I bring this story up because it’s a mistake I often reflect on and try to learn from. Knowing the difference between arrogance and confidence is one of the hardest things to do when you’re trying to make something new. If you lack confidence, you’ll submit to the will of people who are confident. If you’re full of arrogance, you’ll chronically overestimate your own ability.

Arrogance and confidence have many overlapping qualities. They both inevitably involve believing something that many others do not. They both require writing a check you know you can not yet cash.

It’s hard to control whether people see you as confident or arrogant because most of their opinion is based on whether you’ve recently been successful. A football coach who goes for it on a fourth down and gets it is seen as confident while the one who doesn’t get it is arrogant.

You can’t stop people from making hindsight fueled-judgements, but you can stop yourself from thinking in a particularly arrogant way.

The difference between confidence and arrogance has everything to do with empathy.

When you truly believe in a goal you believe that, with enough time, anyone can be convinced to share that goal with you. Everyone who walks around Earth is a potential convert.

When you’re arrogant, you believe only a certain type of person will be able to share your goal. This is an innocent seeming difference, but it ultimately becomes something that will warp your ability to make good decisions.

If your goal is at all bold or worth fighting for, you’ll soon find people who will reject your idea and want to burn you to the ground. Some of these people will deliver meaningful, thought-out criticism and some will dismiss you. If they dismiss your idea from a position of power, they’ll seem arrogant, and a knee-jerk reaction will be to mimic them.

Arrogance is a seductive feeling. When you dismiss someone in response to them dismissing your idea, you can feel as if you’ve taken back some power. This is temporary.

The problem with arrogance is that it makes your world smaller. The more you dismiss people as incapable of understanding your idea, the easier it becomes to do again. You create a category that they fit into, and when you assess a new person you turn attention to yourself. Instead of sitting down with someone to search for common ground, you sit down with them and try to rapidly figure out whether they have a predisposition to understand anything that you’re telling them.

Yes, your time is limited, and you can only connect with so many people, but if empathy is what guides you, it can make all the difference. The more you draw lines in the sand, the more others will do the same. You isolate yourself. And the more you’re alone, the more you’ll need to inflate your own ego and sense of ability to make up for the loss.

Arrogance crushes you. It makes you feel big in exchange for a network that is small and a mind that will never be good enough. Your desire to achieve your goal twists into a desire to prove others wrong.