Evan Carmichael and investor Bill Ackman discuss building confidence versus arrogance. Ackman shares how conviction in contrarian bets drives investment success, while the conversation covers breaking big tasks into smaller steps and stretching beyond your comfort zone to develop real confidence.
Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's message is be confident. Over to you, Bill Ackman.
The best investments are the ones where we are confident we're right and everyone else is wrong. Okay, and you have to, in order to be, you know, been accused recently of being arrogant, among other things. No, no, I'm going to actually ask you that. It was called pompous, but that's okay. Pompous? I don't think I'm pompous, but I've certainly been accused of being arrogant. And there's a difference between arrogance and confidence. If you're arrogant in investing, you're going to get killed. If you're not confident, you'll never make an investment. So you have to do a sufficient amount of work to be confident enough to have the conviction to do something that's contrarian. We bought the stock of a soon-to-be-bankrupt retailer I'm sorry, a shopping mall company during the financial crisis at pennies per share. You have to be willing to look silly when you do something like that. General Growth stock is up 90-fold since our original investment. You know, we had confidence. Maybe people thought it was arrogant to believe that we could be successful in turning it around. But you also have to be humble.
I think entrepreneurs need to be confident. I think most entrepreneurs are confident, but we have We have these nagging voices in our head that sometimes tell us, "You can't do this. You won't be successful. You'll never reach that big goal that you have." I think you have to have confidence as an entrepreneur because you're going to have people around you telling you that you're crazy, that you're stupid, that you have a vision of the world that doesn't yet exist, and you're going to go and be the one to create it. And most people can't see it because it's not logical, because you're leading with your heart and not your head. And so it's hard for people to understand that, and they're going to be critical. A lot of people are going to be jealous of you too, right? You're off doing this crazy thing and you're off living your dreams while they're stuck in some dead-end job that they don't want to be part of. So you're going to get lots of criticism put on you. And to keep going, you have to have confidence that it's going to work out. And it's really tough at the start as an entrepreneur because you're going to make mistakes, because you don't know what you're doing, because, you know, you don't have it all worked out. There are tons of holes in your business plan. But you go forward anyway, and you have confidence that it's going to work out, and that you'll find the staircase as you start to walk. That's part of being an entrepreneur. You know, by the time you have all the information, it's too late to seize an opportunity. So you have to get going and start even though you don't quite know how you're going to get there. You know the why, but you don't know the how yet. And for those of you who don't have the high level of confidence, it's not something that just happens overnight. It's not just some confidence switch that you can turn on. Confidence comes through a series of actions where you're pushing yourself, right? So the opposite of confidence is if you're nervous or if you're scared and you don't take action, right? You shrink down instead of rise up to the occasion. And so anytime that you feel yourself shrinking down, and being afraid and being scared and not doing the thing that you feel like you should do but you don't do it, every time you are in that situation, you say yes, you build more confidence. If you could take some big project that looks super big and super scary and you break it down to the smallest component and just do that, then you can get to the next step and you can get to the next step and you can get to the next step. And doing that again is easy because you've done it before. And so you have the confidence to then expand expand the circle every step along the way. And so it's not just something that you turn on, but get into the habit of pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, stretching a little bit more every single time, and soon people look at you as this super confident person. But really, all you've done is said yes and yes and yes and yes every time you were faced with a difficult decision. So the question of the day today is, how are you building your confidence? Leave it in the comments below and I'll join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. I wake up every morning with espresso, keep me going.
