How you think of the world determines how you experience it.
If you want to escape the boring existence most people live, you must think of the world in a radically different way (almost as if life is a video game and you can’t die).
There are zero roadblocks in your way. They’re all imaginary. Let me show you how to bend the world in your favor so you can get anything you want.
Be so delusional that reality has no choice but to bend to your vision.
You must be completely delusional if you want to be successful.
Being rational gets you nowhere. It forces you to think small and assume the best you can get out of life is a cubicle, $100K salary, and tin soup for lunch. The typical path most people follow is being blown up right before our eyes.
AI started the revolution and it won’t stop here.
What’s weird about acting delusional is that because it’s so uncommon, it forces people to pay attention to you and whatever you might be building.
Being delusional is a pattern interrupt.
And in a world where the average person is ignored and forced to apply for opportunities and suck off gatekeepers, being delusional is an alternative path to the 2.5 kids and white picket fence American Dream.
Part of being delusional is just not taking no for an answer.
Reality is going to pay you back in equal proportion to your delusion – Will Smith
In the 1800s, you were a genius if you could grow a pineapple.
They didn’t have Lambos back then as a flex, but if you had a pineapple you were considered cool. A lonely pineapple was worth the equivalent of $8,000 today (I wonder if pineapple pizza was a flex too).
A bloke by the name of Lord Dunmore decided to build a summer house on his estate (flex). British people at the time worshipped Palladianism architecture. Building in another style was like sh*tting on the king’s freshly mowed lawn.
People wouldn’t take you seriously unless you built the equivalent of a stone box.
The architectural community told Dunmore this:
“You cannot build something whimsical. Architecture must be classical, grave, and follow the rules.”
Dunmore had a distaste for following the rules.
In 1761, he came home from being a governor in Virginia, where the locals used the pineapple as a symbol of hospitality. His delusional idea was to defy modern logic and put a 37-foot pineapple on top of his new summer house.
A nice little middle finger to the rich snobs.
Creating the pineapple for the roof wasn’t easy. The architecture of it was incredibly complex for the time. Every leaf was hand-carved and the design had to ensure that water didn’t pool on them or the frost would destroy them. For its time, this was a phenomenal bit of engineering (Gaudí would have wet his pants).
The sheer cost to build the structure with the pineapple on top signalled just how wealthy he was without saying it. It gets better. He even grew real pineapples in the hot house below which was both difficult and showed he was rich enough to eat them.
Most life decisions boil down to:
Do it the boring old way.
Don’t do it at all.
Dunmore’s delusion used the third option which is “I’ll f*ck around and figure it out.”
When the world tells you to build a square box, hand craft them a giant pineapple and simultaneously show them your middle finger.
“I think for anyone to be successful and dream big and do big things, you have to have a half a cup of delusion. You have to, or it’s never going to work. You just cannot be filled with reality. It just is not going to work.”
- Pharrell Williams
Be so obsessed that people think you’ve completely lost your mind.
The common approach is to be “interested” or “passionate.”
I used to worship passion. Passion led me to become a mediocre musician who struggled to find middle C on the piano. But ultimately I gave up on my music dream. The sheer rejection of dealing with record labels and trying to play at live music venues was too much for me.
Back then I didn’t know about a third category: obsession. I wish I did.
When you decide to switch from being passionate or interested into being hardcore obsessed, everything changes. At first, people think you’ve gone insane.
When you act obsessed you:
Don’t take no for an answer
Know you’ll figure out the answer to any problem
Have a demon voice in your head that tells you not to give up
Desire to be the best there ever was in your field
Smile at hard problems
Every goal becomes a quest to win the equivalent of an Olympic gold medal. Standing on the podium at the end isn’t the focus. It’s the process. It’s the opportunity to push every level of the game to the extreme until you get to see things break.
There’s something thrilling about it. You feel like a madman.
The key benefit of obsession is the energy it gives off. It helps you operate with high energy, and your actions give off energy to lonely bystanders. People feel what you do more than they care about what it is that you do.
Obsession bends your reality to your will.
It’s more than influence. It’s an explosive force that rips through a crowd of people like a tornado. People just get out of your way.
Many people make the mistake of thinking they can’t be obsessed or they need to wait until they are. That’s wrong.
Obsession is a decision. It’s a way of life.
You can choose to channel the unbelievable force that is obsession and apply it to whatever goal you want. Most won’t because they’re bystanders. They’re waiting for something or someone to light a fire under their ass and tell them they, too, will die.
Don’t let that be you. Act with pure obsession going forward. Laugh like the Joker at how many people will say you’re delusional. Take “you’re delusional” as a compliment.
Be so relentless that giving up doesn’t even cross your mind as an option.
Do one thing relentlessly – David Senra
Society is programmed to develop extreme hatred of failure, rejection, stress, and uncertainty. This leads people to give up as soon as things get a little hard.
“You know, I tried. It wasn’t meant to be.”
I haven’t felt this way for 12 years. It makes no sense to give up on your dreams and settle for second best. The beautiful feeling of nostalgia comes from pursuing hard goals and eventually reaching them, then looking back on them later in life.
