The Psychology of Overcommitting — Why High Achievers Are Delusional Optimists

of competence.

I was wondering, you know, when you think about competence, do you feel like it is competence when it comes to specific skills and then therefore it allows you to, you know, do things that further tap on that skill set? For example, practicing medicine, going, you know, advancing your medical career further, or is it more personal? So thinking about the fact that, oh, you know, maybe you've achieved certain things, you trust in your ability to build relationships, try new things, go into new environments.

I'm really curious.

What does that mean for you?

I think it's a bit of both.

You must have enough hard skills to be sure that you can do something competently.

I cannot go in and say I'm going to be a lawyer, I'm going to be an engineer and dig a MRT tunnel today because I don't have the skills for that.

But knowing that I have skills in medicine, I can be like, okay, I can probably stitch this thing fairly nicely or I can probably do this medical adjacent thing.

with like decent competence and in terms of soft skills also it's about knowing your limits so i feel like if i if i know i thrive well in this kind of environment if i add this circumstance to a new scenario it's like okay there's a decent chance of success but if you put me into a different scenario like for example i really suck when i'm i cannot survive when i'm sleep deprived like my functions and my like emotional regulation and fatigue just i just crash So if you put me in a scenario that's like that, I'll be like, okay, the chances of me succeeding are not high because I'm very pragmatic about what my limitations are.

Yeah, so how is it for you though, on a scale of 1 to 10?

So my non-serious answer to this is that I'm an 8 out of 10 optimist in the day and 2 out of 10 optimist at night.

Okay, so 8 plus 2 equals 10, so you're a 10 out of 10 optimist, I suppose.

I would say I average out to a similar level because it's a weird mix for me where I feel like overall on a day-to-day i'm very pessimistic about things i get to i worry a lot about how you know each individual task goes or with each individual endeavor let's say i'm working on a two month long project or business endeavor or something like that i'm always thinking about whether every single thing that happens is like a symptom of potential failure but then When I think back, on a more macro level, every time I dive into something, generally those don't seem to be things that someone who is overall pessimistic would do.

I've tried to cast my name into the mix in things that I feel difficult, but I suppose somewhere inside me, I feel like I can do anyway.

I guess when you're talking about sleep deprived, I think we all have been there.

I don't know if we need to make a public apology to all the people who have talked to us between the 4 to 5 a.m.