Confidence or arrogance?

Golden State Warriors power forward Draymond Green considers himself the greatest defensive player in NBA history.

"The best defender ever? Me", Green said. [...]

"That's what I believe," he added. "Wholeheartedly."

I know what you’re thinking. This is arrogant on so many levels – how can a player say this before they’ve even retired? Besides, Draymond is clearly not the best defender of all time. I mean, have you seen [insert name] defend?

Well, let’s pretend that Draymond goes on to be the unequivocal greatest defender in history.

We’d look back at this quote and say that this was a sign of greatness. That despite all the haters, this confidence propelled him past everyone else.

I think this example describes an important problem: we recharacterize arrogance as confidence after success. Why is this problematic? Confidence is universally agreed as an essential component of success, but we constantly discourage arrogance, when in reality the two mostly overlap.

I think the advent of social media has made this worse; phrases like “weird flex but okay” entering teen lingo show how omnipresent this confidence-cancel-culture has gotten, with studies showing younger generations are more insecure than ever.

This isn’t something that has an easy fix but something to be cognizant of. We shouldn’t seek to impulsively shut down someone for something sounding mildly arrogant, and instead remember that putting yourself out there is already difficult enough.