Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it.
Stan Smith
To err is to human, and so is to learn from those mistakes. After all, what is the point of being unsuccessful in our ventures if we fail to draw the right lessons and achieve personal or professional growth in our lives? A person who learns from their debacles turns them into stepping stones to success. As for those who don’t, failures become more of a regular fixture in their lives, to the point that they are forced into believing that they are not good enough to achieve their goals. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.
Experience is something that we get over time, after repetitive failures. It is what teaches us to learn from our mistakes. That said, it is only part of the process. Even if one is smart enough to see what our frustrated plans are trying to teach us, one still needs the ability to put those lessons into practice. And that is where confidence comes into play.
You see, a smart but unsure person is like a chained elephant – they know the path to the jungle, but they lack the self-belief to step out of their comfort zone and get there. And until they develop that conviction, they are going to have little success getting away from the confinement that they know they should not be in. If experience is the theoretical knowledge of one’s failures and how they can overcome those shortcomings, confidence is the flair needed to actually overcome those shortcomings. If experience is theory, confidence is all about its practical implementation. Both are complementary to each other and one needs both experience and self-belief to make it big in life.
Stanley Roger Smith, more popularly known as Stan Smith, is an American former world-number-one tennis player. Presently well known for a namesake shoe brand, Smith once said, “Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it.”