What if the biggest barrier to our success wasn't a lack of confidence but overconfidence?

We tend to associate a high degree of confidence with success. In fact, most of us believe it's a requirement for achieving our goals. Yet extensive research led Don Moore, author of the book, Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely, to conclude that "the evidence for that relationship...is shockingly weak."

Instead, Don argues, it's about striking a balance between under confidence and overconfidence, and he shares a helpful technique called probabilistic thinking to help us do just that. To illustrate this point, he explains how he and his fiance used this approach to plan their wedding.

After realizing that their guest list far exceeded the 125 chairs available in the reception venue, they knew they needed a strategy. Rather than remove names from the list, they estimated the likelihood of each guest attending. That helped them decide how many invitations to send.

Don explains, "We went through that long list, summing up the probabilities across individuals. It got us to 127, so we sent out the invitations right away. The actual number who said 'yes' was 126, so we found one more chair and were happily married."

Don Moore is a Professor of Management of Organizations at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He is also co-author of the book, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, and he's written for publications like, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review.

The Curious Minds Team

You can learn more about Curious Minds' Host and Creator, Gayle Allen, and Producer and Editor, Rob Mancabelli, here. 

Episode Links

Max Bazerman

5 Tips for Calibrating Your Confidence by Laura Counts

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

The Intelligence Trap by David Robson

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Too Optimistic about Optimism

Why Decisions Fail by Paul Nutt

Simple Ways to Support Curious Minds

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