confidence is NOT key

Society screams "Confidence is key." This is true when you're competing, performing in some sport, and perhaps flirting. But it's not true when dealing with things outside your knowledge. Confidence does not help a team get to the best ideas. Yet people still cope with not-knowing by telling themselves confidence is key. They hide their "weakness" of not-knowing by pretending to know. Polluting a potential A+ team's ability to function. This flaw is ubiquitous in your everyday off-the-cuff conversations. You either have this flaw or know someone that does. The good news is that there is a beautiful solution.

Confidence and accuracy are negatively correlated, yet people act like being confident increases accuracy. "Not realizing this dynamic, is the greatest tragedy of people" - Ray Dalio here. You see this all too many times in off-the-cuff conversations with friends or colleagues. In debates, if you don't have that split-second response, maybe your argument appears weaker. I would say the goal of discovering truth then gets overshadowed by the more shiny goal, Mr. Win-The-Discussion. But, unfortunately, a lot of people actually don't even approach convos with the goal of discovering truth... (maybe they convince themselves they are "speaking up for what they believe in"). This is NOT how A+ teams operate. Too many people have this flaw and it intoxicates the team they are on.

Skills take time to acquire, but leaps within industries can be made quickly, if you know where to look. The great idea is not what needed the thousands of hours of “work”. Those thousands of hours are rather spent studying where attention has been previously and getting up to speed with the state of the art so that you can then start putting attention in what you believe are the right places according to your special intuition. This is not some linear/incremental procedure. This process is very abstract. But once you look in the right spot, the discovery can be so quick to uncover relative to the learning process. And the world is instantaneously changed forever. We are prevented from getting here with high egos pretending to know things, compromising the integrity of any dialogue they participate in.

"Most people believe that they're successful because of what they know." - Ray Dalio

But you are even more successful from how you deal with not-knowing! Do you tell yourself confidence is key?? Or do you execute a more thoughtful solution based out of reasoning.

That solution:

1. Say the words “I don’t know, but I have the capacity to.”
   Note: unfortunately you will have to get rid of your ego here ;)
2. Acquire that knowledge from the work that demands a deep focus from yourself: the learning of the concepts, mental models, relationships of whichever field it be. Have a good sense of the smart people to follow and lean on. Afterall, learning is just catching up on where previous people paid attention to. You have to catch up. To understand where we are going, know what we have tried. And reminder: While you follow people, learn from them, BUT understand their biases. The purpose of science will FOREVER be to always find the truth and nothing but the truth. Be aware of the different stakeholders and their incentives because science can be used to mislead and that is wrong.
3. Find the smartest people who disagree with you and learn how to have thoughtful disagreement. You 2 see truth differently. Continue to ask “What is true and how do we explore that together?” Have the capacity to hold 2 ideas in the mind at the same time. Be simultaneously open-minded AND assertive.

By following the above, you create a positive environment for an Idea Meritocracy to shine. Idea meritocracies operate with the goal of discovering the best ideas by working with the most capable and most open-minded people. This is more important than any single organization itself. Idea meritocracies enable A+ teams to revolutionize the world by allowing them to discover the greatest ideas. They are rare but they have the greatest capacity to do good for humanity. We should all be aware of how we are unintentionally preventing these cultures from existing!

Shout out to Ray Dalio. A lot of my thoughts are shaped from his teachings on Idea Meritocracies. Watch this wonderful interview with him by Lex Fridman.