We tend to view confidence as a product of accomplishment rather than part of the process that leads there. But supremely confident people were confident long before they achieved anything.

To be a top performer you have to be passionately committed to what you're doing and insanely confident about your ability to pull it off.

Elevated levels of confidence are omnipresent among history's greatest overachievers. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most famous men in the world even before he signed the Declaration of Independence once lamented about humility, "I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue."

Great performers in all fields seem immune to what outsiders think about them. Their sense of themselves never depends on the feedback-positive or negative-they get from the environment.

All the great performers I have worked with are fueled by a personal dream.

Great performers require a measure of confidence that would strike many as absurd, unfounded, and downright irrational. They believe in themselves utterly, without question, even when everyone else is questioning how good (or sane) they are.

Bill Russell is one of the great names in basketball, an all-American... and the only athlete to ever win an NCAA Championship, an Olympic Gold Medal, and a professional championship all in the same year-1956...But Bill Russell had this one problem: He threw up before every game.