Chapter Seven: We Should All Wear Ray-Bans to the Office

It’s up to you.  Confidence is about looking at an incomplete circle and filling in the remaining 60 degrees in a way that will give you a better chance to be successful.  It’s also about spending enough time looking at circles that when you eyes view an arc, your mind sees a circle.  Confidence is not a guarantee of success but a pattern of thinking that will improve your likelihood of success, a tenacious search for ways to make things work.  Most people tend to be specialists in projecting  “realism,” disappointment, or total disaster.  They log in an extraordinary amount of thinking about the things that might go wrong.  Most people are not great performers as a result of their intelligence.  Great performers don’t get smart; they develop and then rely on their Gestalt-style confidence.  But I repeat: it is not something they do on the spot.  They don’t suddenly stare at black and white checks and see red.  They have been staring at red and white so long, either through training or experience, that they’re geared for red and white, even when presented the darkest of pictures.
Confidence is about Possibilities not Probabilities

When I ask my clients to tell me about their dreams, they often reply by compiling an odds sheet on their careers – as if they were betting on a horse.  They’ve clearly put a lot of thought into the chances of a promotion in the near term, landing a big client, becoming a department head in a few years or a senior VP, getting recruited by a better company, maybe eventually becoming a CEO, or starting their own multimillion dollar company.  Many people come to me with the purpose of improving their odds.  “Who cares about the odds?” I say.  “What does that have to do with performance?”  The more they stumble trying to explain it to me, the more I see someone who’s either not confident or not excited about the prospect of making their dreams come true.

Most people are not inclined to bet on long-shots.  If someone thinks the odds are 20 to 1 that they’ll land a certain account, they are unlikely to bother trying; they certainly won’t pour in every ounce of effort and tie up all their free time.  I find that when people translate their goals into probabilities, they tend to look for even money or a 50-50 chance.  They’re into safety over happiness.  I advise them to stop thinking about the probabilities and start focusing on the possibilities.  Exceptional thinkers are turned on by the concepts in their mind and the feelings in their gut, not by ideas based on some  external, mathematical prediction.  If what juices them might come true – somehow, some way, some day – then they know they’ll have a blast trying to figure out how to make that possibility happen.  Whether it does or not is immaterial.

Computing the odds against you is one way to make a rational decision.  It’s also a good way to lower your confidence.  If there’s something in life you really want, you won’t get it, or experience it, by sitting around doing calculations.  By basing your efforts on better criteria than statistical probability, you can save yourself a lot of misery and depression – energy that you can then put into finding ways to make the things you believe in come to fruition.  “Why risk your reputation?” is a question exceptional thinkers do not understand.  What they hate risking is being complacent, bored, or unfilled.  The best in every business are always looking for the next big challenge.

In 1992, when an IBM board member asked Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. if he was interested in running the company, the former CEO of RJR Nabisco and ex-President of American Express passed.  IBM’s sales were plummeting, its stock had decreased by 50 percent over the past five years.  Gerstner was aware that both the Wall Street Journal and the London Economist had predicted that IBM was on the verge of becoming another late, great American company.  After he got his first look at IBM’s current financials and budgets, he saw that the company’s sales and profits were declining too fast for comfort and that its cash position was scary.  “On the basis of those documents,” he later recalled, “the odds were no better than one in five that IBM could be saved and [they indicated] that I should never take the position.”  But the board was persistent, Gerstner grew intrigued, and the advice of an old friend also caught his attention:  “IBM is the job you’ve been training for since you left Harvard Business School.  Go for it!”  Gerstner agreed; his track record as “a change agent” might be just what the company needed.  These were the variables that played into what Gerstner later called “my gluttony for world class challenges.”