More than a third of the business leaders interviewed, however, described young lives plagued with family and financial instability. Members of that group tend to trace their confidence to overcoming obstacles. "My father was married six times," says Kevin Price, founder and president of AccuCode Inc., in Denver. "I spent as much time out of the house as I could, and I became very focused on school and extracurricular activities. A lot of my overachievement and confidence comes from that." At age 17, Abid Abedi, an insecure kid who "didn't play sports and had no friends," found himself broke and alone in Columbia, Mo., after emigrating from India. "That experience taught me there was no one I could count on but myself," says Abedi, founder and CEO of Adea Solutions, in Dallas. "I realized all I had was between my two ears. That was when I started building confidence."
What's the difference between false confidence and the real thing?
Harshaw, the evangelist for big brass ones, recalls the first time he encountered what he considers confidence in its purest form. It was 1994, and he was trying to put together a marketing seminar in Dallas. His partner, Edward Earle, was living in Utah at the time, and Harshaw asked him to fly down and make a presentation. "He put on the most unbelievable seminar I'd ever seen," says Harshaw. "Full of confidence, full of passion. Two years later I found out that his wife and two kids had stayed behind in an apartment for three days with no heat because he couldn't afford to pay his bills. But he never gave a tip of the hat to having financial struggles. He gave a seminar on being prosperous in business and pulled it off with absolute conviction because that was what he felt: absolute conviction."
Harshaw's notion of "real" confidence may accommodate a larger tolerance for risk than many people find acceptable. Other entrepreneurs had different perspectives on real and false confidence -- almost as many as on confidence itself. Many drew a distinction between false confidence (which they defined as a serious misreading of one's own abilities) and misplaced confidence (a misreading of a market, say, or of a trusted partner). Some described false confidence as the ultimate fair-weather friend, buoying you when times are good and deserting you when they're bad. The test of real confidence, they said, is if after you lose it, it comes back.
"If you're not confident, you can't be a leader, and that's all there is to it."
--Mark Burnett
By that last standard Scott Earnest has real confidence. Earnest was the kind of kid who had an American Express card at age 17. Three years out of college, he was employed by a software company that put him in charge of a $20-million IBM account and more than 600 employees in five states. "Aren't you afraid you'll fail?" his mother once asked him. "I'm not going to fail," Earnest says he replied. "I am Confidence Man."
He brought the same type of conviction with him when he bought his first company: a pool-cleaning outfit. But his confidence made him sloppy. Pool cleaning requires administering a chemical test to determine how much chlorine goes in the water. The results appear as colored bands, and Earnest was color-blind. "I had put everything on the line," he says, "and I was standing there looking at this test result, and I said, 'Shoot, I have no idea what this means." With the company collapsing, Earnest's wife staged a "confidence intervention," inviting 15 relatives to confront her demoralized husband and one by one remind him of his strengths. He lost the business but came back soon after with CEO Inc., a successful IT-staffing firm in Boca Raton, Fla.
Should confidence be faked?
False confidence is a flaw; faked confidence is a tactic. Still, it's a tactic that entrepreneurs disagree about. Certainly, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani became a national hero because he radiated strength yet never tried to mask his human vulnerability during an extremely tough time. But such honesty doesn't always play well in the confidence business. Brent Habig, founder and CEO of Tigris Consulting, in New York City, says that as a consultant he must appear confident at all times. "Otherwise why are they paying me?" he asks. Yet Habig believes that "acting confident when you don't feel that way is a complicated risk that's best avoided. If your confidence isn't based in the knowledge that you can deliver, you risk letting people down."
Mark Burnett goes further, arguing that confidence can't be faked. "If you're not confident, you can't be a leader, and that's all there is to it," says Burnett, creator and executive producer of Eco-Challenge and Survivor, television programs that do for confidence what Iron Chef has done for nori and spiny lobster. "I've heard 100 times that you can fake confidence, but you can't. It takes too much of a toll. You waste too much energy."
