You’re Not Delusional. You’re Just Early.
I think we’ve completely ruined the word “delusional.”
We use it to describe people who believe something that doesn’t exist yet.
A founder with an idea.
An athlete chasing a championship.
An artist no one has heard of.
Someone who quits a stable job to build something uncertain.
They’re all called delusional at some point.
What’s funny is… we stop using that word the second they succeed.
Then they’re visionary.
Disciplined.
Brilliant.
We don’t usually change our opinion because the idea changed.
We change it because the outcome did.
Success has a way of making yesterday’s crazy idea seem obvious.
That’s convenient.
Because it lets us pretend we would’ve believed in it all along.
We wouldn’t have.
Most people don’t reject ideas because they’re impossible.
They reject them because they’re unfamiliar.
That’s an important difference.
If I asked you twenty years ago whether people would willingly get into strangers’ cars, rent strangers’ homes, or carry their entire lives on a phone…
Most people would’ve laughed.
Not because those things were impossible.
Because they hadn’t happened yet.
Our brains have a habit of confusing “I’ve never seen it” with “It can’t be done.”
Those are not the same sentence.
Here’s where this matters.
If every decision you make has already been validated by everyone around you…
You’re probably not building anything new.
Innovation has always looked unreasonable in its infancy.
That’s the price of being first.
Now don’t misunderstand me.
This isn’t permission to ignore evidence.
Reality matters.
Execution matters.
Feedback matters.
The goal isn’t to believe impossible things.
The goal is to avoid dismissing possible things simply because they’re unfamiliar.
There’s a difference.
One is fantasy.
The other is progress.
So the next time someone calls an idea unrealistic…
Pay attention.
They may be identifying a flaw.
Or they may simply be revealing the limits of what they’ve personally imagined.
Those are very different conversations.
Sometimes the distance between “delusional” and “obvious” is just enough time for someone to prove everyone else wrong.
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