Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
reread what i said. not needing super confidence isnt the same as not needing any confidence at all
That's such a vague statement that it's pretty meaningless imo. Confidence is used as a short-cut for someone's skill, if you see someone being very confident about something we assume that they know what they're doing. But confidence alone is not sustainable without the skill to back it up.

Let's say there's this average guy, a random made up person to illustrate my point. He has poor social skills. Often he'll come off as arrogant when trying to act aloof. When trying to be friendly he'll sometimes come off as needy. When trying to be funny and tease people, he's usually just insulting people without realizing it. He never really connects with people, because, again without being aware of it, he's very selfish and assumes that whatever he has in his mind is interesting to everyone else, lacking the empathy needed to communicate with people in ways that they can relate to. He also sucks at recognizing social relationships that other people have with each-other, and will often speak in ways that are out of line with social dynamics, like openly trying to hit on a girl that is clearly paired off with someone else or trying to randomly belittle the dominant person in the group. And so on.

Now, this guy can act all confident, but it's not going to do him much good. It might help him to impress people he just met but they'll soon get annoyed by him and want to avoid him. The people that know him, shun him and don't care for him. He might tell stories to a new girl he just met which make him seem popular with other people, but when she sees how other people actually treat him, the illusion is quickly dispelled. I would argue that in his case being confident about himself is actually a downside. It would work out better for him if he was less confident. Then atleast he'd keep quiet instead of pissing people off and others would be more keen to be nice to him.

What our emotional system does in such situations is exactly that. If nothing is ever working out for you socially, your emotions will torpedo your confidence, and this makes that confidence is often a very good indicator of how skilled someone really is at whatever he is doing. In practice when someone gets more confident about himself (socially or about something in particular, like being good at dancing, football or minesweeper), this almost always follows from either increasing his skills, or changing external situations that make him perform better.