There is one thing that almost every person who has achieved extraordinary results has in common. It's not talent, it's not inherited wealth, it's not even measured intelligence. It's a deep, almost irrational conviction that something different is reserved for them. Something greater.
It's a conviction that from the outside often looks exaggerated, at times ridiculous. Those who observe it without understanding it mistake it for arrogance, for delusions of grandeur, for some form of detachment from reality. And yet it's exactly this conviction that keeps people standing when everything else collapses. When the market says no. When the people around you say no. When even your family says no.
I know this because I've lived it.
For years, the people around me — friends, acquaintances, people I spent time with — talked about me behind my back. They called me all talk and no action. Someone who talks big and delivers nothing. Someone who puts on airs. They never said it to my face, never. They said it among themselves, when I wasn't there, with that tone that mixes judgment with the subtle satisfaction of watching someone try to do something different and — in their view — fail.
I could have listened to them. I could have scaled back my expectations, found something safe, settled for what those people considered an acceptable life. In other words, I could have chosen mediocrity. It's the most comfortable choice, it's the quietest choice, it's the choice nobody criticizes because it's the exact same one almost everyone makes.
I didn't make it. Not out of heroism and not out of recklessness, but because deep inside I knew — and still know — that my direction is different. That greatness is my destination. And this is not a motivational quote, it's an operating conviction that guides every decision I make, every day, and has for years.
The interesting thing is that this conviction is not exclusive to me. It's a pattern. It recurs in nearly identical form in the lives of people who have built extraordinary things.
In 1985 Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple. The board of directors unanimously sided with CEO John Sculley after disappointing Macintosh sales. Jobs resigned on September 16 of that year. It was a public, visible, humiliating failure. He was 30 years old and the company he had co-founded in his parents' garage had kicked him out. [1] Any reasonable person would have read that situation as a clear signal: you messed up, lower your expectations. Jobs founded NeXT, bought what would become Pixar, and twelve years later — on September 16, 1997, the exact same date — returned as CEO of Apple. In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech he said something that captures it all: "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me." [2] He had not stopped believing for a single day that his story wasn't over.
J.K. Rowling brought the Harry Potter manuscript to twelve different publishers. Twelve times they said no. She was a single mother living on welfare in Edinburgh, and the publishing world was telling her in very clear terms that what she had written was worthless. [3] The thirteenth publisher, Bloomsbury, accepted because the chairman's eight-year-old daughter read the first chapters and demanded more. The initial print run was 500 copies. The series has sold more than 600 million copies worldwide. If Rowling had stopped at the fourth, the seventh, the tenth rejection — as any reasonable person would have — nobody today would know who she is.
Oprah Winfrey at 22 was removed from anchoring the evening news at WJZ-TV in Baltimore. Demoted. She herself called it "the demotion of my life." [4] The station moved her to host a morning talk show to avoid paying the penalty clause in her contract. That talk show turned out to be the format that made her the most influential woman in the history of television.
Michael Jordan as a teenager was cut from the varsity basketball team in high school. The coach chose another player who was taller. Jordan was devastated, but he used that rejection as fuel. By his junior year he scored 35 points in his first game and the rest is history. [5]
In each of these cases, the outside world was communicating one clear message: stop, you're not enough, this isn't for you. And in each of these cases, the person ignored that message and kept going. The question is: why? What is it about the way these people think that makes them immune to feedback that would stop anyone else?
Psychology has a very precise answer. It's called self-efficacy.
Albert Bandura defined it in 1977 as the belief in one's ability to organize and execute the actions necessary to achieve a given outcome. [6] It's not generic self-esteem. It's not positive thinking. It's not believing you're special. It's believing, in a specific and task-bound way, that you have the capability to succeed at what you're doing. And it's among the most replicated constructs in the entire history of psychology.
Stajkovic and Luthans in 1998 published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covering 114 studies with over 21,000 participants and found that self-efficacy predicts job performance nearly twice as well as a job interview. [7] Richardson, Abraham, and Bond in 2012 went even deeper: academic self-efficacy turned out to be the single strongest predictor of college GPA, nearly three times stronger than measured intelligence. [8] Three times. Not twice. Three times. Believing you can do it predicts outcomes three times better than IQ.
