The Confidence hinge that breaks and builds and breaks and builds....

In the past, more often than not, I found the roots of my self-confidence not far from the surface. And i found them uprooted more often than I would have wanted them to be.

I had to plant them back through some 'victories' now and then.
In retro, only now do I get the full significance of the so-called moral victory.

Confidence that I would get through life came from comparison with others, belief in my abilities, or very simply, in some cases, not mine perhaps, parents' wealth.
While I would rather not talk about the kind of confidence that comes from knowing you're going to be wealthy just because you were born, I can say a few things about the rest.
This kind of self confidence doesn't last very long however.
You might clear an entrance exam and be confident that your neighbour's son or your friends didn't make it. Unfortunately, Everybody else at college made it through this exam as well. - So that's no reason to be confident.
If you got this really nice job at this great firm, you walk into the firm and everybody else there has made it, and what's worse you're at the bottom of the ladder - that's no reason to be confident either.
Getting a very well paid job is not going to help either, the higher your pay gets, the more likely are you to hear of people with better paychecks. So just getting a lot of money can't make you smarter.
The roots need to go deeper.
If they don't, you'll have to keep planting them back each time you recover after a setback. A lean period without a job, a long period single will uproot it again, and make you into this hapless soul desperately in need of some kind of success to get back to your confident self.
The idea would be to plant them deeper and deeper after each setback, so they don't get uprooted as easily the next time round.

But then how deep can you plant them?
Ok, you've got this really well paid job - How do you stand up confident when you meet this chap who earns more than you?
You think you're really smart and on this very complicated PhD program, how do you stand up to this very smart chap who's ahead of you in his research, and whom everybody thinks is really smart?

The answer according to one man, who ran a very big company called General Electric for a long long time was to simply be confident in your shoes!
Whatever he meant.