Be delusional

Unfuck yourself

What was your biggest dream when you were a kid? When was the precise moment you gave up on it?

The unfortunate truth is that life beats the dreams out of most of us. You get an average SAT score and don’t believe you are smart enough to be a lawyer. You get rejected by a few pretty girls and believe you’ll never have the charm of the other guys. You get a few data points that you don’t have what it takes to achieve your dreams, then admit defeat and settle for the life that is handed to you, rather than the life you want. The fortunate truth is that you aren’t most people. You are uncommon. To be the best, be delusional.

Think of life as a video game. For simplicity, let’s say there are 10 levels representing the potential of your life. We all begin life dreaming of beating the level 10 final boss - becoming an astronaut or becoming the president or changing the world - but then you collect a few negative life experiences and soon enough, you are content with the level you are at. You concede that the folks who have slain the final boss are intrinsically “built different” without a critical second thought.

You believe you are cooked and you are right. However, you are not cooked in the way you think. It is not because you don’t have some “it” factor that only certain people were born with. You are cooked because you believe you are cooked. Once you stopped believing in yourself, your dreams died. Perception becomes reality. Our brains are great at finding data points that confirm our beliefs, so your current level becomes your terminal level. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Everything that you want is in your grasp. You just have to change how you think of yourself. The way out is delusional self belief.

The dilemma is that we have a chicken-and-egg problem - you need belief to create evidence and you need evidence to create belief. If you don’t believe in yourself, then you won’t create evidence that you can achieve more than your current level. So unfortunately, you either decide to be delusional and believe in yourself or you never break the loop and get stuck at at your current level. For some people that is fine - is it fine for you?

Now that we understand the challenge, let’s break down our escape plan. Being delusional comes down to believing three things:

1. The world is malleable: In other words, you have agency over your life and the outcomes of your life. You are the main character crafting the world, not a passive bystander getting dragged around by life.

2. You lack nothing intrinsically: You may lack skills or experience or ability, but everything you need is learnable or out-sourceable. Nothing about the way you were born is an unsolvable blocker.

3. There is light on the other side of the leap of faith: This is the delusion - the leap of faith that is required to build evidence. On level 1, there is no logic, pure belief - you have never deluded yourself successfully before. For level 2, remember that you took a leap of faith for level 1 and came out of the other side as the victor. With each entrance to the next level, remember the delusion it took to get there. Each uplevelling will require a different belief without evidence - maybe level 1 is believing you can learn to swim, level 2 is making the high school swim team, and so on - what is common is that you have to be believe in yourself with no evidence. Build that habit of delusional self belief.

Whether you like it or not, life will make you question yourself. The good news is when that doubt starts to creep in you have a choice - give in or get going. This is when 99% of people quit. Use this as fuel to keep going in that decisive moment. Greatness is in the palm of your hands. All you have to do is keep believing when others give up. You may not see it yet, but I promise you there is light at the end of the tunnel - your untapped potential is sitting there, waiting to be claimed. Believe in something. Believe in you.