什么是获得真正自信的唯一途径The Only Way to Be Confident
一、自信的困境：毫无底气时，如何自信？
English:
How are you supposed to be confident about something when you have nothing to feel confident about?
Like, how are you supposed to be confident at your new job if you’ve never done this type of work before? Or how are you supposed to be confident in social situations when no one has ever liked you before?
Or how are you supposed to be confident in your relationship when you’ve never been in a successful relationship before?
On the surface, confidence appears to be an area where the rich get richer and the poor stay the fucking losers they are.
After all, if you’ve never experienced much social acceptance and you lack confidence around new people, then that lack of confidence will make people think you’re clingy and weird and not accept you.
中文:
一件事你毫无经验、毫无底气，又怎么可能自信得起来?
比如，从没做过这类工作，你怎么在新岗位上自信?从没被人真心喜欢过，你怎么在社交里自在?
从没谈过一段舒服的恋爱，你又怎么对亲密关系有信心?
表面看，自信就是个马太效应:越有自信的人越顺，越没自信的人越糟。
你本来就不被人接纳，在陌生人面前没底气，结果这份不自信，反而让人觉得你黏人、奇怪，更不喜欢你。
二、自信的死循环：成功与自信的相互绑架
English:
Same deal goes for relationships.
No confidence in intimacy will lead to bad breakups and awkward phone calls.
And seriously, how are you supposed to be confident in your work experience when previous experience is required to even be considered for a job in the first place?
If you’ve always lost in life, then how could you ever expect to be a winner? And if you never expect to be a winner, then you’re going to act like a loser. Thus the cycle of suckage continues.
This is the confidence conundrum, where in order to be happy or loved or successful, first you need to be confident… but to be confident, first you need to be happy or loved or successful.
So it seems like you’re stuck in one of two loops: either you’re already in a happy and confident loop. Or you’re in a loser loop.
中文:
感情里也一样。对亲密关系没信心，最后只会搞砸分手，留下一堆尴尬。
说真的，找工作先要经验，可你没经验，又怎么对自己的能力有自信?
你一直不顺，怎么可能觉得自己会赢?不觉得自己会赢，做事就缩手缩脚，然后越来越糟，恶性循环。
这就是自信的死循环:想幸福、被爱、成功，你得先自信;可想要自信，你又得先幸福、被爱、成功。
你好像只能困在两种循环里:要么一路顺风顺水越来越自信，要么一路糟心越来越自卑。
三、打破循环：自信与外在条件无关
English:
And if you’re in the loser loop, well it seems damn near impossible to get out.
It’s like a dog chasing its own tail. Or Domino’s ordering its own pizza. You can spend a lot of time cuttle-gazing, trying to mentally sort everything out, but just like with your lack of confidence, you’re likely to end up right back where you started.
But maybe we’re going about this all wrong. Maybe the confidence conundrum isn’t really a conundrum at all.
If we pay close attention, we can learn a few things about confidence just by observing people.
Just because somebody has something (tons of friends, a million dollars, a bitchin’ beach body) doesn’t necessarily mean that this person is confident in it.
中文:
一旦陷进自卑的循环，想爬出来简直难如登天。
就像狗追自己尾巴，又傻又没用。你想破脑袋，自我开导半天，最后还是回到原点，一样不自信。
但也许，我们从一开始就想错了。这个自信难题，根本不是死结。
只要仔细观察别人，就能看清自信到底是什么。
有些人朋友一堆、有钱、身材好，不代表他们就真的自信。
四、自信的本质：源于自我认知，而非外在标签
English:
There are business tycoons who totally lack confidence in their own wealth, models who lack confidence in their looks, and celebrities who lack confidence in their own popularity.
So I think the first thing we can establish is that confidence is not necessarily linked to any external marker.
Rather, our confidence is rooted in our perception of ourselves regardless of any tangible external reality.
Because our confidence is not necessarily linked to any external, tangible measurement, we can conclude that improving the external, tangible aspects of our lives won’t necessarily build confidence.
Chances are that if you’ve lived more than a couple of decades, you’ve experienced this in some form or another.
中文:
富豪可能对自己的财富焦虑，模特可能对长相自卑，明星也可能对人气没安全感。
所以首先可以确定:自信和外在条件没有必然关系。
自信来自你怎么看待自己，和你拥有什么、没什么没关系。
既然自信不靠外在条件，那拼命改善外在，也不一定能让你真正自信。
只要你活了二三十年，大概率都会体会过这点。
五、自信是感觉：不缺什么的底气
English:
Getting a promotion at your job doesn’t necessarily make you more confident in your professional abilities. In fact, it can often make you feel less confident.
Dating and/or sleeping with more people doesn’t necessarily make you feel more confident about how attractive you are.
Moving in with your partner or getting married doesn’t necessarily make you feel any more confident in your relationship.
Confidence is a feeling. An emotional state and a state of mind. It’s the perception that you lack nothing. That you are equipped with everything you need, both now and for the future.
A person confident in their social life will feel as though they lack nothing in their social life.
A person with no confidence in their social life believes that they lack the prerequisite coolness to be invited to anyone’s pizza party.
