Link tags: confidence

We Live In The Age of The Bullshitter ❧ Current Affairs

We also have a culture in which arrogance is rewarded rather than kept in check, and people can see that with enough shameless bluster you might become the richest person in the world or the president of the United States. There is no quick fix for the problem—if I offered one, I would be the very kind of bullshitter I strive to avoid being—but we at the very least need to recognize what it is we are trying to change. We are trying to create a culture of thoughtfulness and insight, where people check carefully to see whether what they’re saying is true, and excessively egotistical people are looked upon with deep suspicion. With time and patient effort, perhaps we can create a world in which the people who rise to the highest offices and reap the greatest rewards are not also the ones who are most full of shit. 

Systems Smart Enough To Know When They’re Not Smart Enough | Big Medium

I can forgive our answer machines if they sometimes get it wrong. It’s less easy to forgive the confidence with which the bad answer is presented, giving the impression that the answer is definitive. That’s a design problem.

More for the skill

Be willing to look like a dork:

Embarrassment about what others think has to be the biggest block to any learning. Embarrassment of looking silly. Embarrassment of looking stupid for asking the question everyone else is wondering about but no one is willing to make.

Chimes nicely with Charlotte’s recent piece, Be comfortable looking like an idiot.

Be comfortable looking like an idiot by Charlotte Jackson

I was talking to Charlotte recently about public speaking, confidence, and overcoming fear. She really hit the nail on the head when she said “I need to get comfortable with feeling like an idiot.”

Words to live by—especially if you’re working on the web.

Confidence and Overwhelm

Following on from her great conversation with Jen on The Web Ahead podcast, Rachel outlines a strategy to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of tools, frameworks, libraries, and techniques inundating front-end developers every day:

Learn your core skills well. Understand HTML and CSS, be able to build a layout without leaning on a framework. Get a solid understanding of how a website actually gets from the server to a browser, an understanding of security and accessibility. These are the basics, the constants. These things change slowly. These things sit underneath all the complexity and the tooling, the CMSs and the noise of thousands of people all trying to make their mark on this industry.

She also makes this important point:

As you are doing this don’t forget to share what you know.