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John Craig-Sharples dissects an advert:

Beneath the statement, ‘NOW I INVENT INSTEAD OF PREDICT.  I AM A VISIONARY’ a silver-haired senior excutive sits at the shoreline of an expansive lake, gazing out to the horizon.  With his strong chin and resolute expression, the man seems poised to get up and walk across the water, bring peace to the Middle East, solve the world’s energy crisis and reform MPs expenses all before lunch.

I appreciate that if you want to attract people to your expensive management programme you need to make it sound impressive.  ‘I USED TO STEAL ALL MY BEST IDEAS FROM COLLEAGUES BUT NOW I’M A SELF-SUFFICIENT MUDDLER-THROUGHER’  clearly doesn’t have the right ring to it.

Adverts are strange things. If anyone said, in everyday conversation, “I am a visionary”, you’d think they were a psychopath; you’d probably be right. But we’ve come to accept hyperbole in advertising. And not just professional advertising. Everyone knows that people dissemble and exaggerate in their CVs, or on their blogs or MySpace pages. We might not like it, it’s just the way things are.

Self-promotion is a vicious cycle. In this, CVs are like MPs expenses. When everyone’s lining their pockets, you’re a fool not to; when everyone’s exaggerating their abilities, the same applies. If you want to get that job, you’re obliged in some way to play the game.

To my mind, the party leaders were to blame for MPs expenses. They had the power and the position; if they’d taken a lead others would have followed. As it was - and I know this for a fact - senior members were giving party members instruction in how to game the system. Backbench MPs were guilty of cupidity, greed and blindness, but who among us can be absolved from those sins? It’s the people with responsibility who should take the blame - not that they are.

Compared to self-promotion, however, expenses are an easy fix. Where are the leaders in society as a whole? What are the solutions? Companies could insist on honesty, I suppose. But that request would be a bit like an assessment at work: no matter what they say, the rule is never tell the truth. Why would you? Instead, the best tactic is to feign honesty, while continuing to cover up your faults. Except for that perfectionism, of course. And that insistence on working too hard, goddammit.

Call me a pessimist. But I’m afraid the future only holds more bullshit.

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Gnomic baseball sage Yogi Berra asked that question, and it’s a good one. For sportsmen, it’s particularly perplexing. But in our daily lives we all encounter the problem: can you think and act at the same time?

An excellent New Scientist article explores this subject by looking at the case of Ralph Guldahl. At one point, Guldahl was the greatest golfer in the world, a model of metronomic consistency. Then, without warning, he lost form and faded away. The trigger, according to golfing mythology? Guldahl’s authorship of a book (not a book!): Groove Your Golf.

I’ve written before about confidence and the paradox of hedonism and the New Scientist has some evidence to support this theory:

Last year, psychologists Kristin Flegal of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Michael Anderson of the University of St Andrews in the UK showed that thinking aloud had a lasting effect: after explaining a successful putt, skilled golfers took twice as many putts to sink their next ball. In fact, explaining at length had the effect of temporarily wiping out all their expertise.

The problem stems from the need to describe movements that have become instinctive, in effect switching the brain from autopilot to manual. To make matters worse, the focus shifts from motor skills to language, and the need to find words to explain something normally done without thinking.

In the end - and with pleasing roundedness - the article concludes that the book did not destroy Guldahl’s game. But there’s definitely something there.

I wonder if what always seems to me like the high incidence of OCD-type behaviours among sportsmen - Wayne Rooney’s fondness for the vacuum cleaner being the best known example - has anything to do with their need to avoid thinking? (For other examples, see Tait, Matthew and Bentley, David).

And, if this is the case: will the increasing importance of confidence in general inspire greater levels of OCD across the population as a whole?

Just a thought…

UPDATE (30.07.09): Jonah Lehrer has an interesting article on choking in Observer Sports Monthly. His conclusion: that having a meaningless phrase running through your head can stop you bottling it. An idea he clearly got from the Simpsons episode.

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This is how I’ll remember him:

UPDATE (30.06.09): from the Times:

Off the Wall is the critics’ choice of Jackson records, fusing the fizz of his Jackson 5 days with a gorgeously well-tailored Quincy Jones production. What’s new on Don’t Stop is hunger: giddy with independence, he’s more than ready for everything life can offer, he’s itching for it — that twitchy guitar line and slashing strings make a study in delighted impatience. If you want to know what a Jackson free of his demons might have sounded like, start here.

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Everyone who went to Cambridge receives Cam, the alumni magazine. In most cases, I imagine, it is passed directly into the bin. I dutifully open mine, because I’m that sort of person. Then I throw it away. It’s not that it’s not well-presented, or well-written. It’s just somehow… institutional.

