Focus On Self-Efficacy Rather Than Self-Esteem

A while back, someone told me, “I have low self-esteem.”

That person went to an arts high school and was surrounded by people so exceptionally talented that they became painfully aware of how unremarkable they themselves were, or so it seems. Their self-esteem has basically stayed low ever since.

It’s true that people who stand out in the arts are often unusual in a very particular way. I had a classmate in middle school who’s now a hit manga artist, and back then he used to mutter to himself while doodling mysterious things during class.

In my notebook, from the seat behind me. Ha.

I thought he was a weird guy, but a while after graduation I heard he was assisting on one of Magazine’s bestselling manga, and not long after that he made his own debut. He said that at first he had no assistants and drew everything himself, and that he once cut his own finger because he couldn’t get the color of blood right — thinking “this is it!” when he saw the result, only to be disappointed when it quickly turned brownish-red. He’s still just as unhinged as ever.

I also used to play a fair amount of football. I was never at any great level myself, but I have some feel for what it’s like to play at the level of prefectural or metropolitan select teams, national tournament veterans, or regular starters at so-called elite national powerhouse schools, because I played alongside them. But when it comes to national team level, I really have no idea. All I know is, “oh, even those guys don’t come close.” Once, when I was a graduate student, I played in a friendly match between “Tokyo Verdy alumni” and a “fun ragtag team.” The ragtag team was organized by a friend who’d once been on the Tokyo metropolitan select team. Most of its members came from J-League youth academies or top university teams, and it still strikes me as a little funny that a first-year master’s student in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology got mixed in there too. The result: the ragtag team crushed the Verdy alumni. Even though they were called alumni, most of them looked to be around the age of active players, and some even looked like they might have been former foreign signings. But we crushed them. Really, thoroughly, with no room for a comeback. And yet, none of the “ragtag members” from that day went on to have a career in the J-League (at least not one visible enough for the public to notice).

So, as this shows, the idea of building your sense of self-worth on “some achievement” is an easy trap to fall into, and it’s extremely difficult to pull off.

First, as I described above, it’s technically difficult.

Roughly 4,000 schools take part in the national high school football tournament. Only one of them becomes champion, and the football-playing population feeding into that pyramid is over 170,000 people. Add club teams to the denominator as well, and only a dozen or so players get chosen for the various age-group national teams, and depending on the generation, it’s entirely possible that none of them ever make the senior national team. And even then, Japan is still just a mid-tier country by world standards. It’s an absurd pyramid.

Van Gogh is a famous painter today, but he’s said to have received little recognition while he was alive. Franz Kafka is one of the defining writers of the 20th century, but during his lifetime he wasn’t even appreciated — he was just a depressed office worker, so much so that when he was dying he told a friend, “burn all my work.” Their lives were surely soaked in a sense of self-negation.

It might sound surprising, but among successful business leaders, quite a few have low self-esteem. This isn’t some technique like “low self-esteem makes you more likely to succeed” — it’s the rather heavy truth that they suffer from a kind of illness called “never being satisfied” (ha).

Let’s stop relying on self-esteem.

Self-esteem is nothing more than one decorative ornament on your individuality.

Coming first in a nationwide mock exam is nothing more than an individual trait. Passing the bar exam on the first try while still in university is nothing more than an individual trait. Bench-pressing 200kg or running the 100m under 10 seconds is nothing more than an individual trait.

So then, what standard should we use to praise others or feel at peace with ourselves?

Let’s switch to a sense of efficacy instead.

The term “self-efficacy” isn’t very common in everyday speech, but I believe it’s a legitimate term in psychology.

In short, it’s the feeling that “I am useful to someone.”

My underlying belief is that “a person’s happiness exists only right in front of them.” I don’t mean to criticize people who work hard every day for the sake of someone somewhere in the world whom they’ve never met, but focusing purely on sustainability, very few people can keep working hard for “someone unknown who surely exists somewhere out there.” And I don’t think many people can keep working hard purely for “the good of the world” in the abstract, macro sense either.

After all, there’s no direct feedback, no sense of tangible response.

Compared to that, having the person right in front of you show that they’re pleased, or feeling that you were of help to them, does far more to lift a person’s spirits.

Suppose you were a celebrity. Even so, as I’ve written in another post, information directed outward is, to some extent, always controlled. Being praised based on that can give you a sense of response that differs from reality, one that can be misleading.

In other words, “evaluation from people you have no direct connection with will not make you happy.”

Rather than being tossed around by that kind of thing, pay more attention to how the person right in front of you sees you.

If someone is in trouble, help them. If you have a solution, don’t hold back — share it.

If someone is struggling, listen to them. Sometimes you’ll be able to offer advice from your own experience, and sometimes you won’t be able to say anything at all and can only listen. But either way, having someone listen surely lightens their mood somewhat. Isn’t that a wonderful thing?

Try hard at what you do. The person watching beside you might draw strength from it.

Do things carefully and with care. The person watching beside you might reflect on their own conduct.

Even when you act for someone’s sake, you may get rebuffed, or even have a bad result thrown back at you. But giving up over that accomplishes nothing. Keep doing things for the person in front of you, quietly and steadily. This is something Mother Teresa said.

If you can’t get a real sense that “I exist here and I’m useful for something,” changing the place you belong is also an option. With 7 billion people in humanity, it’s not simply 7 billion different paths — 　7 billion Combination 2 ≈ 2.5 x 10^19 relationships ought to exist, that many combinations. If something is tormenting you, it’s not something absolute, but something relative. Your skills and abilities are, as I said earlier, nothing more than a small decorative flourish on your individuality. Think of it the same way as having a nice-looking nose or clear skin. It has little to do with whether or not you can be happy.

Make the person in front of you happy. There’s an anecdote that Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, made Twitter thinking it would please his “mother,” and made Square thinking it would please a “glassblower friend.” His business insight is remarkable, but that’s really what starting motivation looks like.

**Self-esteem looks reliable at first glance, but it’s actually unstable — you can manufacture it yourself, you can end up needlessly dependent on it, and it turns out to be a surprisingly troublesome thing.

Self-efficacy doesn’t fluctuate nearly as much, and instead builds up gradually and steadily bears fruit over time — it’s a more grown-up sort of thing.**

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/02/342/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.