An Engineer's Guide To Cultivating Confidence

You don't need to "feel" confident to be confident. Here's how.

For most of us, confidence is like trying to recall a specific word on the tip of your tongue. The word comes when the stakes are low, but the harder you focus on it in a conversation, the further it slips away.

We hope we have it before a big presentation. We wish for it when interviewing for a job. We’d love to have it when in a group of strangers.

But we wait for that word on the tip of our tongue to show up and we’re disappointed when it doesn’t.

The word always comes later when you don’t need it.

My wife still makes fun of me for a story that almost stopped my YouTube ambitions before they ever started. Back in 2013, the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay came to Seattle to film an episode of his show Kitchen Nightmares. If you haven’t seen it, Gordon finds a failing restaurant and spends a week trying to save it, which usually involves a lot of shouting.

My wife and I had a choice. We could be diners in the “before” group, eating the original food, or the “after” group, eating the new and …