Why the most successful people you know are slightly delusional
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The most successful people you know are slightly delusional.
I had a conversation with a founder last year that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
He’d just raised $40 million. Real revenue. Customers loved the product. By every reasonable metric, this guy had figured it out. So I asked him what it felt like when he first started. Before the traction. Before anyone cared.
He said, “I genuinely believed we’d be a billion dollar company before we had a single customer. And I know that sounds insane. It was insane. But if I didn’t believe that, I never would have made the first phone call.”
He’s not unique. Almost every founder, creator, and operator I’ve interviewed who built something meaningful has said some version of this. They believed something unreasonable about their future before there was any evidence to support it.
We have a word for people who believe things without evidence. We call them delusional. But when it works out, we call them visionary. The only difference between the two is the outcome.
The Evidence Problem
If you only pursued things where the evidence was on your side, you’d never start anything worth starting.
Think about it. The evidence against any new venture is overwhelming. Most businesses fail. Most podcasts die after seven episodes. Most newsletters never get past 500 subscribers. Most books don’t sell. The data says don’t bother.
So the people who actually build something have to ignore the data at some level. They look at a mountain of evidence that says “this probably won’t work” and say “yeah, but I’m going to do it anyway.” That’s not rational. It’s a little bit delusional. And it’s completely necessary.
I remember when I started the podcast. I was a sales guy. Nobody was asking me to interview CEOs. I had no audience, no studio, no connections in media. If you’d shown me the stats on how many podcasts make it past episode 20, I probably should have done something else with my time.
But I had this belief that if I just kept having interesting conversations with smart people, something would compound. I couldn’t prove it. I just felt it.
Seven years and over 100 million downloads later, I can tell you that feeling wasn’t based on anything logical. It was based on a version of myself that didn’t exist yet. I was betting on a future me.
Delusion vs. Denial
There’s a line here and it matters.
