When experience contradicts firmly held judgments of self-efficacy, people may not change their beliefs about themselves if the conditions of performance are such as to lead them to discount the import of the experience

People who underestimate their capabilities also bear costs, although, as already noted, these are more likely to take self-limiting rather than aversive forms. By failing to cultivate personal potentialities and constricting their activities, such persons cut themselves off from many rewarding experiences. Should they attempt tasks having evaluative significance, they create internal obstacles to effective performance by approaching them with unnerving self-doubts

People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided.

Many people who gain recognition and fame shape their lives by overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, only to be catapulted into new social realities over which they have less control and manage badly. Indeed, the annals of the famous and infamous are strewn with individuals who were both architects and victims of their life courses.

People who are insecure about themselves will avoid social comparisons that are potentially threatening to their self-esteem

If you look at our theories of social pathology and then at the dismal conditions in which children grow up in our ghettos, you would predict that all of them would be on drugs or psychological basket cases. Yet if you use criteria like gainful employment, forming partnerships and life without crime, you will find that most of those kids make it.

The content of most textbooks is perishable, but the tools of self-directedness serve one well over time.