Who You Could Be

We’ve seen how easy it is to feel insecure, and the damage it does to ourselves and others. We’ve also talked about what we can do to push back against it, and become someone who’s ready to defeat their insecurities once and for all.

Now we can take that final step.

Adler knew that even though pursuing confidence is hard, we’ll always have a guiding star, a light in the dark that can help us find the right way forward.

That light is our contribution to others.

As long as our actions are having a positive impact on the people around us, we know we’re doing the right thing to build confidence in ourselves.

No matter how successful you become, if it’s only benefiting you, then you will always feel insecure. You can chase greater and greater success for the rest of your life, but it’ll never make you happy with the person you are. And no matter how much you improve yourself, how healthy, skilled, and knowledgeable you become, if you aren’t using it to make other people’s lives better alongside your own, insecurity will always find you. You will never feel good enough.

We live in a world where everyone has an impact on everybody else. The way we choose to treat others, the parts of ourselves we share on social media, the careers we decide to pursue, and the relationships we build along the way, it all connects us to a vast web of other human beings. The only way, and I really do mean the only way, to be truly confident, is to make your impact as far reaching and positive as you possibly can.

This is the key ingredient that too many of us are missing in our lives. This is the end of the road in the pursuit of confidence.

We are only just starting to understand the true significance of these ideas, over 100 years since Adler first wrote about them.

It’s time to take that final step, and have a look at what’s waiting for us on the other side. For I truly believe that our entire future will be defined by the confidence we either gain or lose, right here and now.

Immortality

I’m going to make something clear before we start feeling too wholesome about contributing to the world.

The reason contribution makes us feel confident is because at a deep, existential level, it makes us feel immortal.

Insecurity is rooted in how well we think we’re doing in life, how likely our chances of survival are. So the absolute best way to weaken your insecurity is to create a part of yourself that can’t be killed. Something more than your body or mind, something that can carry on and keep a small part of who you are alive. Something immortal.

And that is exactly what our contributions become.

The proof that they’re the most important thing in life is all around you. Unless you’re deep in the wilderness while reading this book (possible, but not likely), you’ll see a world filled with things invented by people who are long gone. Roads, buildings, furniture, technology, even this book or the device you’re using to read it, it’s all been passed down to us by the people who came before. It’s their contributions that survived, the things they gave to others. This includes non-tangible things like traditions, ideologies, art, and science. Ideas that contribute to a large group of people are carried on, improved upon, and if they continue to contribute, they can last thousands of years, passed on from generation to generation.

But what happens to the things that don’t contribute to anyone? To the ideas we have that only mean something to ourselves?

Adler had the perfect answer, and it’s also the greatest warning he ever gave us. “What has happened to those who never cooperated, who gave life a different meaning, who asked only, ‘What can I get out of life?’ They have left no trace behind them. Not only are they dead; their whole lives were futile. It is as if our earth itself had spoken to them and said, ‘We don’t need you. You are not fitted for life. There is no future for your aims and strivings, for the values you held dear, for your minds and souls. Be off with you! You are not wanted. Die out and disappear!’”^{Note 1}

A life without contribution is a wasted life. A life with only harmful contributions is even worse. It’s one thing to say the world never needed you, but it’s another thing entirely to say the world would have been much better off without you.

Our lives have no meaning on their own. They are meaningful only through our contributions to the people around us. Loving and supporting our friends and family gives it meaning. Contributing to our communities, societies, and all of humanity gives it meaning.

This is why confidence cannot exist without contribution.

Contribution is what’s missing from too many people’s lives. People think they can be confident by giving themselves the best of everything, by taking more than they need and caring only about themselves. But they are wrong.

It’s our contributions that ultimately define the quality of our lives, and frees us from insecurity.

From the grand contributions that change the course of history, to the small contributions we save for the people we love most. They are all that remain after we’re gone, even if only in the hearts and minds of others.

Balancing the Scales

It’s important to understand that contributions exist at different scales. We can’t all cure cancer or solve climate change. Making a giant contribution that impacts millions, if not billions of people around the world is something only a small handful of people will ever get to experience.

Luckily for us, the kind of contributions we need for confidence can be much, much smaller.

Being a good friend to someone when they need it most is making a powerful contribution to that person’s life.