Reality won’t bend to your vision if you give up when it gets hard. Only when it gets hard do you know you’ve made the right decision.
Easy is boring. Easy is being a trust fund kid and having daddy pay all your bills while you sit on the beach and feel empty because the gift of struggle has been removed from your life.
To be relentless and never give up, you must master the basics of self-improvement. Everything you ever wanted in life is just a video game that runs on self-improvement.
The biggest trap is jumping from one goal to another looking for rainbows and unicorns, then giving up right before you get any ROI. This creates a lifetime of frustration. It’s the worst feeling in the world.
If you’re relentless and apply all your time and energy to one goal, it’s nearly impossible to lose if you refuse to give up. It won’t be easy but that’s the whole point.
Be so committed that your worst-case scenario is still better than average.
The goal isn’t to succeed.
It’s to commit to your goal and know that whatever happens, it’s the story that matters most. When I walked away from a startup I loved in my 20s, I lost everything. What got me out of a dark place was the story I got to keep despite the failure.
I told my startup failure story everywhere I went. Not everyone cared. But a few people resonated with it. Those people ended up helping me find new opportunities I couldn’t have found on my own. One of them was a farmer. He plucked me out of call center slavery and gave me the chance to work the best job I’ve ever had.
The startup failure story convinced him.
Even if you fail, it’s still better than never trying and just cruising through life eventually to be forgotten. Most full-grown adults are actually still small children inside. They never grow up. They do everything they can to avoid a worst-case scenario because they’re taught that’s the end. But…
The worst-case scenario is actually the beginning of something special.
It eventually leads you to stop being stomped on like an ant and stand up for yourself as well as refuse to take no for an answer.
Be so focused that distractions physically can’t penetrate your attention.
Your phone is begging you to look at it.
Mine is too. But when I look at my phone I look away from my two daughters and that’s a f*cking tragedy. Society isn’t present anymore. They’re hypnotized by a phone full of motivations that are nothing more than someone else priorities.
Writer James Altucher once said the way to have fewer emails is to stop responding to so many emails. Same applies to your phone. The less you engage with it the fewer notifications and demands you will face.
Most people’s dreams aren’t stolen away by an evil power or government. They’re quietly stolen from them by their devices. For an iPhone, distracting adults is like taking candy from a baby.
FOMO forces people to obsess over their phones in case they miss something important. Meanwhile, their actual life — their kids, their work, their one shot — is happening without them.
Focus is becoming the rarest skill on the planet. Talent, intelligence, marketing, prompting, vibe coding, and whatever else doesn’t matter as much as being able to channel your attention for an extended period of time into one useful thing that you want to see in the world.
– Dan Koe
See distractions for what they are – tiny bullets aimed at your brain that, if you keep letting them in, they’ll eventually force your mind to bleed out. It’s why the average mind is fried.
Brain rot is the norm.
It’s expected. Caring about some foreign war or being brainwashed to wear a badge on your coat pocket for a cause you know nothing about is the result of distractions.
You don’t need more inputs. You don’t need to overload your brain with more information. You need to leave your phone at home and go for a 3-hour walk.
Choose one goal. Delete the rest.
Work on it every day as a daily habit.
Make “do not disturb” your default mode.
Operate with present moment awareness, not from the past (depression) or future (anxiety).
Be so ambitious that mediocrity becomes your biggest nightmare.
If you haven’t figured out already, I f*cking detest mediocrity.
Being some factory worker in a suit who gets jammed in a train every day like sardines to commute to a painfully dull office that is as exciting as a dentist’s office is my worst nightmare.
There’s no need to be mediocre. It’s a sign of a wasted life.
You don’t need to be freaking Brad Pitt either. But to think small and never have a go at anything makes zero sense. If you think being ambitious and trying to pull off difficult goals is hard, wait until you taste what mediocrity gifts you. Ready?
No time. Constantly saying “I’m busy.” An email inbox full of emails that you can’t clear every day. A level of money that’ll force you to live in an apartment with no backyard or nature in sight. Always worrying about what everything costs which becomes a form of mental illness. Having to save up for small purchases like a holiday to another state. Friends who hate their jobs. Work that feels more like a slow death than the type of work that gives you meaning and fulfillment. A funeral with a dozen attendees who sit through the 15-minute PowerPoint slide deck of your life, eat some dull-tasting sandwiches, then go home and never think of you again.
If this doesn’t scare the cr*p out of you I don’t know what will. This is how most of the population lives. It’s the default path if you don’t become delusionally ambitious.
I’d rather jump off a bridge than go back to mediocrity. I’ll do anything to avoid it. Once you’ve had a peek into the other side of reality, mediocrity looks and feels like the most obvious description of hell you could ever imagine.
Closing Thought
If people don’t think you’re weird, something is wrong. If your friends and family understand what you’re trying to do, something is wrong. If you’re following the path someone else prescribed you, something is wrong.
To achieve your big goal you’ll need humans to bend to your reality. Acting delusional is how you interrupt their thought patterns and ethically get their attention.
Reality is controlled by those who are crazy enough to think they deserve more than the scraps most people barely survive on. Be delusional.