And it's not just a reflection of the past. It's not that skilled people simply feel skilled. Talsma and colleagues in 2018 demonstrated with a longitudinal meta-analysis that the relationship is genuinely causal in both directions: self-efficacy predicts subsequent performance even after isolating the effect of prior performance. [9] You're not simply recording your current level. You're actively shaping your future one.
There's one finding that struck me in particular. Seligman and Schulman in 1986 tracked roughly 15,000 MetLife insurance agents and found that the top-decile optimists outsold the bottom-decile pessimists by 88%. [10] But the most interesting part is something else. A group of people who had failed the company's standard aptitude test — they had essentially been screened out — but who scored highest on optimism, were hired anyway as an experiment. By their second year, these people were outselling the pessimists in the regular group by 57%. People who on paper shouldn't even have been there were beating the colleagues who had been hired through normal channels. The only difference was that they believed in themselves more.
This happens because the brain is literally built to work this way. Sharot and colleagues in 2007 demonstrated in Nature using functional MRI that optimism has an identifiable neural basis: specific brain regions activate differently in optimistic people, and the level of activation correlates with trait optimism. [11] Touroutoglou and colleagues in 2020 identified a specific area as the brain's "persistence engine" — the node that decides whether to keep pushing or give up. [12] Greater connectivity in this area correlates with higher grit scores. Moser and colleagues in 2011 showed that people with a growth mindset display an enhanced neural response to errors — their brain pays more attention to mistakes, not less, and this improves subsequent accuracy. [13]
The point is this: self-belief is not a pleasant illusion. It's a biological mechanism that drives action, increases persistence, improves error processing, and over time builds real competence. The brain of someone who believes in themselves works differently from the brain of someone who doesn't. Not better in the abstract, but in a way that produces more attempts, more feedback, and more learning.
But now let's look at the other side.
Because if we stopped here, we'd be telling half a story. And half-stories are dangerous.
In 2003 Roy Baumeister, along with Campbell, Krueger, and Vohs, published what remains the most comprehensive review ever conducted on self-esteem research, in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. [14] The conclusions were brutal. High self-esteem does not cause better academic performance. Does not cause better job performance. Does not cause better relationships. Does not cause better leadership. The modest correlations observed between self-esteem and outcomes mostly reflect reversed causality: success generates self-esteem, not the other way around. Baumeister went further: efforts to boost students' self-esteem not only didn't improve outcomes, in some cases they made them worse. Forsyth and colleagues in 2007 proved it with an experiment: low-performing students who received self-esteem-bolstering messages scored significantly worse on subsequent tests than control groups. [15] Telling them "you're great" made them worse, not better.
Then there's the Dunning-Kruger effect. In 1999 Kruger and Dunning demonstrated across four studies that participants in the bottom quartile — those performing at the 12th percentile — estimated themselves at the 62nd percentile. An overestimation of 50 percentile points. [16] The least competent were the most confident. Which seems to suggest that self-confidence is inversely proportional to actual competence.
And then there's the most uncomfortable objection of all: survivorship bias. Cooper, Woo, and Dunkelberg in 1988 surveyed nearly 3,000 new entrepreneurs and found that 81% rated their odds of success at 7 out of 10 or better, with a full 33% giving themselves 10 out of 10. [17] The problem is that roughly 75% of new businesses fail within five years. Which means the vast majority of those ultra-confident entrepreneurs failed. We only see Jobs, Rowling, and Oprah because they won. But for every Jobs, there are thousands of people who believed just as strongly and didn't make it.
In financial markets, overconfidence does even more damage. Malmendier and Tate in 2005 showed that CEOs classified as overconfident were 65% more likely to make acquisitions, especially in industries they didn't know, and markets reacted negatively to their announcements. [18] Barber and Odean found that among tens of thousands of investor households, the most active traders — the most confident — earned 11.4% annually versus the market's 17.9%. Their confidence was costing them 6.5 percentage points a year. [19]
And finally, narcissism. Grijalva and colleagues in 2015 conducted a definitive meta-analysis and found that narcissism is positively correlated with leadership emergence — narcissists become leaders more easily — but shows zero correlation with leadership effectiveness. [20] They think they're effective, but supervisors, peers, and subordinates disagree. The narcissist wins the room, but can't run it.
At this point the picture seems clear. On one side, self-belief that produces extraordinary results. On the other, self-belief that produces disasters. How do these two realities reconcile?
