The hairy guy is my son, Ari; the statistics gal is Libby, on the left!

My younger daughter, Libby, left her statistics test feeling fine about how the test went for her. Then she spoke to other students. Comparing answers, she realized that she got a lot of them wrong. No surprise there, she told me. Every one of her brothers and sisters who had taken statistics had struggled with it. Her brothers even called the subject, Sadistics.

Then she called me yesterday to say she got a 97 on the test. Those other students? Their answers were wrong, not hers.

How often do we discount our own abilities? We assume the next guy is smarter. In the middle of a test in high school, I glanced at the answers of the boy sitting next to me. The kid was smart. Waaaay smarter than me. I cheated. I changed my answer. When I got the tests back, I saw that my original answer was right. But I didn’t trust myself.

That was the last time I cheated. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last time I questioned myself.

We can trust ourselves just as much as we can trust someone else.

Today, I can trust my own mind, my own perceptions and my own abilities.

If you are one of the three people who did not see this review about my talk in Rome, read here.