To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.

Where you point your attention matters

There's something appealing about this idea, especially when you're in a funk—the thought that you could just flip a switch and focus only on what went right. But the tricky part is that "forgetting" failures doesn't actually work the way it sounds. Our brains are wired to remember what hurt us or went wrong, because that's how we learned not to touch fire.

The real insight here isn't about amnesia. It's about where you direct your attention when you're building confidence. If you spend all your mental energy rehashing every mistake and criticism, you naturally starve the evidence that you're capable and resilient. So the practice becomes more deliberate: actively noticing what you handled well, what you improved at, who trusted you with something important. It's not pretending failures didn't happen—it's refusing to let them be the only story you tell yourself.

This matters today because social media and news feeds are basically designed to highlight what's wrong—with the world, with others, with ourselves. Building self-esteem in this environment means being intentional about remembering your own wins, no matter how small. That's not delusion. That's survival.