The secret kind of confidence

A few weeks ago at a festival, I spotted probably the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in person. Blonde. Cowboy hat. Surrounded by her friends.

And I was terrified to walk up to her.

Not nervous. Terrified. I've approached thousands of girls — on camera, off camera, bars, festivals — and I still get scared. Every time.

I walked up anyway. And it turned into one of the most viral videos I've ever made.

Most guys would watch that clip and tell themselves: "I could never do that. I'm not confident enough."

That's exactly what you've got backwards. And today I want to show you how confidence actually gets built — plus the secret version of it that almost nobody figures out.

Confidence is self-belief in your capability to do the thing. So how do you build the belief that you can do the thing? By being GOOD at it. Confidence comes from competence — a stack of mental evidence that proves to yourself you're good at something.

Which means confidence comes AFTER the reps. Never before them. You can't psych your way into feeling confident at something you have zero evidence for.

Yeah — sorry. Your affirmations are bullshit.

You say you don't have any confidence. But I'll bet you can name SOMETHING you're confident at. Your job. Video games. An instrument.

And you're confident at it for one reason: you're good at it, and your brain has the evidence. Results. Praise. A rank.

That's the whole mechanism. You've just never applied it to the thing you're scared of.

I didn't wake up one day and decide I was confident with girls. It took hundreds of awkward interactions and rejections before I got good. Then girls started showing interest — and that was the evidence my brain needed. She called me cute: evidence. She gave me her number: evidence.

Confidence is domain-specific. Getting confident with girls doesn't make you confident giving a speech. Different thing, different evidence.

But you know people who seem confident at EVERYTHING. And no — they didn't get good at everything. They found the secret:

They got good at tolerating failure.

When you build evidence that you're somebody who keeps going through rejection and failure, you become confident at everything you do. Because whatever it is, you're not terrified of it going wrong anymore. You know you'll be okay whether she says yes or no. You proved it to yourself. Over and over.

Mark Manson has a line I love: "Success teaches you that the task is doable. Failure teaches you that you're durable."

Durability transfers to everything.

Here's the part nobody tells you. Confidence is only 50% of the answer.

I believe I'm great at talking to women. Real, earned confidence. And I STILL got scared standing across the field from that girl in the cowboy hat.

What got me across wasn't confidence. It was courage — doing the thing WHILE you're feeling the fear. That video exists because of thirty seconds of courage.

So maybe what you need isn't more confidence. Maybe it's more courage.

Because courage gets you the reps. The reps make you competent. And competence gives you the evidence to finally become confident.

That's the order. It's the only order.

— Noah

P.S. Hit reply and tell me the ONE thing you're confident at. I read every reply — and it'll show you the mechanism already works in your life.

P.P.S. I'm filming the full video version of this soon. You got it first.