the 10,000-hour mark, I can entertain the ambition of becoming one of the best in the world in my field. When Serena Williams became the number-one female player in the under-ten age group, she in fact had 10,000 hours of playing behind her.

      Malcolm Gladwell took Anders Ericsson’s study and made it into a general law, as well as a bestseller with a whiff of demagoguery about it. He suggests that in any given field, you need only practise for 10,000 hours in order to acquire mastery of your art and full confidence in yourself. He analysed many instances in great detail, including Mozart and the Beatles, showing that in every case true excellence was achieved only after crossing the 10,000-hour threshold. It’s true, of course, that Mozart could follow a score and play to tempo even before he knew how to read or write. And it’s true that he started composing at the age of six. But his first masterpiece, according to Gladwell – his Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major, K.271 – was written in Salzburg in 1777. Mozart was twenty-one at the time and already had 10,000 hours of composing to his credit.

Re-examining the history of the Beatles prior to their wildly successful United States tour in 1964, Gladwell counts how many hours John Lennon and Paul McCartney spent onstage playing music. He tells how in 1960, when they were a schoolboys’ rock and roll band, they were lucky enough to be asked to play at a club in Hamburg. The sets at the Hamburg club lasted eight hours at a stretch, and sometimes all night. This was playing on a different scale from the band’s practices in Liverpool, which had lasted an hour at most and often involved repeating the same few songs over and over. In Gladwell’s telling, the Hamburg club gave the Beatles a chance to really train, and it was there that they gained confidence in themselves, especially in their ability to perform together onstage. The many hours of playing allowed them to learn their instruments thoroughly, to expand their repertoire, and to explore their vocal range. It was also there that they learned to read their public and bring it to a pitch of excitement. The Hamburg experience made them a great band. When they landed in the United States in 1964, they had already spent – according to Gladwell’s detailed calculations – some 12,000 hours onstage. That’s what allowed them to win the hearts of Americans.

Clearly, Anders Ericsson’s findings are not strictly speaking scientific: his theory that excellence can be achieved in any field with 10,000 hours of practice is neither verifiable nor refutable. And when Gladwell uses the work of neuroscientist Daniel Levitin to support the thesis that 10,000 hours is the time it takes the brain to master any discipline, he seems to be reaching for scientific validation. There are many reasons to be wary of this thesis. But I have to admit I find it quite seductive. It makes us realise that even among geniuses, confidence takes time to achieve. It develops in tandem with growing competence that, as it becomes integrated in stages and incorporated, has a liberating effect. Confidence is not innate but something that is largely acquired.

‘Genius,’ as Thomas Edison put it, ‘is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.’ We shouldn’t forget this when we start to have doubts about ourselves. Often, when our confidence is at a low ebb, we start to think that we lack talent, that we aren’t good at what we do, when in fact it’s just a matter of not having trained enough. Whenever doubt starts to gain the upper hand, whenever we’re afraid that we won’t measure up, the best thing to do is to bolster our confidence by actively developing our skills, rather than invoking some hypothetical lack of talent. Gladwell’s unusual book reminds us of this: Mozart was perhaps an inspired genius, but he also perspired a great deal. He even perspired considerably more than many musicians less inspired than he. Keeping this in mind can help us draw strength from his example.

      But Gladwell is only interested in a very localised confidence, focused on the skill on which 10,000 hours of practice have been devoted. True self-confidence, on the other hand, is much broader in extent. It goes beyond the mastery of a single discipline, even if that mastery contributes to it.

      Through her skill at tennis and the great success it has brought her, Serena Williams has acquired a sense of confidence that is not limited to the tennis court. When she makes her voice heard nowadays, it is no longer just as a high-ranking sports figure but as a woman, a mother, a citizen, and a feminist. And her voice finds a wide audience.

In 2016, she published an open letter denouncing sexism in sports and the persistent inequality between the sexes. Here is an excerpt: ‘What others marked as flaws or disadvantages about myself – my race, my gender – I embraced as fuel for my success. I never let anything or anyone define me or my potential … Women have to break down many barriers on the road to success. One of those barriers is the way we are constantly reminded we are not men, as if it is a flaw. People call me one of the ‘world’s greatest female athletes’. Do they say LeBron is one of the world’s best male athletes? Is Tiger? Federer? Why not? We should never let this go unchallenged. We should always be judged by our achievements, not by our gender.’

      Serena’s confidence is also a transformation of her prowess. By training for all those years, day after day, by hitting balls for hours, she didn’t just train at tennis. On a daily basis, she showed her strength of will, her hunger for achievement, her ability to overcome obstacles. The confidence that now allows her to take courageous positions is the fruit of that experience. As she developed her skill at hitting serves, as she worked on her forehand and her backhand, she became aware of her own power and her drive for life. On the tennis court and everywhere else. By playing tennis, she discovered her own truth, she reached deep within herself and found remarkable resources.

By developing our range within a discipline, we are fortunately able to gain a broader self-confidence. Our experience in that discipline, whatever it may be, can then serve as a fulcrum. ‘Give me a fulcrum, and with my lever I can move the earth,’ said Archimedes. Because our self-confidence plays an important role in how we act, how we engage with the world, everything that anchors us to reality can serve as a base, a springboard.

      ‘All consciousness is consciousness of something,’ said the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. He meant that we become conscious of ourselves by being conscious of something other than ourselves. For example, because I am conscious of the taste of coffee in my mouth and of the cup I’m holding in my hand, I am conscious of myself. But I am not conscious of myself in a pure, abstract, or disembodied way.

      The same goes for self-confidence. In order to feel confidence in ourselves, we must first feel confidence based on specific actions. To paraphrase Husserl, we could say that ‘all self-confidence is confidence in the accomplishment of something’. We need concrete experiences, specific skills, and real successes in order to have confidence in ourselves. So let’s not hesitate to celebrate our successes, even the small ones – they are so many stages along the way to full-blown self-confidence. We sense this when we congratulate our children: we are inviting them each time to have a little more confidence in themselves.

During childhood, we developed confidence in our ability to put one foot in front of another, to write in cursive, to ride a bike.