You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu. I really needed to hear today's talk from the activist and educator Brittany Patnett, and I hope you get a lot out of it too. It's all about confidence and how to grow our own. She'll explain in her TED 2019 archive talk

why confidence can be revolutionary

in helping us redesign the world.

So when I was a little girl,

a book sat on the coffee table in our living room,

just steps from our front door.

And the living room is a first impression.

Ours had white carpet and a curio of my mother's most treasured collectibles.

That room represented the sacrifices of generations gone by,

who by poverty or by policy couldn't afford a curio of collectibles,

let alone a middle-class house to put them in.

That room had to stay perfect,

but I would risk messing up that perfect room every day just to see that book.

On the cover sat a woman named Septima Clark. She sat in perfect profile with her face

raised to the sky. She had perfect salt and pepper cornrows platted down the sides of her head and pride

and wisdom just emanated from her dark skin. Septima Clark was an activist and an educator,

a woman after whom I'd eventually model my own career.

But more than all the words she ever spoke,

that single portrait of Septima Clark,

it defined confidence for me before I ever even knew the word.

It may sound simple, but confidence is something that we underestimate the importance of. We treat it like a nice to have instead of a must have.

We place value on knowledge and resources above what we deem to be the soft skill of confidence. But by most measures, we have more

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