"Doubt keeps me sharp"

You have a presentation on Thursday. By Tuesday night you've been through the slides four times and you know them. On Wednesday night you go through them three more times, and you're in bed at one. On Thursday it goes well. Walking back to your desk, you think, "Good thing I put the work in."

The belief is that doubt is what makes your work good. It drives the care and the checking. Without it, you suspect, you'd get sloppy and be caught out, so the doubt is the price of quality and worth paying.

Part of this is right. Preparation matters, and confident, careless people turn in bad work every day. There's also research suggesting that for some anxious people, expecting the worst is a working strategy. In the 1980s Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor studied students they called defensive pessimists. These students set low expectations before a task, thought through what might go wrong, and then performed as well as the optimists. When the researchers interfered with the strategy, for example by reassuring them that they'd do fine, their performance got worse. So if thinking through what could go wrong is how you get ready, I'm not going to tell you to think positive. It would be bad advice.

But look at what the useful part of that strategy is. It's turning a vague dread into a list of particular things that could go wrong, and dealing with each. In the terms of chapter 3, it converts general doubt into specific doubts. That kind of preparation has a natural end. You check the figure. You rehearse the opening. You work out answers to the three questions you're most likely to get. Then you're done.

The Wednesday night run-throughs were a different activity. They weren't answering anything. You knew the slides. You were going through them to make a feeling go away, and preparation of that sort has no natural end, because the feeling isn't about the slides. It stops when you run out of time or fall asleep. A useful sign is that you can't say what the next hour of work is meant to fix.

Then there's what happens to the credit. When Thursday goes well, the success is put down to the extra work. "I only got through it because I did three times what anyone else would need." Pauline Clance, from chapter 4, described this as a cycle. The person over-prepares, succeeds, credits the over-preparation, and so gains no confidence from the success. Some people run the opposite version, where they put the task off, rush it at the end, succeed anyway and call it luck. In both versions the success is explained by something other than ability, and the doubt is as strong for the next task as it was for this one.

Notice also that you've never run the comparison. You believe the extra hours are what stand between you and disaster. You don't know that, because you've never given a presentation on ordinary preparation and seen what happened. The belief has been protected from testing in the same way as the prediction in chapter 2.

The costs are easy to list. There are the hours. There's the state you arrive in, because a person who's over-rehearsed and short of sleep isn't at their best. And there's a ceiling on your working life. If every task costs you three times what it costs a colleague, you can take on a third as much, and you'll turn down good things on the honest ground that you don't have time.

I'd add one observation, which you can check against your own experience. Doubt during the task doesn't make you sharper either. When half your attention is on how you're coming across, only half is left for the work. Most people do their best work when they're absorbed in it, and being absorbed and watching yourself don't go together.

The objection is, "My standards are the reason my work is good." I believe you, and you should keep them. But a standard and a doubt are separate things. A standard is a statement about the work, such as "the figures must be right and the argument must be clear in the first minute". A doubt is a statement about you. You can hold the first at full strength without the second. An airline pilot runs the checklist before every flight. She does it because it's the checklist, and it takes the same few minutes whether she feels sure or unsure that day. When it's finished, she flies the plane.

The practical point follows from that. Decide the preparation in advance, by the job and not by the feeling. Before you start, write down what done looks like. For the presentation it might be two run-throughs, a check of the three key figures, and answers ready for the questions about cost. When you've done what's on the list, stop.

The feeling will say it isn't enough. Expect that. It would have said so after seven run-throughs too. Then give the presentation and see how it goes, because that result is the comparison you've never had.