The answer lies in a distinction that most people don't make, and that most critics ignore.
In 2012, Albert Bandura published an article in the Journal of Management in which he was more explicit than ever: "Self-esteem and self-efficacy are entirely different constructs. Self-efficacy is a judgment of capability. Self-esteem is a judgment of self-worth." [21] He then added a direct criticism of researchers who "create erroneous associations by equating self-efficacy with self-esteem and its questionable predictive value."
This distinction changes everything.
When Baumeister demolished the case for self-esteem in 2003, he was talking about something else. Self-esteem is global — feeling good about yourself regardless of what you're doing. Self-efficacy is specific — believing you can accomplish a particular task through effort and work. Self-esteem says "I'm a good person." Self-efficacy says "I'm capable of doing this thing and I'm willing to work to make it happen." The first is weakly predictive. The second is among the strongest predictors psychology has ever found.
The entire antithesis rests on confusing two fundamentally different constructs.
But there's more. Valentine, DuBois, and Cooper in 2004 reviewed 55 longitudinal studies and found that self-beliefs predicted subsequent achievement even after isolating the effect of prior achievement. [22] This is the point that dismantles the survivorship bias objection: self-belief predicts outcomes even when you remove from the equation the fact of already being good. It's not a proxy for competence, it's something that adds to competence.
Greven and colleagues in 2009 studied thousands of twin pairs and found that self-perceived abilities predicted school achievement independently of IQ. [23] Chamorro-Premuzic and colleagues in 2010 followed nearly 6,000 children and found that self-perceived ability at age 9 significantly predicted academic achievement at age 12, even after isolating the effect of cognitive ability at both time points. [24] These results don't come from winners. They come from entire populations. Winners and losers. Survivorship bias doesn't apply.
The Dunning-Kruger effect, too, dissolves under closer examination. Gignac and Zajenkowski in 2020 reran the analysis with appropriate statistical methods and found that the association between objectively measured intelligence and self-assessed intelligence was entirely linear. No Dunning-Kruger pattern. [25] Magnus and Peresetsky in 2022 demonstrated that the classic Dunning-Kruger graph emerges as a statistical artifact of boundary constraints in the scale, with no psychological explanation needed. [26] Which doesn't mean miscalibration doesn't exist, but that Dunning-Kruger is about how well people judge their rank, not whether self-belief helps produce results. Those are two completely different things.
There's one finding I consider decisive and that few people know about. Gilovich and Medvec in 1994 asked people what their single biggest regret in life was. 67% cited a regret of inaction. [27] Not something they had done that went wrong, but something they had never done. And the pattern is systematic: bad actions hurt more in the short term, but missed opportunities are regretted far more in the long run, because there's no way to process them, to close them, to move on. The roads not taken stay open forever. Gilovich and colleagues replicated the finding cross-culturally in China, Japan, and Russia. [28] If people systematically regret not acting more than acting and failing, then the self-belief that pushes you to act is psychologically superior to the caution that leads to paralysis. Even when the action fails.
And here we come back to Johnson and Fowler. Their evolutionary model published in Nature in 2011 demonstrates mathematically that overconfidence is an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. [29] In simple terms: in a competitive environment, those who overestimate their chances try more often, compete for more resources, and even though they lose more often, in the overall balance they come out ahead of those who assess themselves with surgical precision. If overconfidence were truly useless or harmful, a hundred thousand years of human evolution would have eliminated it. They didn't. Because it works. Not always and not for everyone, but often enough to be selected by natural selection itself.
The point is not that self-belief eliminates the risk of failure. It doesn't. The point is that it increases the odds that things will go your way. Like a seatbelt: it doesn't guarantee survival in every crash, but nobody argues that seatbelts are useless because someone wearing one died.
Locke and Latham in 2002 synthesized 35 years of research and roughly 400 studies with nearly 40,000 participants and found that goal difficulty produces enormous effects on performance — among the largest ever measured in psychology. [30] Those who set ambitious goals and commit to them achieve dramatically better results than those who set reasonable ones. Not marginally. Dramatically.