Being a loving father, mother, brother, or sister is making a huge contribution to the lives of your family members.

Even being a kind owner to your pet is making a positive contribution to another living thing.

All of these small contributions help us build confidence, and we all have opportunities to make them in our daily lives.

In fact, if you aren’t making these sorts of contributions to the people closest to you, you might find that no matter how much good you do for society as a whole, you’ll still fail to find confidence in yourself. For most of our history, the biggest contribution you could make was to everyone in your tribe, a group of your closest friends and family. And this is still the most important contribution you can make today.

It’s the best place to start, the first and most important step towards living a life filled with contributions and confidence. But you certainly don’t have to stop there.

Being kind to strangers, giving to charities, choosing careers in industries that help people, and maybe, just maybe, finding a way to be one of those people who change the entire world for the better.

There are no limits to how much we can scale our contributions. But there is a minimum amount we need if we want to feel good about who we are.

When you’re in doubt about where to start, just turn to the person next to you.

A Light in the Dark

When I finally decided to overcome my insecurities, I treated building confidence just like any other life skill. I studied hard, diving back into psychology, relearning much of what I’d forgotten from my uni days, and devouring book after book on every topic from cellular biology to happiness itself.

I doubled down on self-improvement, developed a rock solid meditation habit, and prioritised my health over everything else.

It was working, but slowly, and I soon felt like my confidence levels were plateauing. Insecurity was very much still a part of my life.

It was Alfred Adler’s work that gave me the missing piece of the puzzle, and when I finally had it, I knew I’d need to make a serious change if I ever wanted to actually be confident.

I was already the type of person who treated others as well as possible. I was kind and friendly, quick to forgive, easy to smile, and open to helping those in need. My contribution to the people who were in direct contact with me was almost always on the positive side.

I know now that this was the source of all the confidence I’d managed to build up since my teen years. I was good to people, and people were good to me in return. I’d just never given it the credit it was due. Mostly because I was comparing myself to all the wrong things.

For most of my young life, all I cared about was whether I looked and talked the right way, owned the right things, had the right career, earned the right amount of money… you get the idea. These were the kind of things I used to determine my worth, and they were obviously wrong.

No matter what I did to improve myself and my situation, it never brought me any more confidence. And I kept ignoring the only thing in my life that was. The positive impact I was having on the people around me.

So when I finally realised what had been right in front of me this whole time, another major crossroad lay before me. It was time I started focusing on the right things. I was committed to defeating my insecurity once and for all, and now I knew what had to be done to do it. The only question left was how. How was I going to increase my contribution to others?

I saw two clear paths ahead of me. One was to pivot my career into something with more direct impact. There are countless jobs out there where you get to spend your days making people’s lives better, but my current job in tech didn’t feel like one of them.

My other option was to focus on my personal life, to use my growing confidence to help others achieve the same for themselves.

The purpose of this book is to do exactly that.

My journey in the pursuit of confidence has led me right here. All signs point to the idea that growing your contribution to others is how you grow your confidence. I can now recognise this phenomenon in my own life, but this book is a way to achieve it on a grander scale.

After decades of striving, the end finally seems in sight.

Intentions vs Consequences

It feels good to finally have an answer and a clear way forward on the path towards confidence, but trying to make a positive contribution to others and actually doing it are two very different things. The first hurdle to overcome is the fact that often what we think is good for other people actually isn’t.

It’s hard to find a better example of when good intentions lead to bad consequences than the prohibition of alcohol in the United States, from 1920 to 1933. A full 13 years where making, importing, and selling alcohol was illegal.

To be fair, many of the intentions behind this were genuinely good. The movement was pushed forward by people who truly believed alcohol was behind many of society’s problems, including crime, poverty, and domestic violence. The idea was that without alcohol, all of society would benefit, becoming much more productive and healthier across the board.

It’s not too hard to understand where they were coming from. Alcohol is involved in many of society’s most harmful problems.

So did making it illegal create a perfect society, free from violence and poverty, and full of people radiating health and happiness?

Just the opposite.

Organised crime skyrocketed as there were now huge amounts of money to be made bootlegging and smuggling in alcohol. Some of this money made its way into law enforcement’s hands as they were bribed to look the other way, raising the amount of corruption in what was now an overworked and under-resourced police force.