Sometimes, though, Cam comes up with something really worthwhile. This issue contains an excellent piece of architectural history by Edward Hollis (Sidney 1989 - yes, it’s that sort of publication). Starting with the famous “Reality Checkpoint“, the graffitied lamp-post marking the entrance into Cambridge, Hollis asks what is real and what is unreal about the architecture of Cambridge:

Nearly a century ago, the Viennese architect Adolf Loos observed that architecture originates not, as one might expect, in the dwelling, but in the monument. The houses of our ancestors, contigent responses to their ever-shifting needs, have perished. Their tombs and temples, which were intended to endure for the eternity of death and the gods, remain, and it is they that form the canon of architectural history.

… all buildings, in order to remain beautiful, must not change; and all buildings, in order not to change, must aspire to the funereal condition of the monument.

This reminds me very much of some contemporary attitudes towards the body. We are told that the plucking, pummelling, pumping up, shrinking and remoulding will keep us beautiful, but in reality it will just keep us - unchanging, unaltering and deathless.

The anorexic is the epitome of this thought process. She aspires to be beautiful, but her starvation diet is a fight against the advances of her body, forcing it back to the bloodless state of childhood. Flesh, that inconvenient reminder of mortality, is suppressed. The body itself is turned into a monument.

Rather quaintly, Cam appears online only in an archive, updated after the event. So you’ll have to wait to read the complete article; or to buy the book, which comes out in September. One thing you can do in the meantime: check out The Architect’s Dream, by the nineteenth-century painter Thomas Cole. As Hollis says, it is everything the deathless view of architecture hopes to be. And entirely on the wrong side of Reality Checkpoint.

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Michael Chabon has some good lines on charisma in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union:

Litvak knew for certain that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave-off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.

There’s a lot here that is also true of confidence. Its amorality, for one, which is why it seems so ridiculous the way in which education is increasingly geared towards confidence-building. In the first chapter of my book - first draft finally done - I phrase my doubts thus:

Can it really be right that everything comes down to confidence – and that more of it is always the answer? This is what we were told when the economy crashed; it’s what we are told about schooling and education. The problem child is always lacking in confidence, if you believe some people. Assertiveness training and even therapy are now relatively commonplace in schools, all part of the great project to endow children with confidence. I don’t know the detail, and I am sure there is method to these schemes. Yet my memory of school – not so long ago, really – has the confident kids messing about, while the meek and mild sat at the front of the class. Perhaps, a too-soft voice says, those children didn’t have the right kind of confidence. Which begs the question: what is the right kind – your kind or their kind? Another reason to be suspicious. How odd it is that this thing we claim to value and to want is so difficult to define.

But there are also differences between charisma and confidence. Charisma seems to me to be something you either have or you don’t; charismatic people are born, not made. Confidence, in contrast, can be acquired. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it could be instructed, in a classroom, with textbook, exams and so on, but it can definitely be learnt, one way or another.

That is why Chabon is so right to call the charismatic half-fortunate. Those born with a power like that have to come to terms with it and with the effect it has on other people. I often think this about people born with immense beauty, or innate sexiness. Naturally enough, they will see themselves as normal, knowing as they do their faults and flaws. Everyone else will see them as abnormal, and react accordingly. For the beautiful, the sexy and the charismatic, therefore, the world is a strange place, in which the normal social rules of cause and effect do not quite apply. Some may see this as good fortune. It destroys just as many.

Philip Larkin is just the sort of miserable git to see the dangers in being exceptional. In the poem he wrote on the birth of Sally Amis, he made the unusual request:

May you be ordinary;
Have like other women
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable in itself,
Stops all the rest from working.

That sounds about right to me. I wonder what Marilyn would say, if she were still around.

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The New Yorker has generally replaced the NYRB in my affections; in the end, I suspect, I may have to choose between them. For now I’m still reading both, which feels far more like a regular job than anything else I do. It’s worth it for pieces like Michael Dirda’s on Patricia Highsmith, author of the Tom Ripley novels: “This Woman Is Dangerous“.

Ripley is one of the quintessential con-men, so it’s unsurprising that confidence features so largely in the novels. Three points struck me in particular:

1. Ripley’s attitude towards forgery and imitation. As he puts it:

…if one painted more forgeries than one’s own paintings, wouldn’t the forgeries become more natural, more real, more genuine to oneself, even, than one’s own paintings? Wouldn’t the effort finally go out of it and the work become second nature?

This strikes me as very similar to the process most of us go through to acquire confidence (as it is, of course, to the process in which Tom Ripley became Dickie Greenleaf, in The Talented Mr Ripley):

Ripley is the great exemplar of the self-help phrase beloved of AA and books on confidence: “fake it til you make it”.

2. The ease and flexibility of the true con-artist. As Dirda says:

Tom alone is a supremely confident artist, a master of improv. While everyone else leads a derivative life, shaped and bound by the actions of others, he remains utterly free.

Flexibility is one of confidence’s most prized attributes. It is what separates confidence from arrogance. Those who cannot inhabit their parts completely struggle to exhibit it; for Tom it comes entirely naturally. More incentive then, to fake it all the way.

