Being humble is holding you back

Video Transcript

Would you tell people publicly that you're the best in the world even if you weren't? I got asked that question on a stage in New York and I wasn't ready for it. I was pitching Motribe, one of my first venture-backed businesses. We created a social network builder for feature phone users in Africa, back before smartphones took over.

It was a 9-minute pitch with a red clock counting down in a room full of investors who had never thought about Africa as a market. This was my third pitch of the day and after I stopped, the room was dead when it was meant to be a lively Q&A. And at the end of the awkward silence, someone finally put their hand up and said "Nick do you think you guys are the best in the world at what you do?" And I paused and I gave it a little bit of thought. Maybe I hesitated for a second and then I said, "Yes." He shot back immediately, "Well, why didn't you say that?" And that question really hit me in the chest because I didn't really have an answer on the stage [music] and I've been weighing up this question ever since.

When I look back on it now, there were two reasons that I hadn't said it. >> [music] >> Firstly, I'm South African and we're not the most arrogant bunch. We're not raised to say things like that out loud generally. It's more of a modesty or a tall poppy syndrome kind of culture and I like that about South Africa most of the time.

We quietly go about changing the world. Some of us go quietly and some of us not so much. Elon Musk Instead, you wait for other people to say it about you and the moment you say it about yourself, you've broken a rule that nobody really wrote down. Secondly, and this is the real one, I didn't believe it.

So, I didn't say it. It was that simple. >> [snorts] >> I didn't believe we were the best in the world and in my brain, if you're not the best in the world, you don't say you're the best in the world. Except Muhammad Ali.

He sits firmly on the other side of this conversation and he might be the best example of the opposite ever recorded. He famously said very loudly and very publicly, "I am the greatest." >> I tell I tell you before he'd beaten anyone and proved it. He said it himself years later, "I said that I was even before I knew I was. I figured if I said it enough, I would convince the world." The confidence wasn't the reward for the work.

The confidence was the engine that produced it. There's actually a name for what's going on when the words when the words come first. Self-perception theory says we don't always know what we believe by looking inward. A lot of the time we watch our own behavior, including our own words, and infer our beliefs from that, especially when we're not fully sure to begin with.

Say it enough out loud and part of you starts treating your own statement as evidence. In the same way you treat someone else saying it about you. There's a blunter version of this from a classic experiment. Kids who were repeatedly told they were tidy kids became measurably tidier than the kids who were just told to clean up.

Nobody trained the behavior directly. They were just handed a label and grew into it. Claiming it out loud can do work that discipline never gets around to. So, which is it?

Do the work first or say it first and let the work catch up? I've landed more on the Rick Rubin side of this conversation. I'm more interested in finding enjoyment in doing the work and producing what I want to see in the world. I'm figuring out what I enjoy with my own interest and curiosity, my own standards and consistency, and the ambition I bring to it, something will emerge.

And here's where it actually gets interesting. Because there are two completely different reasons to say it out loud, and they get treated like the same argument when they're not. One, saying it holds you to it. Announce a goal to someone and you're now more likely to follow through with that goal.

And this is one of the more replicated findings in goal-setting research. And it gets stronger the higher the status of the person you tell. So, tell a mentor, not a mate. The claim becomes a debt that you have to pay off with the work.

Two. Right now, in the world, the loudest claims get the most attention, whether or not it's earned yet. There's a real research behind that. One study followed over 150,000 small business loan applicants and found that the more overconfident ones were judged more competent and more fundable, despite performing no better on actual skills tests.

There's an ongoing split amongst researchers on why. One camp says more confidence always buys more credibility, and the other says confidence gets punished the moment someone checks. And I think that reality sits somewhere in between. Confident people win by default and only lose if somebody else checks.

And most people never check. That's where the opportunity to do the work lives, in the gap between claiming and defending the claim. Fall in love with becoming great and doing the work, and then you might actually do enough work to become great. Ali made his massive claim, and then about 2 and 1/2 years later went on to beat Sonny Liston.

Usually, I'd lean heavily on Dunning-Kruger effect here, the most famous finding in this exact subject. But even it doesn't hold up if you check, and I did. Dunning-Kruger is the idea that the least skilled are the most confident about their own abilities. It turns out that some of that effect is just maths, that if you're near the bottom of a scale with a floor of zero, any noise in your self-guess can only push your estimate up, never down, because the floor is zero.

So, the worst performers look overconfident even when they're not. So, the most cited study about people overclaiming their own ability is itself a [snorts] bit of an overclaim. Now, I don't have a clear answer for you. I don't think there is one.

I think that there are people who say they're the best because they're already doing the work and the words are just catching up to reality. And then there are people who say it because saying it is the only way anyone looks their direction long enough to find out if it's true. Both of those people sound identical the day they say the thing, and we only find out which one they really were years later. So, here's the actual question I want to leave you with.

If you're one of the many smart, capable people who has gone quiet about what you're actually good at, is that humility or is that agency that you've quietly given up? Tell me where you land. This debate is still raging in my own life and in my own brain, so I want to hear from you now.