In a recent blog post, Seth Godin states that “the opposite of confident is not-confident. Unsure.”

In fact, “not confident” is the absence of confidence, not its opposite – a point well made and illustrated by Taleb in his book Antifragile. For Taleb, the absence of fragility is robustness. And the opposite of fragility is… he couldn’t come up with a word…

What is fragile breaks under external pressure. What does not break under external pressure is robust. But what gets stronger under external pressure? THAT is the opposite of fragility. And for lack of a word that describes this, Taleb called it “antifragility”.

If the opposite of fragility is antifragility then the opposite of confidence is carefree.

 

See https://seths.blog/2020/08/the-opposite-of-confidence/, accessed 200827