Likewise if people with unchallenged confidence get to run things, bad things tend to happen and there is a difference in being confident and projecting it to others.
Understanding is often followed by humility.
Understanding is often followed by humility.
They usually grow in the process and get ahead of the too careful and doubtful ones.
Throughout growing up I regularly thought other guys knew so much more things than me on various topics and often didn't dare to pitch in and felt like I couldn't contribute. Then most of the times, just a little later I realized how much they were just clumsily piecing together phrases they heard here and there but didn't really know what they were really talking about.
This includes topics like WWII history, computers, political ideology (communism, nazism), sex, sports, and all sorts of stuff they probably heard from their parents or older siblings.
An enthusiastic, confident kid (let's say 10-14 years) can just talk so much nonsense on and on without being disturbed in the slightest (adults tend to be more mindful of their own gaps of knowledge and are more afraid of embarrassment). But their peers won't know better and will be impressed.
Step by step it even continued to university. People would confidently talk about things I didn't know much about (AI stuff, Linux, various flamewars) and only later did I realize that they were mainly putting together pieces of arguments they heard here and there without any deep understanding.
I was too careful not to make mistakes and didn't hone my arguing and convincing skills nearly as much as these types of guys did.
What I want to say is that it's okay to be wrong sometimes. This is a message to specific types of people. Some people need to be more careful and introspective, but others are already too introspective and second guess themselves too much. For the latter, you need to relax and be okay with making rookie mistakes, getting called out etc. It's okay to discuss and give your opinion on things you're not fully knowledgeable about. Perhaps people will sometimes think you're stupid, but it's in active discussion how your opinions will get refined. Maybe you'll "cringe" about your early opinions after a few years, but it's still the quicker way.
I don't know whether they "grow", as in "actually understand things", "acquire skills" etc if they're basically just using Markov chains to communicate (but maybe they are, maybe it's "fail forward", iterate over your mvp and turn it into a success product, but for communication). They often do get ahead with regard to social points, but at least in my experience, only very few of them are so good at bullshitting their way through life that they don't hit a wall. At some level, just having heard a word isn't enough to look competent, you also need to know what it means.
One most obvious case was when I studied in France for a semester. Even though my base knowledge upon arrival was higher than some of my peers, I was generally shy and embarrassed around native French speakers, while others who weren’t ended up getting a lot more experience and making a lot faster progress.