The homemade alcohol was also unregulated and often quite dangerous, leading to an increase in the amount of people getting sick and even dying from drinking it.

Ultimately, what ended prohibition wasn’t that it was unenforceable, or that organised crime was getting too big to control, or even that the government was losing ridiculous amounts of money to what was now a blackmarket trade.

Prohibition failed because people didn’t want to stop drinking. Being sober was not the answer to their problems. And as positive as the intentions were, the bad consequences easily outweighed the good.

A large group of people thought they knew what was best for everyone. But everyone is different, and have different ideas about what’s good for them and what’s not. You may think you’re doing something incredibly kind and helpful, but it can often come across in exactly the opposite way.

This is something that causes a great deal of problems in modern society. What’s more important? The intentions behind an action, or the consequences that come from it?

With so many different ideologies, lifestyles, religions, political parties, and opinions out there, it’s inevitable that intentions will clash with consequences. Everyone believes their way is best, and there will always be someone who’s negatively impacted by it.

So how do we navigate through such dangerous waters? How can we have a positive impact on some people without accidentally having a negative impact on others?

The first and most important thing we have to accept is that the consequences of our actions are more important than our intentions.

This is a very hard pill for most of us to swallow.

No matter how good your intentions are, no matter how pure and wholesome, if you act in a way that causes people harm, then the overall balance of that contribution is in the negatives. If you try to help someone and they get hurt, the overall situation is a bad one.

The worst atrocities in human history have been carried out for the greater good. Those intentions are completely drowned by the pain and suffering they caused.

But there is another danger to this approach, one that we’re seeing more and more these days.

People seem to think others are hurting them simply because they disagree with what they’re doing, even if it doesn’t actually do anything to them.

There’s a line in the sand that needs to be drawn here. If someone’s opinions or actions are not directly impacting your life in any way, then it’s impossible for it to be harming you, no matter how much you might disagree with it.

I’ll say it again, even simpler… if it doesn’t impact you, it’s not a problem for you.

We have too many people on the extremes of this spectrum at the moment. They believe that their good intentions are more than enough to justify the harm they cause others, and they feel like anyone who isn’t living exactly like them is a direct threat against their lives.

Both of these are about as wrong as it gets.

Having good intentions is a must for making a positive impact, but your ultimate goal should be to have positive consequences for everyone. And you need to be able to recognise the difference between someone who’s just different to you, and someone who’s impacting your life negatively.

Only once you’ve aligned your intentions with the consequences will you be ready to make a great contribution to the people around you and the rest of humanity.

It’s not an exact science, and you will make mistakes. But as long as you value the consequences of your actions over the intentions, you will always know when to change course, and soon you’ll be sailing through the storm, and on to calmer waters.

Compare Better

Even if you succeed in making a large and positive contribution to others, one that you intended to make and that had no harmful consequences whatsoever, you are still vulnerable to insecurity unless you make a very important change in your life.

You need to get better at comparing yourself to the right things. We all do.

If you’re still the type of person who judges themselves based on selfish metrics, like how you look, the things you own, or how much money you have, then you’ll miss the opportunity to judge yourself on how much good your contributions brought to others. And unlike those other things, this one will actually make you feel confident about yourself, and not just in the short term.

It’s our contributions we leave behind long after we’re gone. Who we were is gone. The things we owned are not ours anymore. The only things that stay ours are the contributions we made to others, the good and the bad.

So you can think of your insecurity as a warning sign that you’re not leaving behind any positive contributions.

This is how you find millionaires who seem to have it all and are the most insecure and miserable people you’ll ever meet. They’ve built their life around comparing themselves to the wrong metrics, trying to look like the definition of success, instead of actually contributing to the world in a way that will let them leave behind something good when they’re gone.

We can’t stop ourselves from comparing our lives with everyone else’s. But we do get to choose which parts are worth comparing, and which are a waste of literally everyone’s time. We’ve spent too long being told that the more you have, the better you’ll feel, when really it’s the more you give.

Imagine a world where success was making life better for everyone, not just yourself. Imagine how much further ahead we’d be. How different our leaders and icons would look. How good each and every one of our lives would become.

This world is right there for the taking. All we have to do is make one simple change.

Judge ourselves on how much we can give back, not on how much we can take.