Is self-delusion the first requirement for getting what you want?
For almost any goal you set in life, you have a limited reserve of attempts before trying again starts to feel illogical. Before persistence starts to feel irrational.
There are plenty of things in the world telling you to keep trying, but you only have so much capacity to do it. Eventually you get tired. Eventually you give up. And I think somewhere in that gap lives this idea of self-delusion.
You need to believe something for long enough to keep going even when reality hasn’t given you enough evidence yet.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on a lot of things that have happened to me, and I’ve noticed something recurring: I’ve been much luckier than I could have imagined at the beginning.
Of course, luck has a place in all of this. And maybe you can maximize your surface area for luck. You can buy five lottery tickets instead of one. You can put yourself in situations where more things can happen to you.
But I don’t think luck is the most important thing that has improved my quality of life over the last five years.
I think it has been my ability to break ideas and concepts that I had implanted in myself, or ideas that I simply learned somewhere and eventually started treating as truths.
Think about this.
Imagine someone could tell you exactly how to reach a certain point in your life, and somehow there is a guarantee that this person is telling you the truth. You know with absolute certainty that following their advice would work.
Would you listen to them?
Yes (right?)
I would too.
But life obviously doesn’t work like that.
We rarely get to sit with people who can challenge our assumptions and tell us that the way we’re thinking about something might be wrong. We don’t get a message saying, “This person is correct. Listen to them.”
Mentorship, in some sense, is an attempt to approximate that.
Over the last few years, I’ve actively looked for those conversations. Meetings with people who can tell me something I don’t know, challenge something I believe, or make me uncomfortable with an idea I hadn’t seriously considered before.
That doesn’t mean I automatically believe them.
Usually my reaction falls somewhere between:
“I wish I could believe you.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I feel like reality works differently.”
And my favorite one:
“I understand your point, and I think I’m going to end up agreeing with you. I just don’t like agreeing with you at this moment. Give me a day or two”
That last one is probably the most useful (and funny).
Sometimes you recognize that someone is probably right while simultaneously wishing they weren’t.
And then you have to decide how quickly you’re willing to remove your ego from the equation.
How quickly are you willing to be wrong?
How quickly are you willing to leave your comfort zone and your ego behind in order to create something people actually want?
There’s this idea that people don’t know what they want, and that somehow you’re supposed to know for them.
I don’t really believe that.
I try to give myself permission to assume the opposite: you can be completely wrong about what another person wants, and that’s normal.
Nobody is a mind reader. Nobody is smart enough to know exactly what everyone wants.
The dangerous part isn’t being wrong.
The dangerous part is committing something big based on the assumption that you’re right.
I can tell you ten ideas and you can reject all ten of them. That’s completely fine. I just need to tell you an eleventh idea and see if that one works.
If it does, I can go after it.
The question is whether I’m willing to accept that the first ten were wrong without turning them into some kind of personal defeat.
How willing are you to realize that you’ve been spending your time on the wrong thing?
We all carry ideas about how we’re supposed to live.
A very generic one that almost every friend or colleague of mine probably believes is:
Never stop learning.
Always keep learning. Always stay updated. Always keep training yourself.
Obviously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I’m not arguing that people should stop learning. It’s a good idea!
But even completely innocent ideas can become deeply rooted assumptions that eventually work against us.
How willing are you to spend money on something you need?
I think there’s a point where the only way to see farther is to do bigger things, and some things cannot be solved by throwing more of your own time at them.
Sometimes you have to spend money.
You have to sacrifice it.
And sometimes you do it purely for the learning.
I know how this sounds. The wrong person can immediately read this as “Wow, you want me to spend money. You want me to buy something.”
I genuinely believe that almost everything eventually requires an investment of either money or time, and very often both.
Hopefully you encounter many things in life where time is the only investment required.
But eventually, trying to do everything yourself becomes expensive in a different way.
You lose time.
I see it myself. I built my own video editor. I have my own agentic workflows and skills that I built myself, and that’s fine. I like building things.
But time is valuable, and doing everything yourself consumes an incredible amount of it.
That’s why paying for software and services can be such an intelligent investment.
It’s completely fine if you disagree with me. I just value my time a lot, and there are many other things where I could be investing it.
I don’t know which version of myself I’m going to be in a few years.
As time passes, I keep discovering that some of the things I believe are wrong.
Sometimes they’re tiny things, like visual preferences or small opinions. Sometimes they’re enormous ideas about how life, work, love, money operate.
And it’s deeply unsatisfying when those ideas break.
Because when an idea you’ve carried for years collapses, you’re not just changing your mind about something. You’re admitting that a version of yourself misunderstood reality.
I think that’s also what makes you move forward.
Every burst of experiences you accumulate eventually changes something.
Maybe self-delusion is useful at the beginning because you need enough irrational belief to try something before the evidence exists.
But after that, you need almost the opposite ability.
You need to be willing to break your own beliefs as soon as reality gives you a good enough reason to do it.
I think (at the moment) progress requires both.
Enough self-delusion to keep moving when you have no proof, and enough humility to change direction when the proof finally arrives