The difference between competence and confidence is that the former refers to one’s ability to do things and the latter refers to one’s belief in one’s ability to do things.

These attributes often inform each other: if you’re competent, over time you’ll tend to develop a confidence in your abilities, and if you’re confident you’ll probably keep trying and learning until your abilities measure up to your faith in them.

In my experience, there’s a similar dynamic between believing in myself and believing myself: the former referring to something like confidence, the latter referring to my certainty that I will live up to my ambitions—that I’ll do what I commit to doing.

Many capable people make big plans, but then fail to go all-out achieve to those plans.

They don’t struggle to reach those goals because they’re incapable, they struggle because they lack followthrough. A consistent lack of followthrough can make not finishing things feel okay and normal, which in turn can lead to a lack of self-belief.

Not following through isn’t always a bad thing: sometimes knowing when to stop and move on to other things is more prudent than pointlessly chugging along, despite no longer deriving value from the pursuit in question.

But habitually planning grand things and then stopping as soon as the going gets difficult (or some new, shiny pursuit appears) can leave folks who are more than capable of doing impressive and valuable stuff with little to show for that potentiality.

Over time they learn that their commitments aren’t real commitments, and this lack of internal trust can make future strivings all the more difficult because their completing-things muscles have atrophied; it’s intuitively understood that new ambitions needn’t be taken seriously, so they probably won’t be.

I’m not always capable of doing the things I want to do, but I have worked hard to ensure that I always believe myself when I make a commitment to try: even if that commitment requires I attempt big, currently-out-of-reach-for-me things, I know I’ll give it my best because that’s what I always do.

This has lent me the motive power to push beyond what I think I’m capable of on a regular basis, which in turn has helped me dream bigger than what my current capabilities and accomplishments would endorse.

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