Where Confidence Comes From

The rock wall and the wild pitch.

A ways back, I was learning to rock climb. Or, more accurately, learning to “boulder,” since there’s a distinction. I won’t go far as to say you should try it, but it’s a helluva workout.

You stare at a wall, assess oddly-shaped colored pieces jutting out, then attempt to climb to the top.

Each day in the rock gym, I saw chiseled, limber bros with man-buns — the kind of men you see in Michelob Ultra commercials or under a string of Edison-bulb Christmas lights on a rooftop in Bushwick — scaling walls like upside-down spider-monkeys in the blink of an eye.

Each time, I’d immediately tense up and think, “Fuck this shit. I’m gonna get laughed out of this joint. This is going to be just like the day I did CrossFit.”

Anyway, when you “boulder” — sorry, it’s a stupid verb and you know it — fear starts to take hold as you rise ever higher, and you start sweating the possibility of missing your mark and tumbling to your doom.

Knowing this, I decided to embark on a bold and seemingly capricious strategy: I would fall on purpose after each successive rung. So, climb one rung, fall, climb two rungs, fall, climb three, etc., etc.—y’all can count, y’all get it.

Now, why would I intentionally short-circuit my progress each time?

Because I wanted to know what it felt like to fall from the very top. I wanted to know how badly it would hurt. I wanted to know it would never be as bad as I’d feared. I wanted to learn how to fall.

If the first time I fell was an accident, I might be too afraid to climb well or to get back on the wall. I wouldn’t be as … confident.

What Confidence Is Not

Often, we imagine confidence to be endemic — a “maybe-she’s-born-with-it” / “maybe-she’s-just-hot-and-rich-and-no-one-tells-her-no” cocktail of adventurousness, optimism, and a zen-like calm. An overarching sense of, “I’m going to do this thing because I want to, and what’s the worst that can happen?”

Still, others believe confidence is a byproduct of success. That after you’ve worked at something long enough and gotten good enough at it, the real trophy was the confidence you accumulated along the way.

I don’t believe either is quite right.

Instead, I’d prefer to consider the case of baseball player Rick Ankiel. [Wait … who?]

When A Pitcher Just Can’t Pitch No More

Rick Ankiel, in 2000 at age 20, was one of the top pitchers in Major League Baseball. A pitching prodigy, as it were.

Deploying a scorching fastball and a beguiling curve well beyond his years, he finished in the league’s Top 10 in earned run average and strikeouts, helping his St. Louis Cardinals team to a playoff appearance.

Ankiel looked on his way to a prosperous, prestigious career. Fate had other ideas.

Injuries to the rest of the Cards’ starting pitching rotation that autumn forced him into the role of Game 1 starter in the National League Divisional Series — a role typically given to the ace [or, a team’s best pitcher, for those of you who don’t speak baseball], not for a young lion in his first meaningful year as a pro.

In the third inning of Game 1, Ankiel suddenly lost command of his fastball. He faced eight batters and allowed four runs on two hits, four walks, and five wild pitches.

In his next start — Game 2 of the National League Championship Series — Ankiel threw five wild pitches in the first inning before being removed. In his next appearance, he threw two more wild pitches and walked two of the four batters he faced.

The Cardinals lost the NLCS, and in the years that followed Rick Ankiel was never the same. Injury and control problems plagued him for the rest of his pitching career.

Was what Rick Ankiel suffered a “Crisis of Confidence?” Yes. (In baseball, they cutely refer to this as the “yips.”)

Ankiel’s sustained excellence from ages 0–20 and up until the third inning of that playoff game let him develop mastery — a kind of confidence you get when you know you’re good at something. And it’s something you have until the situation changes. Like a playoff game.

That kind of confidence is a fickle mistress. It’s only as enduring as, well … your next pitch. You have it until you can feel the fear associated with expected failure.

And to talk about that, we need to go back to that rock wall.

You Want Me On that Wall

Eventually, I managed to make it up the wall without falling — exactly one run after falling from the top.

I had already fallen as far as I could. While it wasn’t pleasant, it was easier than I’d expected, because I had already fallen so many times. From there, I continued climbing up other routes on the wall.

Before long, I had mastered most of the walls and felt comfortable. It helped me grow stronger.

However, it’s not entirely translatable confidence across time and space. It’s been years since I last approached a wall. I’d be rusty and unsteady. I’d know how to build my confidence back up — the way I did before.

Confidence is, in fact, a product of repetition, but it’s not a byproduct of success. It’s a byproduct of intentional failure.

It’s knowing how the fall feels, embracing it, getting comfortable with it, and having a solid plan to try again.

“You’re A Failure!” Yeah, and?

The dictionary defines confidence as “a state of certainty about your abilities, or the truth of something.”

When we bake failure into incremental growth, we acquaint ourselves with it, so we can develop certainty in our ability to overcome it.

Thus, the key to confidence is to set ourselves up for failure — not in a way that we’re surprised or defeated, but encouraged and comforted.

People who seem confident because they’ve mastered many things are simply people who’ve failed incrementally forward at all of them.

I’ve failed at several things while growing incrementally more skillful at them: learning Portuguese, car maintenance, love, writing, and baking.

In some cases, I learned what failure felt like, how to prepare for it, how to avoid it, and — most importantly — how to embrace it as a learning tool. My mileage varied based on how easily I could plan for it. Frankly, I’m better at learning a foreign language than I am at relationships. Duolingo keeps score; love doesn’t.

Finally, A Heartwarming Comeback Tale

As I said earlier about Rick Ankiel, he was never the same — but that’s not quite the end of his story.

In 2007, nearly seven years after his infamous playoff meltdown and subsequent flameout, Ankiel returned to the major leagues with the Cardinals.

However, not as a pitcher — as an outfielder.

And this was what happened in his first game back. If you’re into chills, I highly advise you to watch it.

Quite the re-entry, no?

Ankiel would spend a handful of productive years at the highest level of baseball. In his career, he hit 76 home runs.

He became one of only four players in MLB history to start at least a full season as both a pitcher and a position player — the last player to do it before Shohei Ohtani ruined two-way excellence for everybody.

[The other two? Hall-of-Fame first-baseman George Sisler and some fella named Babe Ruth.]

Perhaps we’re so bad at understanding where confidence comes from because it often looks like resilience.

Perhaps that’s why successful entrepreneurs preach the gospel of “fail early, fail often” or “move fast, break things.”

Confidence can only come from repeatedly hitting the bottom, dusting yourself off, and climbing again, until the heights you reach feel like the places you were supposed to be all along.

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