How Much Confidence Is Too Much? Being sure of yourself is nice, but thinking that nobody knows better is a mistake.

Being right feels awesome. There's nothing quite like discovering that you had an idea or made a decision that didn't just work--it rocked. But while ending up in the right is lovely, stubbornly refusing to give up on being right is not good for business. Just ask Jeff Booth, president and CEO of BuildDirect, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based retailer of flooring and other building materials. He's been there.

Booth and business partner Robert Banks launched BuildDirect at just the right time. It was 1999; the dot-com boom was on and home sales were on the upswing--big time. They built solid relationships with suppliers, skipping the middleman and passing savings on to consumers. The company took off quickly, growing from a kitchen-table operation to an international success.

But nine years in, confidence got the best of them--and that's when the problems began. "When you're right and have crazy success with that right, you can become jaded--and quickly," Booth says.