Talsma and colleagues provide the mechanism: higher self-efficacy leads to better performance, which strengthens self-efficacy, creating a virtuous cycle. [9] Those who doubt themselves enter the opposite spiral: they avoid, they don't practice, they don't develop skills, and confidence erodes further. Bandura explained this as early as 1997: people with high self-efficacy approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered, not threats to be avoided. [6] They set higher goals, maintain commitment through setbacks, and attribute failure to insufficient effort, not lack of talent. All of these are behaviors that accelerate learning.
And then there's Taylor and Brown. In 1988, in Psychological Bulletin, they identified three forms of "positive illusions" typical of normal, healthy cognition: unrealistically positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control, and unrealistic optimism. [31] They didn't find them in depressed people or narcissists. They found them in psychologically healthy people. Positive illusions are the norm, not the exception. And they promote the ability to care for others, to be happy, and to engage in productive and creative work.
Let's go back to where we started.
The people who called me all talk and no action had a worldview perfectly consistent with the criticisms we just examined. They thought my confidence was unfounded, that my ambitions were disproportionate, that sooner or later I'd have to face reality. And they were acting in good faith, most of them at least. They weren't bad people. They simply couldn't conceive of a path different from their own.
But the path they were proposing was mediocrity. They didn't call it that, of course. They called it "being realistic," "keeping your feet on the ground," "not getting your hopes up." But the substance was the same: lower your expectations until they're compatible with what everyone else is doing. Blend in with the average. Don't stick your neck out. Don't risk looking foolish.
The problem with mediocrity isn't that it's a wrong choice in absolute terms. It's that it's a choice made out of fear, not conviction. Nobody dreams of mediocrity. You end up there by subtraction, eliminating one by one every path that requires exposure, risk, and the real possibility of failing in front of others. Mediocrity is the refuge of those who've decided the cost of trying is too high. And for many people it truly is, and it's not my place to judge them. But it's not the only option, and making people with different ambitions believe it is — that's a subtle form of sabotage disguised as advice.
The research we've seen tells a clear story. Self-belief — the real kind, specific, tied to action and effort — is among the strongest predictors of success that science has ever measured. It surpasses intelligence, it surpasses raw talent, it surpasses starting conditions. It doesn't cancel them out, but it adds to everything else with an independent and measurable contribution. And it's selected by evolution, rooted in the neurochemistry of the brain, and confirmed across entire populations, not just the survivors.
Those who believe in themselves have no guarantee of success. But those who don't believe in themselves have a near-certainty of never trying. And at the end of a life, as Gilovich and Medvec tell us, it's not the failed attempts that will haunt us. It's the things we never had the courage to do.
Notes
[1] The story of Jobs's ouster from Apple is documented in detail in Walter Isaacson's biography, Steve Jobs (2011). The board sided with Sculley after Jobs attempted to remove him. Jobs was stripped of all operational responsibilities and formally resigned on September 16, 1985.
[2] Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address, June 12, 2005. The full text is available in the Stanford University archives.
[3] The story of Harry Potter's twelve rejections is confirmed by multiple sources. Agent Christopher Little submitted the manuscript to twelve publishers before Bloomsbury accepted. Chairman Nigel Newton has recounted that it was his eight-year-old daughter Alice who insisted on publication after reading the first chapter. The initial print run was 500 copies, 300 of which went to libraries.
[4] Oprah Winfrey was removed from anchoring the evening news at WJZ-TV Baltimore in 1976 and reassigned to host the morning talk show "People Are Talking." She has described the event as a demotion in numerous interviews and in her 2025 book.
[5] Michael Jordan was placed on the junior varsity team instead of varsity at Laney High School when coach Pop Herring chose Leroy Smith, who was taller. Technically he wasn't "cut" — being a sophomore on JV was normal — but the emotional devastation was genuine and he has cited it as a pivotal moment in his motivation.
[6] Albert Bandura (1977), "Self-efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change," Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. Self-efficacy theory is among the most replicated in the history of psychology. Bandura defined it as the belief in one's ability to organize and execute the actions necessary to achieve given outcomes. In 1997 he published the full treatment in Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (W.H. Freeman).
[7] Stajkovic, A.D. & Luthans, F. (1998), "Self-Efficacy and Work-Related Performance: A Meta-Analysis," Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 240–261. Meta-analysis of 114 studies with 21,616 participants. The weighted average correlation between self-efficacy and job performance was r = .38, a medium-to-large effect size explaining approximately 14.4% of the variance in work outcomes.
