🔁 Confidence is just the second time

There was a self-checkout machine at my grocery store for about a year before I would go near it. I would see the short line, look at all those buttons on the screen, and walk on to the regular register with the longer wait. Then one afternoon the regular lanes were backed up and I had four things in my hands, so I tried it. I made a mess of it. A young woman had to come over and fix my produce code. Last week I went through that same machine without once looking at the screen.

By the end of this, you will:

Let me say plainly what I mean by confidence, because the word gets thrown around loosely.

Confidence is not a feeling you work up before you begin. It is what is left over after you have done something enough times that it stopped taking all of your attention. That is the whole of it. Not nerve. Not personality. Repetition, and what repetition leaves behind.

There is a hint of this in the numbers, and it comes from people our age. AARP published a survey in August asking adults over fifty how confident they feel doing various things online. Ninety-three percent felt confident looking up health information. Ninety-one percent felt confident with online banking. Confidence sat lower, at eighty-four percent, for a telehealth video visit with a doctor.

I cannot prove from a survey like that one that practice is the reason. But look at what separates those numbers. Banking and searching are things people do most weeks. A video visit with a doctor happens once or twice a year, if at all. Same people. Same abilities. Different amount of practice.

If confidence came from personality, there would be nothing to be done about it. Some people would have it and the rest of us would go without.

But if it comes from repetition, the question changes. It stops being "am I the sort of person who can do this" and becomes "how many times have I done it." That second question has an answer you can actually change, and you change it the same way everyone else does.

Researchers who study how people learn any complex skill describe the same pattern. Repetition is what moves a task from something that takes all your concentration to something your hands do while you think about other things. The reward for that is not just the task. It is getting your attention back.

Here is the step, and it is smaller than you are expecting.

Pick one thing you have already done online once, and do it a second time. The same thing, the same way.

Not something new. That is the part people get backwards. A new task starts you at zero again.

That is all there is to it. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to buy.

If you do it, the second attempt will often go easier than the first. Not always. Some days the website has changed on you, or the phone rings halfway through. But often enough to be worth finding out for yourself. And that matters more than it sounds, because you will not be taking my word for it, or anybody else's. You will have watched yourself do it. That is evidence, and evidence holds up on the days encouragement does not.

If you skip it, nothing bad happens. Next Tuesday arrives the same as always. The only cost is that the thing stays in the pile of things you have done exactly once. That is the pile that always feels hard.

I will be honest about the timeline, because I would rather you hear it from me. One repeat will not make you feel like an expert. A few will start to make it feel ordinary, which is the better goal anyway. That is the honest pace.

Everything above is about doing a thing a second time. Here is a first time – and those are the ones that always feel worse. The ClickBank Profit Challenge is a live 3-day training in October on building a small online income, and a seat is $37 as I write this. I spent an evening on the fine print and wrote up what I found, including who should walk away from it.

→ My honest write-up

Skip it if you want money in the next few weeks, or if three afternoons in October are not
realistic. It is neither of those things, and the write-up says so plainly.

I earn a commission if you join through my link, and more if you take the upgrades I tell you
to be careful about. It costs you nothing extra – the price is the same either way.

You do not have to feel ready. You only have to go second.

I am curious where you are sitting today. One tap, and nothing is shared.

A different question this week:

There is no wrong answer here, and every one of these is a normal place to be.

Talk soon,
Bob

A short story from my desk about the boring little tool that quietly runs this whole operation. No sales in it, just a look behind the curtain.