Hitting the sweet spot

December 12, 2006 ⋅ 1 Comment »

On Creating Passionate Users, Kathy wrote a great article about telling your inner voice to shut up. After reading the article, I went to play a soccer game, and played what was easily my best game of the indoor season. During the game, I did things that I would never have thought I could do. As Kathy says, it’s amazing what you can achieve when you don’t let the logical side of your brain get in the way.

Afterwards, I started thinking about that sweet spot between humility and confidence. It happens when you are confident enough that you slightly overestimate your abilities, driving you to do succeed at things that you couldn’t before; but humble enough that you avoid those really stupid mistakes. I think the confidence comes from the emotion part of your brain — basically, your ego; and the humility comes from the logical part. So to find the sweet spot, you need to shut the logical part up just enough.


1 Comments:

  1. Kathy Sierra - December 12, 2006:

    You made my night with this post, Patrick : )

    Cheers, and thanks for adding your thoughts about this. I think you made an excellent point about a humility vs. confidence sweet spot.