[8] Richardson, M., Abraham, C. & Bond, R. (2012), "Psychological Correlates of University Students' Academic Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis," Psychological Bulletin, 138(2), 353–387. Academic self-efficacy was the strongest predictor of college GPA at ρ = .59, versus ρ = .21 for measured intelligence and ρ = .41 for high school GPA.
[9] Talsma, K., Schüz, B., Schwarzer, R. & Norris, K. (2018), "I Believe, Therefore I Achieve (and Vice Versa): A Meta-Analytic Cross-Lagged Panel Analysis of Self-Efficacy and Academic Performance," Learning and Individual Differences, 61, 136–150. Meta-analysis of 11 longitudinal studies with 2,688 participants. Self-efficacy predicted subsequent performance at β = .071 (p < .001) even after controlling for prior performance.
[10] Seligman, M.E.P. & Schulman, P. (1986), "Explanatory Style as a Predictor of Productivity and Quitting Among Life Insurance Sales Agents," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(4), 832–838. Study of approximately 15,000 MetLife agents. Top-decile optimists outsold bottom-decile pessimists by 88%. "Super-optimists" who failed the standard aptitude screening outsold pessimists in the regular group by 57% in year two. Replicated cross-industrially by Schulman (1995) with similar results across insurance, real estate, banking, and auto sales.
[11] Sharot, T., Riccardi, A.M., Raio, C.M. & Phelps, E.A. (2007), "Neural Mechanisms Mediating Optimism Bias," Nature, 450, 102–105. fMRI study demonstrating that optimism bias is mediated by the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) and the amygdala, with rACC activity correlating with trait optimism.
[12] Touroutoglou, A., Andreano, J.M., Dickerson, B.C. & Barrett, L.F. (2020), "The Tenacious Brain: How the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Contributes to Achieving Goals," Cortex, 123, 12–29. Identified the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) as a critical hub for cost-benefit computations of sustained effort. Greater aMCC connectivity correlated with higher grit scores.
[13] Moser, J.S., Schroder, H.S., Heeter, C., Moran, T.P. & Lee, Y.H. (2011), "Mind Your Errors: Evidence for a Neural Mechanism Linking Growth Mind-Set to Adaptive Posterror Adjustments," Psychological Science, 22(12), 1484–1489. Individuals with a growth mindset showed enhanced error positivity (Pe), reflecting greater neural attention to errors, and Pe amplitude mediated the relationship between mindset and post-error accuracy.
[14] Baumeister, R.F., Campbell, J.D., Krueger, J.I. & Vohs, K.D. (2003), "Does High Self-Esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?" Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4(1), 1–44. Review commissioned by the American Psychological Society. Concluded that high self-esteem does not cause better performance, job outcomes, or relationship quality. The only causal effect identified was on initiative and persistence.
[15] Forsyth, D.R., Lawrence, N.K., Burnette, J.L. & Baumeister, R.F. (2007), "Attempting to Improve the Academic Performance of Struggling College Students by Bolstering Their Self-Esteem: An Intervention that Backfired," Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 26(4), 447–459. Field experiment in which low-performing students assigned to self-esteem-bolstering messages scored worse on subsequent tests than controls.
[16] Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999), "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. Four studies (humor, grammar, logic) in which bottom-quartile participants estimated themselves at the 62nd percentile while performing at the 12th.
[17] Cooper, A.C., Woo, C.Y. & Dunkelberg, W.C. (1988), "Entrepreneurs' Perceived Chances for Success," Journal of Business Venturing, 3(2), 97–108. Survey of 2,994 new entrepreneurs: 81% rated their odds of success at 7/10 or better, 33% at 10/10.
[18] Malmendier, U. & Tate, G. (2005), "CEO Overconfidence and Corporate Investment," Journal of Finance, 60(6), 2661–2700. Panel data on Forbes 500 CEOs. Malmendier, U. & Tate, G. (2008), "Who Makes Acquisitions? CEO Overconfidence and the Market's Reaction," Journal of Financial Economics, 89(1), 20–43. Acquisition likelihood was 65% higher for overconfident CEOs, with announcement returns approximately 12 basis points worse.
