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It's a really good counterweight to "You're only as good as your last ___," a narrative which leads a person to feel frightened/shaken after a failure.

Remembering past successes in times like that can be nice grounding. I've always liked Julia Evans' brag document, which presumes you and your co-workers won't remember your past successes: https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/

Experience isn’t the only source of confidence though

i expect personal experience to be the most heavily weighted source of confidence

most people have limited experience. Thus if you are deriving confidence mainly from experience, you will have hard time bootstrapping confidence for a very long time. 2c

which is definitly the case for me, but at this point it just comes from the fact that ok, i just know i have the capacity to work hard so i dont the confidence will come

author here, I agree, but i feel like i've had so many self esteem issues growing up, its the only way i can believe it.

Confidence is just from working really fucking hard.

but again these are the lies i tell myself :)

Also consider confidence as the potential for success. Prospective motivation is empowering.