Self-efficacy matters more than self-esteem

The other day, someone told me, “I have low self-esteem.”

That person went to an arts-focused high school and became painfully aware there of how unremarkable they were, surrounded by people who were far too outstanding. Their self-esteem has basically stayed low ever since, they said.

It’s true that people who excel in the arts are often extraordinary in a specific way. I had a classmate in junior high who’s now an active, successful manga artist, and back then he used to mutter to himself while doodling mysterious sketches during class.

In my notebook, sitting behind him. Ha.

I thought he was a strange guy, but a while after graduation I heard he was working as an assistant on one of the popular series in Magazine, and not long after that he made his own debut. He used to say that at first he had no assistants and did everything himself, and he still says slightly unhinged things — how he once cut his own finger trying to get the color of blood right because none of the colors looked convincing, thought “this is it!” when he saw the result, then was disappointed that it quickly turned blackish-red.

I also used to play soccer, more or less seriously. I was never at a great level myself, but having played alongside people who were, I have some feel for what it’s like to compete at the level of prefectural or metropolitan select teams, national-tournament veterans, or the regular lineup of a so-called nationally famous powerhouse school. The level of the national team, though, is something I genuinely don’t understand. All I know is, “ah, so even those guys don’t measure up at that level.” Once, when I was a graduate student, I played in a practice match between “a team of Tokyo Verdy alumni” and “a fun mixed team.” A friend of mine, who’d been on the Tokyo metropolitan select team, organized the mixed team. Most of the members came from J-League youth academies or top university teams, and it still amuses me that mixed in among them was a first-year master’s student from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology. The mixed team ended up thoroughly beating the Verdy alumni. Even though they were called “alumni,” most of them looked to be around active-player age, and one even looked like a former foreign signing. But we crushed them. Truly, crushed them with no room to fight back. And yet, none of the members of that “mixed team” went on to succeed in the J-League afterward (or at least, not visibly enough for anyone to notice).

So, as this shows, building your sense of self-worth on “achieving something” is a trap that’s easy to fall into, and it’s extremely difficult to pull off.

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

Roughly 4,000 schools participate in high school soccer. One of them becomes the champion, and the soccer-playing population connected to that pyramid runs over 170,000. Add club teams to the denominator, and out of all of that only a dozen or so players per age group get selected for age-category national teams — in some generations, it’s possible that not a single one of them ends up on the senior national team. Even so, Japan remains only a mid-tier country by world standards. It’s an absurd pyramid.

Van Gogh is a famous painter today, but it’s said he was barely recognized during his lifetime. Franz Kafka is one of the defining writers of the 20th century, but during his life he wasn’t just unrecognized — he was simply a depressed office worker, so depressed that when he died he told a friend to burn all of his manuscripts. Their lives were surely steeped in a sense of self-negation.

It might sound surprising, but among successful business executives there are actually quite a few with low self-esteem. This isn’t some kind of know-how claim like “low self-esteem makes you more likely to succeed” — it’s a heavier point: they’re afflicted with a kind of disease called “never being satisfied.”

Let’s stop relying on self-esteem.

Self-esteem is nothing more than one decorative flourish of your individuality.

Even if you came in first on a nationwide mock exam, that’s just individuality. Even if you passed the bar exam on your first try while still in university, that’s just individuality. Whether you can bench press 200kg or run 100m in under 10 seconds, that’s just individuality.

So then, what axis of evaluation should we use to praise others or come to terms with ourselves?

Let’s shift to a sense of efficacy.

The term “self-efficacy” isn’t very commonly used, but I think it’s a properly established psychological concept.

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

My underlying belief is that “a person’s happiness exists only right in front of them.” I don’t mean to disparage people who work hard day after day for the sake of someone somewhere in the world they’ve never met, but focusing purely on sustainability, very few people can keep doing something for the sake of “someone unknown, who presumably exists somewhere.” I doubt many people can keep going purely for “the good of society” in some macro sense either.

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

Compared to that, the feeling of having made the person right in front of you happy, or of having genuinely helped them, does far more to lift a person’s spirits.

Suppose you were a famous person. Even so, as I’ve written in another post, information directed outward is, to some degree, always controlled. Being praised on the basis of that can give you a sense of response that’s disconnected from reality — even a wrong one.

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

Rather than being tossed around by that kind of thing, we should care more about how the person right in front of us feels about us.

If someone is in trouble, help them. If you have a solution, don’t be stingy — 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. Either way, having been listened to will have lifted their spirits somewhat. Isn’t that wonderful?

Try your best. Someone watching beside you might draw strength from that.

Do things carefully and with care. Someone watching beside you might reflect on their own conduct because of it.

Even when you act for someone’s sake, you may get pushed back, or even have a bad result thrown right back at you. But giving up over that accomplishes nothing. Just keep doing something for the person in front of you, plainly and without fuss. 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 “where you are” is also an option. With 7 billion people in humanity, it’s not simply 7 billion different ways of being — 　7 billion Combination 2 ≒ 2.5 x 10^19 relationships ought to exist, and that’s the scale we’re talking about. If something is causing you pain, it’s not absolute — it’s relative. Your skills and abilities are, as I said earlier, nothing more than a small decorative flourish of individuality. Think of it as being on the same level as having a nice-shaped 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, built Twitter thinking it would make his “mother” happy, and Square thinking it would make a “glassblower friend” happy. His business insight is remarkable, but that’s really what motivations at the start of something look like.

**Self-esteem looks reliable at first glance, but in truth it’s unstable — something you can manufacture yourself or become uselessly dependent on. It’s a surprisingly troublesome thing.

Self-efficacy, by contrast, doesn’t waver nearly as much. Instead, it builds up gradually and steadily bears fruit. It’s a more mature kind of thing.**

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