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."

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.

Great performers welcome pressure.

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.

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.

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.

Great performers are, by definition, abnormal; they strive throughout their entire careers to separate themselves from the pack.