Aplomb (Doubting Self-Doubt)
When facing uncertainty, self-doubt almost always shows up. Even innovators, entrepreneurs, and pathbreakers doubt themselves, and not just once but over and over. At the core of this recurring fear is the nagging worry that you may not be smart (or clever, or daring) enough, your ideas may not be good enough, and that trying anyway might reveal this fact for all to see. If you buy into that fear, it is almost certain that you won’t try anything uncertain. Because self-doubt is such a natural part of facing uncertainty, feeling it is a sign not that you should stop, but rather that you’re in territory requiring triage—digging deeper to that place inside yourself that believes your offering is worthwhile. We named this chapter and tool “aplomb” because it’s such a great word, coming from the French for a plumb line, denoting steadiness, confidence, poise. When something is done with aplomb there is self-assurance, even nonchalance.
Consider the experience of two Nobel Prize laureates, one a pioneer of quantum physics and the other of literature. When Richard Feynman arrived at Cornell University for his new job as a physics professor, he didn’t realize how burned out he was due to his work in the race to beat Nazi Germany to build an atomic bomb and the loss of his wife to tuberculosis. As the months passed, Feynman found himself suffering from a crippling self-doubt. “When it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work,” Feynman recalled. “I simply couldn’t get started on any problem…. Here I was, burned out, reading the Arabian Nights and feeling depressed about myself.”1
Despite his struggle to produce, Feynman started receiving job offers from other universities and companies. “Each time I got something like that, I would get a little more depressed…. They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas.” When Feynman got an offer from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, led by Albert Einstein himself, he balked: “The other offers had made me feel worse, up to a point. They were expecting me to accomplish something. But this offer was so ridiculous, so impossible for me ever to live up to, so ridiculously out of proportion.”
The prestigious offer felt so absurd that Feynman took a new, almost roguish angle on his self-doubt: he moved to aplomb. “I thought to myself, ‘You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!’ It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.” He decided to quit trying to do “important” research and just spend time having fun with physics, which is what originally attracted him to the field.
A few days later in the dining hall at Cornell, someone tossed a plate in the air. Feynman noticed that the Cornell medallion on the plate went around faster than the plate wobbled. He developed a series of equations to calculate the ratio of the spins. When he showed them to his department chair, Hans Bethe, another Nobel laureate, Bethe admitted it was interesting but asked, “What’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
Feynman laughed and replied, “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” Because he had reframed his work based on his curiosity, he was able to be calm and collected in the face of the skepticism and dismissal.
As Feynman kept working, driven by curiosity and setting aside the notion of importance, the simple work started to transform. “Before I knew it (it was a very short time), I was ‘playing’—working, really, with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems, all those old-fashioned wonderful things. It was effortless…. There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”
Feynman’s vulnerable account is rare for its transparency, but it’s a type of experience shared by many creatives and innovators tackling the unknown. Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath, but while writing it he experienced overwhelming self-doubt on a daily basis. He documented his experience in a journal that he requested be kept private during his lifetime and be given to his two sons, so they might “look behind the myth and hearsay and flattery and slander a disappeared man becomes, and to know to some extent what manner of man their father was.”2
His journal reveals shocking levels of self-doubt, frustration, and fear while writing what many people consider the greatest American novel. At every stage he doubted himself, worrying, “If only I could do this book properly, it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability.” At one point he decides, “I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were.” Even when he manages to encourage himself to keep going, his journal documents a continual struggle to maintain hope that it would be good: “Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity.” His doubt did not abate even as he neared the end. He concluded: “This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy.”3
These firsthand accounts of self-doubt by two Nobel Prize winners illustrate the intensity and regularity with which people who had great ideas and produced important work still doubted themselves. Indeed, when we step into the unknown, self-doubt may be the first instinct we have: what if we aren’t right, what if others think we are foolish, what if things don’t work out? There are many, many faces of self-doubt. We may tell ourselves that we don’t have the time, we don’t have the money, we are too old, others have had the idea before, someone else could do it better, and on and on until we convince ourselves not to try. But aplomb is moving forward anyway, knowing others have felt what we feel. And when paired with the concept of prioritizing values over goals, which we discuss in chapter 19, aplomb becomes truly powerful.
Reflection and Practice
Few, if any, people have all the capabilities they need when they start something bold, new, or uncertain. Instead, they get what they need by starting. When self-doubt arises, welcome it, separate it from yourself, focus on what makes you curious or inspired, and get back to work.
There are a number of tactics to increase self-confidence in order to bypass the self-doubt that arises with uncertainty. Acting with aplomb takes nerve, nonchalance, collectedness, and self-assurance.
- Call it what it is. When you are experiencing self-doubt, recognize it quickly and externalize it—it’s a natural human response to the unknown, not a measure of your ability or the idea’s merit.
- Work regularly and frequently. Both Feynman and Steinbeck simply got to work (or “play” in Feynman’s case). Steinbeck committed to a daily routine: “There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, ‘I’ll do it if I feel like it.’ One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all.” Steinbeck advised himself, “Just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it does.”4
- Separate the self-doubt from idea doubt. In his book Originals, Adam Grant argues that innovators are able to separate the value of their idea from their value as people, making them more curious and more robust against self-doubt. “The difference between high-output geniuses and the rest of us is the attitude they take when something flops…. When many of us would internalize that realization and think, ‘I’m crap,’ they think something like this: ‘The first few drafts are always crap, and I’m just not there yet.’”5
- Go rogue on the doubt. The beauty of Feynman’s example is that he flips the self-doubt on its head and lets it liberate him. Part of what creates self-doubt is the question of whether our idea is worthwhile and our attempt is any good. Not caring so much about either liberates us to do our best work.
- Revisit your story. When self-doubt comes up, go back to your story: Why are you doing this? Recalling your reasons for doing it in the first place will bring aplomb to your work.
- Argue both sides. Rather than letting self-doubt cripple you, argue your case like a defense attorney would. Remind yourself why what you are doing has merit. Explain why you should take action now versus later. Sometimes you need to put the thing you were working on in the drawer for a while, but if you can convince yourself that now is the time, don’t let the doubting of your own capabilities drive the decision.
- Stop letting self-doubt rob you. It may help to remember what self-doubt has stolen from you and will steal from you if you listen to it. Yes, doing new projects is uncertain, but the one certain thing is that if you never try, you will never achieve anything. Self-doubt, if you reframe it, is robbing you in broad daylight of the things you want most: conversations, experiences, projects, curiosities—all of it!