There’s a certain kind of insanity that precedes every great achievement. Not the clinical kind, but the sort of magnificent delusion that makes someone look at an impossible situation and think, “Yeah, I can do that.” We celebrate successful people for their vision and determination, but we often gloss over the fact that at some point, they had to be a little bit crazy.
Think about what it actually means to start a company. You’re essentially saying, “I believe I can create something that doesn’t exist, convince people to pay money for it, and build an organization that will outlast my involvement.” When you lay it out like that, it sounds preposterous. The statistics are brutal. Most businesses fail. Most startups never make it past their second year. A rational person, armed with all the data, might reasonably conclude that entrepreneurship is a terrible idea. And yet, the delusion persists, and thank goodness it does.The same principle applies to artists, writers, athletes, and anyone pursuing something extraordinary. Every novelist who sits down to write their first book is engaging in a beautiful act of self-deception. They’re betting hundreds or thousands of hours on the belief that they have something worth saying and that they can say it well enough that strangers will care. They’re ignoring the crowded marketplace, the long odds, and the distinct possibility that they’ll finish and realize it’s not very good. But without that initial delusion, that willful blindness to the obstacles, the book never gets written at all.
What makes this delusion so necessary is that success often requires you to persist long past the point where any reasonable person would quit. When you’re facing your fifteenth rejection, your third failed prototype, or your hundredth disappointing day of progress, rationality becomes your enemy. A clear-eyed assessment of the situation might tell you to cut your losses. The delusional optimist, on the other hand, finds a way to reframe the setback as a learning opportunity or a sign that they’re getting closer.This isn’t about ignoring reality completely or charging forward without any feedback from the world. The most successful people aren’t detached from reality; they’re selectively attentive to it. They absorb the information they need to improve and adapt, but they refuse to internalize the message that they should give up. They maintain an unshakeable core belief in their eventual success even as they remain flexible about the path to get there. It’s a delicate balance, almost paradoxical, but it’s what separates those who make it from those who don’t.
Consider the sheer audacity required to believe you can change an industry, create a new art form, or solve a problem that has stumped countless others. When the Wright brothers decided humans could fly, they weren’t working with encouraging odds. When a young comedian decides to move to Los Angeles with no connections and little money, convinced they’ll make it, they’re not being rational. They’re being delusional in the most productive sense of the word.
The delusion also serves as a shield against the inevitable criticism and doubt you’ll encounter. People will tell you your idea won’t work, that you’re wasting your time, that you should be more realistic. If you’re too grounded in conventional wisdom, these voices will erode your resolve. The delusional optimist hears these objections and thinks, “They just don’t see what I see.” Sometimes they’re wrong, of course, but sometimes they’re spectacularly right, and that possibility is worth protecting.
There’s something almost spiritual about this kind of delusion. It requires faith in yourself and your vision when there’s no rational basis for that faith yet. It’s believing in the invisible, in the version of reality that exists only in your mind. Every major achievement started as an implausible idea in someone’s head, and the path from imagination to reality required someone to believe in it fiercely enough to make it real.This doesn’t mean you should ignore all evidence or refuse to adapt when things aren’t working. The key is knowing which signals to listen to and which to filter out. You need enough delusion to maintain momentum and enough realism to course-correct. Too much realism and you’ll talk yourself out of trying anything ambitious. Too much delusion and you’ll waste years on something that was never going to work. The sweet spot is somewhere in between, tilted heavily toward the delusional side.What we call “vision” in retrospect often looked a lot like delusion at the time. The difference is that vision is delusion that turned out to be correct. But you can’t know which it is when you’re in the middle of it. All you can do is commit fully, work relentlessly, and maintain that irrational belief that somehow, against the odds, you’re going to make it happen.
So if you’re harboring some ambitious dream that feels a bit crazy, that makes people look at you skeptically when you mention it, that seems to defy the odds, good. You’re exactly where you need to be. The world doesn’t need more reasonable people pursuing reasonable goals with reasonable expectations. It needs more people who are delusional enough to think they can do something remarkable, and stubborn enough to prove it.