3. What Dirda calls the unstable nature of modern identity:

In this counterfeit world only the pragmatic Tom survives, for he alone recognises that there is no distinction that matters between what is real and what is only apparently real.

It makes me wonder. In the postmodern world of confidence, is it only talented Mr. Ripley’s who have what it takes?

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I’ve had to turn down an invitation to the Manchester Festival. Had I gone, I would have been sure to see Jeremy Deller’s Procession. I met Deller once and he didn’t come across as a bit of a tit (sample interaction: JD pauses to check hair and make-up before getting into lift). But he’s a bloody good artist.

The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone had an interesting interview with Deller last week - sample quote: another day, another cravat - which raised the issue of confidence:

Jeremy Deller can’t draw, can’t paint, can’t sculpt, can’t do any of the things we traditionally associate with artists; but I have rarely met somebody so confident in his status as an artist.

I posted on the weekend about the uncertain relationship between confidence and achievement and this is more evidence of that uncertainty. It also hints at a reason for confidence’s modern prominence.

The shift in art - from technical skill to “art of ideas”, from Valezquez to Warhol (whom Deller describes as the most important artist of the last 200 years) - is symptomatic of a wider shift in Western society. So many things now are more a question of perception than they are of reality, to use an unavoidable false dichotomy. Even international diplomacy, long seen by philosophers as the ultimate realm of conflict and aggression, has become all about the “optics”, as the current vogue for soft power demonstrates. We can see this shift in Deller’s art, which includes ordinary people and seeks overtly to question the boundaries of traditional art.

Confidence is an unreal thing with very real consequences. It lies at the core of all soft power, because it has the power to shift perceptions. So as the world becomes more unreal - more Warhol-esque, one could say - confidence is bound to become more and more important. People might even end up fighting wars over it. Oh - they already have.

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Decca Aitkenhead’s recent interview with TV presenter Ben Fogle almost made an interesting point about confidence  before the chip on her shoulder got in the way:

Confidence is a theme which crops up a lot with Fogle. He says that as a boy he was “the shyest person in the world. I would hide behind my parents’ legs at social events, I was even shy in front of my sisters … But the one thing I took from my public school education was confidence.”

I can feel myself bridling at this breezy description of class privilege, and ask if he thinks it’s fair for confidence to exist independently of achievement.

Fair? What a ridiculous question. It’s normal for Guardian journalists to ask interviewees to apologise for their upbringing. But Aitkenhead is asking Fogle to apologise for the nature of confidence.

The relationship between confidence and achievement is difficult to sum up. There is a relationship, certainly - if you’re good at something you’re more likely to be confident. But it’s not a direct relationship, as Fogle’s experience indicates. And he’s hardly the only one.

I’ll post more on this in the future. For the meantime, here’s a thought: that the dynamic between confidence and achievement resembles the dynamic between money and its real-life basis.

John Lanchester, who’s been one of the best and most literate commentators on the financial crisis, wrote an interesting article on this subject for the New Yorker. The piece was called “Melting into Air“:

For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always “deferred,” moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail.

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When I told my Grandfather I was going on holiday, he said:

How can you go on holiday when you’re on holiday all the time?

I said:

Good question.

I’ll have to let you know. Back in a week.

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A new study has come out showing that humans prefer cockiness to expertise. The Times of India welcomed this news with its normal scientific rigour:

Your astrologer may not always be bang on target while predicting your future, but you still tend to pay him regular visits, all because of the confidence with which he discusses things with you.

Joking aside, this study - which I must confess I haven’t read, although I have printed it off, which is pretty much the same thing in my book - seem to raise the issue Malcolm Gladwell commented on recently. Gladwell argued that confidence would almost inevitably lead to overconfidence, and that this was most likely an evolutionary adaptation,

… because appearing “bigger and stronger” than you really are keeps you from being attacked.

Over on Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow has a different view. Citing the case of a trader who starts to think the market might turn bearish when he has spent months betting the other way, Dillow suggests that the desire to appear competent might encourage the trader to ignore his information and stick with his previous position:

To an outsider, our trader looks like he’s committing some combination of the confirmation bias or over-confidence. But in fact, he’s acting rationally, maximizing his expected utility.

For my money - not very much, as you know - both positions are dubious because their groundings - evolutionary psychology and rational choice theory respectively - offer such impoverished views of what we might call human nature. But Gladwell and Dillow only differ over the mechanism. When it comes to the inevitability of overconfidence, they’re on the same side - the side I like to think of as my side.

Most of the attention given to this report has focused on the way louder voices crowd out sane ones - an issue the brilliant Peggy Noonan looked at recently. But this is a sideshow. The real question concerns a certain father-of-two in the United States, and the immense confidence he exhibits when dealing effectively and efficiently with any number of impossible challenges.

Will Obama succumb to overconfidence? Watch David Brooks wrestle with his beliefs, and come to no firm conclusion, in this interesting interview.

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