 Excessive Self-Regard Tendency Did you know that 90% of Swedish drivers believe that their driving skills are better than average? The reason people tend to put great value on their skills is because of what's called the endowment effect. People generally make terrible misjudgments based on a lack of objectivity when observing their skills. This can be seen when people are playing lollies. Lollies in which a person is able to choose their own numbers, not given the numbers like Scratches, are a lot more popular. People have this irrational idea that their special numbers are going to give them a better chance at winning, or that by choosing the numbers they will be able to win. When mathematically speaking, the chances of winning a lorry next to zero are incredibly slim. And yet people keep doing this. They keep getting in. Now, this also happens in the stock market. When someone buys a stock, when they pick a stock that they believe is going to increase in value over time, they tend to hold on for too long. They tend to hold on when the stock starts going down. When they start losing money because they always believe that it will get back up, they couldn't have made a bad decision. It's kind of a sense of pride when we believe that the choices we make are the right ones, or that our skills are better than what they are. It's like the thing when a lot of people believe they're more attractive than what they are. You can ask someone to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on how attractive they are. A lot of people generally rate themselves a lot higher than what other people will rate them, or their ability in certain games. A lot of people accept challenges that are not ready for. They accept golf matches or chess matches, tennis games. Thinking that their skills are relatively high, just to be exposed. This happened recently in the MMA world. We saw the fighter Ronda Rousey get outmatched by Holy Home. Now, why did Ronda Rousey get outmatched by Holy Home is because of the excessive self-regard tendency. She believed that her stand-up fighting was better than what it actually was. Now, she got into the fight and she fought a boxer, Ronda Rousey is not a boxer, and she got dominated. She got dominated and humbled. This happens to not just MMA fighters, it happens to boxers. We see it time and time again when you see an old veteran boxer who used to be great in his heyday. Coming back for one more fight. And generally what happens is they get knocked out by a younger competitor or someone who is relatively new to sport because the boxer overestimates their skills. They cannot face the reality that they are not what they used to be, that their skills are fading with time, with age, and they try to hold on to it. And we see this in sport over and over again. I'm sure you can come up with some examples. Now, this excessive self-regard tendency is bad for hiring when people are hiring new people for job positions because due to the same tendency, we tend to like people that are more like us, that resemble us. They did experiments in which they dropped wallets around campuses and calculated the return rate and also checked out the profile of the people who returned the wallets. It turned out that you are more likely to return a wallet if the contents in the wallet signify that the person who lost the wallet is somewhat like you. You are more likely to return the wallet to them because you believe that they are a good person because we tend to regard ourselves as good people. Now an interesting result of this tendency is the Tolstoy effect on criminals in which criminals have this weird belief that if they were to get caught, somehow they would be forgiven for their crimes. Or in some cases that they didn't even commit the crime. It's the sense of high regard for ourselves that often gets us in trouble. It often ends up being the fall of great men and great women. So how can we avoid this tendency? Objectivity. Seeing things as they are. Intense realism. Instead of believing that your skills are superior to others just off the merit that they are yours, you need to look at everything through an objective lens. See for what it is. Do the facts add up. Do the facts match your expectations or your view of the world. If you can do this in every aspect of your life, there is no way you will fall from the excessive self-regard tendency. Get different perspectives as well. Get other people's viewpoints because seeing life through our lens often gives us a skewed image. But if you get different lenses and look at the facts, we get closer to the truth. So that is how you can avoid excessive self-regard tendency.