Why Trying to Be Confident Makes You Less Confident

It is July 1849 in Lower Manhattan and a man named William Thompson is walking around, walking up to strangers and asking them after a few moments if he could borrow their watch. Now, at the time, pocket watches were very nice, they were very expensive, they were worth a lot, and for some reason, the

strangers kept giving the watches to him. From there, Thompson would talk for a little while longer, kind of distract the person, and then he would just get up and walk away. Thompson stole dozens of watches this way. It was a crime so odd, so unique that the New York Herald felt like they had to come up with a

name for it. And the name they came up with was confidence man. The name stuck, and for many decades a confidence man was a swindler. It was a fraud. It was a thief. It was somebody who would talk you out of your own money. These were the snake oil salesman of the Wild West,

the people who would show up at your door and promise a cure for cancer and then walk off with your life savings. These were known as confidence men or as they later became known, con men. For most of human history, confidence was largely seen as a negative thing. It was a pejorative term. Confidence is rooted

in the Latin term with faith or believing in somebody or something. And for most of Western history, to believe in anything, to have faith in anything other than God was an offense to God. As late as the 17th century, somebody who walked around with confidence was somebody who walked around with a level

of narcissism and self-absorption that was looked down on by everybody else. So, how did a word that became synonymous with criminal fraud become associated with the feeling that we all want to have in ourselves today? Should it have become associated with that term? Should we want confidence? Should we try to be more confident? Should we