20 Quotes by Katty Kay

The irony is that perfectionism actually inhibits achievement. Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson, authors of The Plateau Effect, call it the “enemy of the good,” leading to piles of useless, unfinished work, and hours of wasted time, because, in the pursuit of it, we put off difficult tasks waiting to be perfectly ready before we start.

Confidence, at least the part that’s not in our genes, requires hard work, substantial risk, determined persistence, and sometimes bitter failure. Building it demands regular exposure to all of these things. You.

When a man walks into a room, they’re assumed to be competent until they prove otherwise.

In the most basic terms, what we need to do is start acting and risking and failing, and stop mumbling and apologizing and prevaricating.

She doesn’t hesitate often. She told us that good leadership means being an efficient decision maker, and she doesn’t tolerate indecision in others. “When somebody says to me, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do,’ I don’t have time for that. Because if I ask you to give me your opinion and you’re wishy-washy with me, I’m moving on. We’re always on a fast-moving train,” she said, crisply, and we got a sense she’s not somebody you’d want to let down.

I think confidence is the way we meet our circumstances, whether they are wondrous and wonderful or really hard and difficult,” she offered, with a tranquil smile. “It’s almost like a wholeheartedness, where we’re not holding back. We’re not fragmented. We’re not divided. We’re just going towards what’s happening. There’s an energy to it. I think that’s confidence. And it’s absolutely part of human fulfillment.

Who you are and what you do matter way more than how you look.

Columbia Business School even has a term for it now. They call it “honest overconfidence” and they have found that men on average rate their performance to be 30 percent better than it is.

When dopamine, which gets us moving, is commingled with serotonin, which induces calm thought, and oxytocin, which generates warm and positive attitudes toward others, confidence can much more easily take hold.