Cockiness vs. Confidence

Do others think you are cocky or confident? Is there a difference? Most importantly, is being cocky necessarily a bad thing?

These things have been floating around in my head lately (yea, I know, what a waste of brain power). Ironically, I would not describe any of the young entrepreneurs I know as cocky, but I would describe all of them as very confident. Cocky tends to have a negative connotation - the people I would describe as cocky are the people that are all talk and no substance, they talk about how much better they are than everyone else and give no one any respect. That can't be good for an entrepreneur...right?

But then I make my sports analogy (this is where my sports analogies might fail) and it seems to me like great athletes - Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Barry Bonds - are not just confident, they are cocky...probably overly cocky. They seem to never even acknowledge their competition as legitimate and, in their prime, there was no chance that they would ever be beaten. It seemed like their cockiness helped crush the competition.

For a little help, I leaned on dictionary.com for some definitions.

cock‧y - arrogant; pertly self-assertive; conceited; Overly self-assertive or self-confident.

confident - belief in oneself and one's powers or abilities; self-confidence; self-reliance; assurance

First off, there's nothing worse than not understanding a word in a definition. Wtf is "pertly"? Apparently it means "boldly forward in speech or behavior; impertinent; saucy". Ah, pertly, of course. Can't wait to drop that one on my friends.

So the definition of cockiness has "overly self-confident" in it, which is certainly a good thing, but it also includes "arrogant" which means "making claims or pretensions to superior importance or rights; overbearingly assuming; insolently proud".

Now that describes someone who's cocky in my mind...and being arrogant is certainly not good. So I suppose I conclude that being cocky is not good and being confident is. Anyone have any thoughts...or do you feel stupider (yes, stupider is a word) for having read this and wish you could have that five minutes of your life back?