Yes. Culture plays a big role. The media you consume, the cultural leaders you hear speak, will affect your view of the world. Will you see the world as something malleable that you can change, or accept that you were destined for a low place in an hierarchy and there's nothing you can do to change it.
Ego - narcissism - a desire to prove oneself because of feeling less than others while young - these are the dark and necessary motivators to feeling invincible and confident and that you can make your ideas reality. How arrogant must an entrepreneur be to believe that he can defeat and conquer multibillion industries?
Here's the secret though. There is no secret- there is only your fear of being laughed at and ridiculed and failing. People like Steve Jobs aren't confident because they try to be confident - confidence is a side effect of being stubborn and desperate. You are desperate to succeed because of the dark motivators I described above. You are stubborn because you desire success desperately, and will keep knocking your head against the wall until you achieve it. If you push your stubborn-ness and desperation to the extremes, eventually one day people will look at you speak, and think you were always confident and always powerfully-centered and in control. But they are just seeing the symptoms of a lifetime of failure and desperation and stubbornness that has finally begun to turn around.
What I am saying is - to be confident - be honest with yourself. If you want to be great, expose yourself, look ugly and feel insecure, but be stubborn in pursuing your honest desire to be great and do great things. Confidence will be gained by trying to do exceptional and weird things long enough until you realize you can achieve them.
I agree. I think the fields of "computational cognitive science" and developmental psychology are the ones to look into to make progress towards the "hard fundamental problems". Some of the leading labs working on this are MIT CBMM (https://cbmm.mit.edu/, they have a nice youtube channel) and Berkeley Cocosci (https://cocosci.berkeley.edu/index.php).
Google Brain/DeepMind are also pushing some of those ideas. They must be, since they aggressively poach all the top researchers from those labs...
Ng approach is different: he wants a world powered by Deep Learning, so his goal is to make applied deep learning thrive. His strategy to do that: give those data-hungry models even more data, which is completely reasonable.
Those two approaches - fundamental research and applied deep learning - are often referred to as AI, causing much confusion.
The part that might be most relevant to your question:
"There's a decent chance you'll get sick and tired of the negative aspects of being a DN sooner than you'd think. Before you've ever been a DN it's easy to understand what the good parts of being a DN will be: who the heck doesn't want to know what it's like to live in Scandinavia or Japan or on a beach in the Caribbean or to learn to dance salsa in Colombia! But you really can't understand the negative social or psychological aspects of long-term nomadism without having experienced them. I hope this part of my post doesn't get me downvotes because this place [reddit.com/r/digitalnomads] seems to only really want to talk about feel-good stuff, but there really are drawbacks to being a DN.
In the initial months of being a DN I was meeting new people, learning the basics of a new language, dating some interesting people that seemed very different than any I'd met before and had accents like James Bond girls, etc. It was amazing. But what you start to get worn down by is the fact that every month, or every three months, or whatever your period ends up being, you've got to start over socially or romantically or whatever and climb that mountain all over again. Moving to a new place and knowing no one can be exhilarating, but it's also a lot of work and takes a bit of psychological fortitude to push yourself to go out there to an event or a bar or anything and go up to new people with the possibility of rejection. Even if you're a natural born extrovert (I'm pretty extroverted actually) it just gets tiring to have to keep losing people when you leave and restart. Even if you don't consciously change, you may find that one year in you can't force yourself to be as enthusiastic when meeting new people because in the back of your mind you're subconsciously aware that you probably won't have them in your life in 6 months. If you're dating while traveling it can be a whole 'nother level, for a multitude of reasons. You start being intimate with someone then a week later you're lying in bed alone again and asking yourself if you'd been better off just staying there. You'd certainly have been less lonely. You may find yourself starting to treat people as replaceable even if you are a more traditional person before you became a DN.
Something I noticed after some time was that in some ways you could tell who'd been a traveler or a DN for a long, long time. The people I met who'd been doing it for years didn't have as much enthusiasm when meeting new people. Ask yourself what kind of person is able to stay emotionally healthy when they're not maintaing any long-term friendships or relationships for years and years at a time - only making surface level friends that they throw out every few months. That person is either very introverted / self-reliant emotionally and friendship-wise or they're crazy (the exception is a DN who has travels with someone else or goes back and forth between places they already have friends or loved ones). There's a joke that goes around in traveling circles (didn't invent it myself): "what do you call a 5-year nomad? a sociopath." Hopefully I don't ruffle the feathers of any 5-year DN readers here, I'll be the first to admit that towards the end of my DN-hood I was seeing some of these changes in myself. I'm not saying that long-term DNs are all emotionally unhealthy or crazy heartless bastards, but I am saying that it's a struggle that you may not think about before you've experienced it. And it's the main reason I think so many people eventually stop and settle somewhere. I think there are definitely people who can stay emotionally healthy, who can keep the twinkle in their eye, but I'm just saying not everyone can.
Which leads to me my last point - I did drop out of the DN rat race. I got some useful data for my life about what cultures and languages I'd like to learn about and engage with more in my future. I have a short list of 2-3 places I'd go if I ever decide to leave where I currently am. And now that I've seen a lot I know exactly why I love the place that I'm living (and also what it lacks :( wah, wah, wah). There's a handful of places that I lived that I absolutely loved. None of them were places I expected to love. One of them is actually - shame on me - the United States.
If you want to be a digital nomad, I'd suggest having an idea of why you want to, considering what you want to discover or find out while being one, and plan your time around that. You may get tired of the constant travel after a year or two or three, and that's OK. Just keep that in mind when planning so you can accomplish what you want in that timeframe."
Ego - narcissism - a desire to prove oneself because of feeling less than others while young - these are the dark and necessary motivators to feeling invincible and confident and that you can make your ideas reality. How arrogant must an entrepreneur be to believe that he can defeat and conquer multibillion industries?
Here's the secret though. There is no secret- there is only your fear of being laughed at and ridiculed and failing. People like Steve Jobs aren't confident because they try to be confident - confidence is a side effect of being stubborn and desperate. You are desperate to succeed because of the dark motivators I described above. You are stubborn because you desire success desperately, and will keep knocking your head against the wall until you achieve it. If you push your stubborn-ness and desperation to the extremes, eventually one day people will look at you speak, and think you were always confident and always powerfully-centered and in control. But they are just seeing the symptoms of a lifetime of failure and desperation and stubbornness that has finally begun to turn around.
What I am saying is - to be confident - be honest with yourself. If you want to be great, expose yourself, look ugly and feel insecure, but be stubborn in pursuing your honest desire to be great and do great things. Confidence will be gained by trying to do exceptional and weird things long enough until you realize you can achieve them.