The mythical line between confidence and overconfidence.

If you look from my perspective, I have been quite a confident guy throughout my life. But when you look from my sister's perspective, then I am way too overconfident to achieve my goals. I have always been confused by these two words as people always say that there is a thin line between confidence and overconfidence. But when you see carefully, there isn't any difference between the former and the latter word. The line between confidence and overconfidence is mythical. As that mythical line depends on our success or failure.

Let's first understand what is confidence. It is a feeling of having faith or belief in something. But what does that actually mean? Well, simply put, when you know that you are doing better than guessing, it’s the confidence or faith, as Wikipedia describes it, "a chosen course of action is better or most effective". Now to understand the very notion of confidence and over-confidence, we must understand the nature of success and failure.

'Success' and 'Failure' are two of the most important words that we use throughout our life to describe the outcome of every action. Life is nothing but a series of poorly made decisions, some luck-play and a collection of success and failures. I know that this blog post is not about 'Success' and 'Failure', neither is it titled, 'what is life'. But understanding the above concept is very important as we all define the whole life by measuring the outcome of the action, FYI, that is either failure or success. More on this later, let's resume to our tittle.

So, just like we judge a lot of things based on the outcome of an action, same is the case with one's confidence. When one is confident and he makes his move, the outcome of that decision will determine whether one was confident or over-confident. If he fails, that's because he was over-confident whereas if he succeeds, it's because he was so confident.

Let's take an example of a poker player, who has three choices. This poker player is smart that he kept the record of every card felled, thus he has somewhat an idea of the winning percentage of all the card. One card of them had the probability of winning 70% so he went with that card. So the outcome of this move will decide whether he was a confident and smart poker player or just an over-confident guy. Even though it is way better than guessing which would be having a 33.33% chance of winning, yet the victory is not assured. Thus the failure or success status effects confidence status of our innocent poker player.

While it's said that our confidence/over-confidence decides the outcome of our action. It is quite the opposite, maybe one of the biggest irony in the world. As it's the 'success' or 'failure' that decides the very notion of confidence and over-confidence in our society.