[19] Barber, B.M. & Odean, T. (2000), "Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors," Journal of Finance, 55(2), 773–806. Among 66,465 households, the most active traders earned 11.4% annually versus the market's 17.9%. Barber, B.M. & Odean, T. (2001), "Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(1), 261–292.
[20] Grijalva, E., Harms, P.D., Newman, D.A., Gaddis, B.H. & Fraley, R.C. (2015), "Narcissism and Leadership: A Meta-Analytic Review of Linear and Nonlinear Relationships," Personnel Psychology, 68(1), 1–47. Meta-analysis of 54 studies (N ≈ 11,700). Narcissism correlated positively with leadership emergence but showed zero correlation with effectiveness. The emergence effect was entirely explained by extraversion.
[21] Bandura, A. (2012), "On the Functional Properties of Perceived Self-Efficacy Revisited," Journal of Management, 38(1), 9–44. Bandura was explicit in distinguishing self-efficacy and self-esteem as entirely different constructs and in criticizing researchers who equated them.
[22] Valentine, J.C., DuBois, D.L. & Cooper, H. (2004), "The Relation Between Self-Beliefs and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analytic Review," Educational Psychologist, 39(2), 111–133. Review of 55 longitudinal studies. Self-beliefs predicted subsequent achievement at β = .08 overall and β = .12 for domain-specific measures, after controlling for initial levels of achievement.
[23] Greven, C.U., Harlaar, N., Kovas, Y., Chamorro-Premuzic, T. & Plomin, R. (2009), "More Than Just IQ: School Achievement Is Predicted by Self-Perceived Abilities—But for Genetic Rather Than Environmental Reasons," Psychological Science, 20(6), 753–762. Study of 3,785 twin pairs: self-perceived abilities predicted school achievement independently of IQ, with 51% heritability.
[24] Chamorro-Premuzic, T., Harlaar, N., Greven, C.U. & Plomin, R. (2010), "More Than Just IQ: A Longitudinal Examination of Self-Perceived Abilities as Predictors of Academic Performance in a Large Sample of UK Twins," Intelligence, 38(4), 385–392. Study of 5,957 children: self-perceived ability at age 9 predicted academic achievement at age 12, controlling for cognitive ability.
[25] Gignac, G.E. & Zajenkowski, M. (2020), "The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is (Mostly) a Statistical Artefact: Valid Approaches to Testing the Hypothesis with Individual Differences Data," Intelligence, 80, 101449. Among 929 participants, the association between objectively measured and self-assessed intelligence was entirely linear — no Dunning-Kruger pattern emerged with appropriate statistical methods.
[26] Magnus, J.R. & Peresetsky, A.A. (2022), "A Statistical Explanation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect," Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 840180. Demonstrated that the Dunning-Kruger graph emerges as an artifact of boundary constraints, with a tobit model fitting the data without requiring psychological explanation.
[27] Gilovich, T. & Medvec, V.H. (1994), "The Temporal Pattern to the Experience of Regret," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 357–365. 67% of respondents cited regrets of inaction as their single biggest regret. Actions cause more pain in the short term; inactions are regretted far more in the long run.
[28] Gilovich, T., Wang, R.F., Regan, D. & Nishina, S. (2003), "Regrets of Action and Inaction Across Cultures," Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 34(1), 61–71. Cross-cultural replication in China, Japan, and Russia. Confirmed by Yeung, S.K. & Feldman, G. (2022), Collabra: Psychology, 8(1), 37122 in a pre-registered replication with 988 participants.
[29] Johnson, D.D.P. & Fowler, J.H. (2011), "The Evolution of Overconfidence," Nature, 477, 317–320. Evolutionary game theory model demonstrating that overconfidence is an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) when the benefits of contested resources exceed the costs of competition. Cited over 500 times.
[30] Locke, E.A. & Latham, G.P. (2002), "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey," American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. Synthesis of 35 years of research across roughly 400 studies with nearly 40,000 participants. Goal difficulty produced effect sizes ranging from d = .52 to .82 on performance. Specific, difficult goals outperformed vague "do your best" goals at d = .42 to .80.
[31] Taylor, S.E. & Brown, J.D. (1988), "Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health," Psychological Bulletin, 103(2), 193–210. Identified three forms of "positive illusions" characteristic of healthy cognition: unrealistically positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control, and unrealistic optimism. These illusions promoted mental health criteria including the ability to engage in productive and creative work.