Arrogance is having an overinflated sense of self; confident humility is having an accurate sense of your self now and where you can go next.
Faced with a problem, an arrogant person and a confident person might both answer the same way: "I can do that". From the outside looking in, arrogance and confidence can be hard to differentiate; but internally I draw a distinction between the two.
Arrogance
Arrogance is an inflated sense of your abilities, that you might think you know it all or that your skills are superior. Whether it's about what you know or what you can do, being arrogant means that you overvalue your self.
Arrogance usually brings with it as baggage an oversized ego, a fixed mindset and stunted future growth potential. Arrogance makes it harder to grow, learn and improve as you can't admit to others you don't know it all already; it's harder still when you can't admit it even to yourself.
Arrogance is about the image projected of yourself, it's about how others see you. When an arrogant person is asked for something beyond their ability or current knowledge, they are unlikely to admit it and unlikely to seek help as that will feel like a weakness to them.
Arrogance requires an audience and it requires constant work to keep up the appearance. Arrogance is the swan portraying effortless grace on the surface while frantically but invisibly toiling beneath the surface.
A distant cousin of arrogance is having the confidence to figure it out; it's being humble in what you know and confident in where you can improve. Instead of an "I can do anything" attitude even when you can't, it's "I can't do that yet, but I'll probably be able to figure it out". It's two parts:
publicly acknowledging which parts of the request are unknown and yet to be solved and, crucially,
not being put off by the uncertainty.
Being confident in what you know already is not enough to excel. If you know you don't have all the answers and so immediately give up or call in backup, you are unlikely to continually grow. You need to recognize that your ability to overcome problems, hopefully backed up with a track record of doing so, means you will probably be able to find a path through to the solution.
Confident humility is not pretending you have all the answers and it's not being paralysed by fear of the answers you don't yet have.
Finding the balance
An arrogant person might take on a project way beyond their abilities, fail to communicate what obstacles they'll face and fail to ask for help to get the project to success. Someone with confident humility will likely do a better job of communicating where they might struggle and be more open to pulling the help they need to succeed.
Someone with arrogance might jump right in while someone with confident humility might want to prepare more. Sometimes a little arrogance can help: it can be a useful catalyst for motion and can get wheels turning faster than they otherwise would. But it's a tool to use sparingly; arrogance-driven projects often start faster but ultimately take longer.
