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Receiving a performance review, for a job that I was good at, I learned that the problem with me was not my output, but rather my confidence. Rachel needed to “trust her own instincts,” I read, thinking of every time I had consulted another person for their opinion, every time I had joked about what I didn’t know. In the next quarter, the hope was that I would “gain the confidence” to ask for less “direction.” Where this confidence should come from, it did not say.

I have never had any confidence, or at least, not the kind that people recognize. I do not exude peaceful self-assurance. I have bad posture. I bite my nails until they hurt. For much of my life, I wanted to be an actor, and spent a lot of time in various training programs, where it became clear my strength was clowning and I didn’t want to be a clown. I was, one adviser informed me, not adequately glamorous, which of course wasn’t wrong. I never got over my terror of auditioning, never learned to see it as anything other than a referendum on whether I was good enough. Then I became a writer. At my first office job, my exasperated boss told me to stop saying I was “concerned.”

Confidence, we have decided as a culture, is a virtue. It isn’t just that it is effective, though both research and observation suggest it is — confident people are seen as better at their jobs, are more attractive as romantic partners — but that confidence is a moral good. It is an asset to the individual and also the collective. Confidence is embedded in our national DNA: In this great nation, anyone can bootstrap their way to success and fortune with hard work and blind self-belief.

I do not exude peaceful self-assurance. I have bad posture. I bite my nails until they hurt.

Unsurprisingly, given its singular importance, a whole industry dedicated to cultivating more of it has sprung up. In 2014, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay published The Confidence Code, which, after the previous year’s Lean In, may be the pinnacle of Confidence Literature, but there are so many variations. There is Quick Confidence and How to Be Confident and The Tao of Self-Confidence. There is I Can Make You Confident, but also Unstoppable Confidence, Wise Confidence, Radical Confidence, and Confident and Killing It. Online, Tony Robbins will tell you how to be confident, and so will the New York Times, the Cleveland Clinic, and Today.com. “Perfect your posture,” suggests wikiHow in “How to Be Confident (with Pictures).”

For a more intensive experience, there are one-on-one confidence coaches and group seminars and online pre-recorded courses, where, for somewhere between a hundred and several thousand dollars, you can learn to unleash your pent-up better self. Udemy, the online education platform, currently offers 403 options. Stuck in traffic or at the grocery store, you can listen to “bite-sized” confidence-boosting pep talks on Marigold ($39.99/year). The confidence-seeker on a budget can make do with access to a nonstop stream of inspirational confidence content on social media for free.

I was furious, all the time, at this emphasis on confidence. Why did it matter so much how I felt about myself, as long as I was doing things? A lot of people I knew, in real life and online and in the news, seemed to feel quite sure of their abilities, despite obvious evidence. At the same time, I was desperate for what they had. What a life, walking around, certain that my successes were the well-deserved product of my well-honed abilities, and my failures were simply momentary setbacks on my path up and up and up!

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