中文:
升职不代表你对工作能力更自信，反而常常更慌。
谈再多恋爱、和多少人暧昧，也不一定让你觉得自己更有魅力。
同居、结婚，也不一定让你对这段感情更有底气。
自信是一种感觉，一种心态。是你打心底觉得：我什么都不缺，现在和未来，我都扛得住。
社交自信的人，不会觉得自己人缘差、没魅力。
社交自卑的人，总觉得自己不够好，没人真心想和自己玩。
六、常见误区：自我洗脑与外在模仿的局限
English:
It’s this perception of lacking something that drives their needy, clingy, and/or bitchy behavior.
The obvious and most common answer to the confidence conundrum is to simply believe that you lack nothing.
That you already have, or at least deserve, whatever you feel you would need to make you confident.
But this sort of thinking—believing you’re already beautiful even though you’re a frumpy slob, or believing you’re a raging success even though your only profitable business venture was selling weed in high school—leads to the kind of insufferable narcissism…
A lot of people soon realize this doesn’t work and so they take a different approach: incremental, external improvement.
They read articles that tell them the top 50 things confident people do, and then they try to do those things.
中文:
正是这种“我不够好”的想法，才让他们变得黏人、敏感、情绪化。
最常见的解法就是强行洗脑:告诉自己“我什么都不缺”。
告诉自己，我配得上一切，我已经足够好。
但这种自我欺骗很可笑:邋里邋遢却硬说自己绝美，一事无成却硬说自己厉害，最后只会变成讨人厌的自恋狂。
很多人发现这没用，就换一条路:一点点改善外在。
看各种“自信的人必做50件事”，然后照着模仿。
七、外在改善的短暂性：非长久之计
English:
They start to exercise, dress better, make eye contact, and practice firmer handshakes.
This is admittedly a step above simply believing that you’re already confident and that you don’t belong in the loser loop.
And actually, it will work—but only for a little while.
Again, this type of thinking only focuses on external sources of confidence.
And remember, deriving your self-confidence from the world around you is short-lived at its best and completely fucking delusional at its worst.
So no, external improvement is not a sustainable solution to the confidence conundrum.
And deluding yourself into believing you already possess everything you could ever dream of is far worse.
中文:
开始健身、打扮、练眼神、练握手，假装自信。
说实话，这比无脑洗脑强一点。
而且确实有用，但只是暂时的。
说到底，这还是靠外在撑自信。
靠外界得来的自信，最久也只是暂时，往坏了说就是完全自欺欺人。
所以，改外表、堆条件，不是长久之计。
而无脑自我催眠，只会更糟。
八、真正自信的核心：坦然接受不足，与失败和解
English:
The only way to be truly confident is to simply become comfortable with what you lack.
Read that again.
The big mistake with confidence is that it has nothing to do with being comfortable in what we achieve and everything to do with being comfortable in what we don’t achieve.
People who are confident in business are confident because they’re comfortable with failure.
They realize that failure is simply part of learning how their market works.
It’s a reflection of their lack of knowledge, not a reflection of who they are as a person.
中文:
真正自信的唯一方法，是坦然接受自己的不足。
这句话请再读一遍。
我们对自信最大的误解是：以为自信来自成功，其实自信来自接受失败。
商场上自信的人，不是从不输，而是输得起。
他们知道，失败只是了解市场的一部分。
失败只代表经验不够，不代表这个人不行。
九、在失败中建立自信：社交与感情的底层逻辑
English:
People who are confident in their social lives are confident because they’re comfortable with rejection.
They’re comfortable with people not liking them as long as they’re expressing themselves honestly.
People who are confident in their relationships are confident because they’re comfortable with getting hurt.
They’re not afraid to be vulnerable and tell someone how they feel, and then establish strong boundaries around those feelings (even if it means being uncomfortable or leaving a bad relationship).
Building Confidence Through Failure
The truth is that the route to the positive runs through the negative.
Those among us who are most comfortable with negative experiences are those who reap the most benefits.
中文:
社交自信的人，不是人人都喜欢他们，而是他们不怕被讨厌。
只要自己活得真实，就算有人不喜欢，也无所谓。
感情里自信的人，不是不会受伤，而是不怕受伤。
他们敢袒露脆弱，敢表达真心，也敢守住底线——就算会难受，也敢离开不对的人。
在失败里建立自信
真相是：走向光明的路，必须穿过黑暗。
越能坦然面对负面经历的人，反而收获越多。
十、结语：接受失败，方能真正自信
English:
It’s counterintuitive, but it’s also true: we often fear that if we become comfortable with failure—as in, accept failure as an inevitable part of living—that we will become failures.
But it doesn’t work that way.
Comfort in our failures allows us to act without fear, to engage without judgment, to love without condition.
It’s the dog that lets the tail go, realizing that it’s already a part of himself.
It’s the Domino’s that cancels its own order, realizing it already has the pizza it wanted. Or something.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to publish this article comfortable with the fact that some people will probably hate it. And eat my pizza.
中文:
这听起来反直觉，但却是真的:
我们总怕接受失败，就会变成失败者。
事实并非如此。
能坦然面对失败，你才能放手去做、真诚相处、无条件去爱。
就像狗不再追自己的尾巴，因为它明白，尾巴本就是自己的一部分。
就像披萨店不再给自己下单，因为它已经拥有想要的东西。
好了，我要发这篇文章了。我坦然接受有人会讨厌它，然后安心吃我的披萨。
