>To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience. To me, this entire continuum from not confident, to confident to arrogant has to do with how you act wh

>To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience. To me, this entire continuum from not confident, to confident to arrogant has to do with how you act when you encounter a new situation, or some other unknown, well, and how you act around other people in a social situation. Re-reading my posts, this is obviously most of what I'm talking about. The guy I think of as the least confident guy I know is an absolutely awesome c++ programmer. Incredible. The man holds himself like he thinks you are about to punch him. He looks a good four inches shorter than he really is because of his posture. He speaks with such a soft voice that he's usually got to repeat himself several times when he orders food. In any sort of social situation, he looks pretty uncomfortable. But if you talk about C++? He'll look you in the eye and say "I don't write segmentation faults" or "My code has no buffer overflows." and he believes it, too. (hell, after working with him, I believe it.) - but to me, that doesn't seem like confidence. that's just experience, and being obviously very, very good at something. >A confident man can lose well. An arrogant man can't. Logically, I don't think that is the whole story, but emotionally, I really like that definition.