Twentysomethings who don’t feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed.

But twentysomethings who hide out in underemployment, especially those who are hiding out because of a lack of confidence, are not serving themselves.

The Great Recession and its continuing aftermath have left many twenty-somethings feeling naïve, even devastated.Twenty-somethings are more educated than ever before, but a smaller percentage find work after college. Many entry-level jobs have gone overseas, making it more difficult for twenty-somethings to gain a foothold at home. With a contracting economy and a growing population, unemployment is at its highest in decades. An unpaid internship is the new starter job. About a quarter of twenty-somethings are out of work and another quarter work only part-time. Twenty-somethings who do have paying jobs earn less than their 1970s counterparts when adjusted for inflation.

Sometimes Danielle fantasized about “waiting tables or working in some easy job where [she] didn’t have to think or didn’t make mistakes.” But twentysomethings who hide out in underemployment, especially those who are hiding out because of a lack of confidence, are not serving themselves. For work success to lead to confidence, the job has to be challenging and it must require effort. It has to be done without too much help. And it cannot go well every single day. A long run of easy successes creates a sort of fragile confidence, the kind that is shattered when the first failure comes along. A more resilient confidence comes from succeeding — and from surviving some failures.

Overconfidence is usually the mistake of experts, and we do give them a lot of power and authority. Plain and simple, incompetence is frustrating, but the people guilty of it usually can’t screw things up that bad. The people guilty of overconfidence can do much more damage.

Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Compared to older adults, they find negative information — the bad news — more memorable than positive information — or the good news. MRI studies show that twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala — the seat of the emotional brain. When twentysomethings have their competence criticized, they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negative feelings toward others and obsess about the why: “Why did my boss say that? Why doesn’t my boss like me?” Taking work so intensely personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed.

Twenty somethings who aren't at least a little scared about their relationships are often the ones who are being the least thoughtful.

the worst performers are the most overconfident.

I know that if I am not at my best and I do not perform I will lose. I'm never over-confident. Over-confidence is a weakness because it stops you training as hard as you should. It has happened to fighters like Naseem Hamed and Lennox Lewis. Complacency beats fighters.

is a thin line between having enough self-confidence and being overconfident. I suppose the difference is whether you succeed or fail; when you win you are strong-willed, and when you lose you are stubborn!

It is pretty well established that there is an overconfidence effect. ... You don't have the competence to assess your own competence. ... you need competence in order to assess your own competence. ... Everyone has the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Those who lack confidence, for example, routinely make all sorts of faulty assumptions and poor inferences, assuming that they lack the competence, charisma, or talent to succeed in their careers or relationships.

those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t. According to what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s when we lack competence that we’re most likely to be brimming with overconfidence.

And a young man with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America. It’s