We tend to view confidence as a product of accomplishment rather than part of the process that leads there. But supremely confident people were confident long before they achieved anything.

All the great performers I have worked with are fueled by a personal dream.

To be a top performer you have to be passionately committed to what you’re doing and insanely confident about your ability to pull it off.

Anyone who strays too far from the majority view or the conventional wisdom is bound to be labeled “arrogant,” “a maverick,” “a Wildman,” “weird,” or even “crazy.”

If you really want to break from the pack, you have to risk being perceived to be as eccentric as these people. You have to think exception-ally—a LOT! 

Stick with your own perception of yourself—living in your own world—and letting your reality, not the reality presented by other people or particular situations, control your performance.

History, though, shows us that the people who end up changing the world—the great political, scientific, social, technological, artistic, even sports revolutionaries—are always nuts, until they’re right, and then they’re geniuses.

Great performers in all fields seem immune to what outsiders think about them. Their sense of themselves never depends on the feedback—positive or negative—they get from the environment.

Great performers require a measure of confidence that would strike many as absurd, unfounded, and downright irrational. They believe in themselves utterly, without question, even when everyone else is questioning how good (or sane) they are.

Genuine confidence is a way of thinking about yourself and your abilities. Confidence is your perception of your own potential; it’s a kind of long-term thinking that powers you through the obstacles and tough times, helping you solve problems and putting you in the way of success. Your confidence is quite a separate matter from your social skills.

Elevated levels of confidence are omnipresent among history’s greatest overachievers. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most famous men in the world even before he signed the Declaration of Independence once lamented about humility, “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue.”