How to have a high level of confidence in your effort

Have a high level of confidence in your effort

I.

Someone asked me recently what my hardest college course was. Easy: statistics. It was way more involved than I realized. Each week it got more technical and faster paced than I expected. However, one takeaway from statistics has stuck with me for over 10 years since: level of confidence. A level of confidence is a probability of an outcome to occur based on past data or events. For example, there is a high level of confidence that it will rain in Seattle each month. Why? Past data makes it statistically probable that rain will fall there monthly.

A technical definition from Atlas.cern: “Confidence Level (CL) is a statistical measure of the percentage of test results that can be expected to be within a specified range. For example, a Confidence Level of 95% means that the result of an action will probably meet expectations 95% of the time.”

I like the term ‘level of confidence’. Over the last 10 years in business and fitness, it is a concept I can see proven true time and again. Confidence is a word that means many things to different people, but I will take a perspective here to assign it a very specific meaning and more importantly, daily application.

Entrepeneur Alex Hormozi said, “Confidence doesn’t come from shouting affirmations in the mirror, but from giving yourself and undeniable stack of evidence that you are who you say you are.”

Whether Alex knows it or not, his idea of confidence is not off track from the statistical definition of confidence. Rather than confidence being something we find or need to muster up, Alex and the field of statistics view confidence as a signpost pointing towards past evidence, rather than a feeling in the moment.

I believe this is good news. When we view confidence as a feeling we hope to generate, it becomes very nebulous and it’s hard to know whether you have it or not. And if you do ‘have it’, how do you know it’s accurate and not delusion or overconfidence?

What we are considering here is a different route – confidence comes from viewing your past effort and experience and then viewing your next repetition in light of what you have already done. If you are going to present to a client and you have rehearsed your presentation 100 times instead of 5 times, you will feel more confident because you know you have done this before.

Take Kobe: the stories of his showing up at the gym at 3 am, calling his trainer to wake up, and then training for hours are legendary. But he didn’t do it so that you and I would be impressed. He did it so that as he stepped up to the free throw line or to take the winning shot, he could look back down a long line of past repetitions and have confidence in his likelihood of succeeding in that moment. It didn’t guarantee him making every shot, but he was convinced because of the work he put in that no one was more worthy to take that shot than him. That’s confidence.

Alex Hormozi also mentions the concept of ‘unreasonability’. ‘Unreasonability’ is the idea that you can apply a certain level of effort in a given pursuit to the point that it becomes unreasonable that you won’t be successful. It’s unreasonable to think that if we put Kobe in 5 of the biggest gametime moments that he wouldn’t make something special happen in at least a few of them.

It starts to become apparent that there is a cost to unreasonability, the effort needed to establish a high level of confidence in yourself in a given endeavor. That cost is effort itself. This idea starts with the view that most people don’t apply a high level of effort to a given task and/or they don’t understand the level of effort required to be successful.

A prime case and last Hormozi example, I promise: Alex described a billionaire CEO that asked him how to get better at posting content. This CEO was posting once a day to social. Alex then proceeded to tell him his own team posts 30-50 pieces of content per day. The difference wasn’t 1-2x, but 30-50x. Most people are not prepared for this answer to their question around appropriate level of effort in their field of pursuit.

This level of effort, at 30-50x, statistically gives Alex a much higher level of confidence of success. Why? Over a year of posting to social, his past data on makes it much more likely that we can predict his future success. It makes it unreasonable to think that he won’t be successful in his social media content strategy. He says he measures in 100’s – hours, reps, meetings, etc. – and that resets the standard for effort.

II.

Rather than asking, “What do I need to do to be successful at x?”, we can better prepare ourselves by asking, “What level of effort makes it unreasonable that I will not be successful?”. That mindset takes into account that nothing is guaranteed, but can stack up enough effort that it becomes highly unlikely you won’t achieve your goals over time. And that raises your personal level of confidence in your success.

I love Tim Ferriss’ question “what would this look like if it were easy?” We could translate that to “What would this look like if I measure effort in 100’s of reps?” What if I write 100 tweets this week? Or write 100 newsletters in a year? What if I spend 100 hours on client meetings? Or do 100 reps in this workout?

The point here is: sometimes excellence doesn’t require better strategy or more sophisticated technique. Sometimes it requires raising the standard for the effort we give. Raising the standard of effort may in fact be the first requirement for excellence. Repeated, consistent effort provides you with the precious repetitions of failure, over and over. If you don’t get discouraged, each failure makes you sharper and more developed. It’s sharp and developed people that then find success, and they repeat that success over time.

III.

Each day, we can ask ourselves, “What if I did this 100 times (or 1,000 or 10,000)?” Increase your reps, increase your failure, don’t get discouraged, then find success. Through increased effort, we can increase our level of confidence in ourselves, because we can look back at the evidence of our work and growth in the process.

Or in summary: work harder and good things will come.