Short spoken monologue arguing that confidence is not a prerequisite but a result of practice and learning from mistakes. The speaker (Katie McManus) gives concrete examples—learning to ride a bike and learning to knit—to show that making errors, fixing them, and persisting builds confidence. The piece ends with a motivational call to act now rather than waiting for perfect confidence.
Chapters
Most people get confidence. Wrong. If I were to tell you to ride a bike from your home to a store that was three miles away and you had never ridden a bike before, would you feel confident in doing it? Absolutely not. You'd be terrified. You'd be like, oh, my God, I'm gonna. I'm crash, and I'm gonna fall and I'm gonna skin both my knees and I'm gonna get a concussion and all the things. And you probably would, honestly. You know, the only time you're gonna feel confident in riding the bike from where you are to the store that's three miles away is. Is after you've written it a bunch, right? After you've practiced, after you've learned how to do it. And most of us will agree on that, right? Most of us will agree, well, we have to learn how to do the thing first before we can be confident at it. And yes, absolutely. But here's where it gets wonky. Here's where we go wrong. A lot of people will think, okay, well, I have to do it perfectly. I can't fuck it up, okay? I have to do it absolutely perfectly from the very first time I get on the bike to the first time I. I ride that bike to the store. And that's just not realistic. And that's also not how you build confidence, all right? You don't build confidence by doing something perfectly all the time, okay? You actually build confidence each time you fall down, you figure out what you did wrong and you get back up, you brush yourself off, you get back on the bike, okay? You don't learn how to turn well until you turn badly a couple times. You don't learn how to ease on the brakes the correct way until you've gone over the handlebars a couple times. Or at least that was my story. You don't learn how to dismount from the bike in a way that's graceful and easy until you've done it badly a few times, all right? We don't build confidence by doing things perfectly every step of the way. We build confidence by getting it wrong, by not doing it right, by fixing it, by getting hurt, by brushing ourselves off, by getting back on the bike, by doing it again and again and again. And see. Seeing how we can correct. Another example of this is like, I'm a knitter, okay? I have knit dozens and dozens of different projects. I have taught knitting. In my day, I managed a yarn shop, and I never learned anything from doing it well. I never learned anything from following the instructions and Getting it perfect. I learned the best when I it up. I learned the best when I accidentally dropped a stitch and realized that it came all the way down here and thought, thought, oh, crap, I have to figure out how to fix this, all right? And in figuring out how to fix it, I became less afraid of making mistakes because I knew that, oh, my God, I've made this mistake before, okay? I've dropped a stitch and had to pick it back up and bring it back, all right? I've done it before. I can do it again. So I share this with you. Because if you're waiting to be confident to start a business, to apply for the job that pays better, to move to a new city where you don't know anyone or anything that's outside your comfort zone, that you really, really don't wait anymore, don't wait to do that first step and have it go perfect. Don't wait to do that next step and have that go perfect. Just take a fucking step and lean into getting it wrong, okay? Fully immerse yourself in the doing of it, all right? Because you only build confidence to take the next step by showing yourself that you, even if you fell, that you could get back up again, that even if you drop that stitch, that you could pick it up again. All right? Just start acting, okay? It is the only way to get what you want. And if you sit there waiting for confidence to happen, it's never gonna happen.
