Be delusionally optimistic about what you can achieve in life

Society mistakes delusion for stupidity.

To be delusional is to believe in a dream that will never come true, that you keep alive because you can’t tell yourself the truth. I strongly disagree with this viewpoint.

For hundreds of years, society has been wrong about being delusional.

Delusion is a positive trait. And having the mindset of being delusionally optimistic about what you can and will achieve is the secret to high performance that the greats have quietly known for decades.

Delusional optimism is a mindset. It’s a way of life.

The thing about any goal or dream is unless you believe in it first, no one else will. And if no one else believes in your dream, then it won’t happen. Because every achievement is a team effort even if no one ever says that quiet part out loud.

The sprinter who won the 5000m race did it alone. But mommy made his breakfast every morning and cleaned his clothes. The entrepreneur who made $1M in a week did it alone. Except he had a mentor. Oh, and a virtual assistant. And a ghostwriter.

Delusional optimism is crucial to building a tribe that helps enable your mission.

The man who refused to die

I’m Aussie. In school everyone learns about a delusionally optimistic man named Douglas Mawson.

In 1912, Douglas led a scientific expedition in Antarctica. They trekked their way through the ice. Suddenly, one of their team members, along with their best dog team, fell into a bottomless crevasse.

Douglas was left 300 miles from base camp with his remaining partner, Xavier Mertz. They had hardly any supplies left. They were “up sh*t creek without a paddle” as we say here in Australia.

Not long after, Xavier died from extreme exhaustion and Vitamin A poisoning which he got from eating dog liver to stay alive (yuck).

Douglas found himself in the most isolated place on Earth all alone. But he didn’t give up. He acted delusional. His feet began rotting so he strapped the soles of his feet back on with tape and a few extra socks he borrowed from his dead team members.

As he continued to trek his way through, he fell into a crevasse and was saved only by his sledge getting wedged in the ice. He was left hanging in complete darkness, starving, and with extremely painful and rapidly escalating frostbite.

The average person would say “screw it” and simply let themself die in this situation, and you wouldn’t blame them either. But not Douglas.

He spent 4 hours climbing his way out.

Only to fall back in again.

So he climbed out again.

The voyage on his own took 30 days through treacherous ice and freezing conditions. The only fuel he had was a delusional sense of optimism that he wasn’t going to die out there like everyone else on the trip.

You might hope the story has a happy ending. Nope. He did make it back to base camp which was one hell of an achievement. His skin by that point was peeling and he weighed half his original body mass. Right as he arrived he saw his ship, The Aurora, take off into the sunset. It had waited weeks for him and had finally given up.

Douglas’s irrational sense of delusional optimism kicked in again. He built a make-shift hut at base camp and waited a whole year for the ship to return and pick him up.

That year wasn’t one of survival or taking it easy. Nope. He used the full year to further his scientific studies there in Antarctica and make real progress. Exactly one year later the ship arrived and he returned to Australia.

You might think he went home to a warm bed and a few cups of coffee. Nope. He didn’t just want to survive. He wanted his delusional optimism to mean something.

Upon arrival the King knighted him.

Then he went right back to work spending the next several decades organizing all the data he collected. He mapped out huge parts of the Antarctic coast that had never been seen before.

Eventually, Australia put his face on the $100 bill to remind Aussies to be delusionally optimistic like Douglas.

He showed that even when you’ve lost everything, delusional optimism forces you to see a future worth living. That future will surprise the hell out of you.

The knife’s edge of fantasy versus reality

If done wrong, delusion helps enable a fantasy.

If done right, delusion turns a dream into a reality. Being delusionally optimistic lets you believe you can achieve your goal. But belief isn’t enough. What no one tells you is it must be backed up by the discipline to make it a daily habit.

This is the knife's edge between delusion that liberates and delusion that deceives. Dreamers have delusional fantasies, but they never execute on them. It’s all talk. It’s a positive affirmation with nothing behind it. Just empty words delivered by a politician that sound good in a Harvard speech.

Delusional optimists who change the world are different. They start with a delusion but bend the world in their favour to make it happen, no matter the cost. One type of person is relentless, the other is a romantic artist speaking nonsense.

You must be the relentless type for delusional optimism to work in your favor.

Delusional optimism is the secret to extreme self-confidence

The average person in society is a coward. It’s not necessarily their fault. The system just makes us this way by default because it makes us easier to brainwash.

This simultaneously means the average person has no confidence in themselves. They’re always asking themselves, “What’s the success rate?” instead of looking within.

The fastest way out of the hellhole that is the matrix most people live in is to have self-confidence. Delusional optimism is the gateway out.

People who are delusionally optimistic are more confident.

I’m a good example. I didn’t have much confidence growing up. When the startup I built in my 20s faced hard times, I quit. After that one failure, I lost all my confidence. That mindset sent me to a bank’s call center.

I was stuck in that bank prison for 10 years.

What got me out was what Tony Robbins taught me. He drilled into my head that there was nothing to lose by believing everything would work in my favor. He’d say, “What’s the worst that can happen?”

So I adopted his belief. What I didn’t know was he programmed me to become delusionally optimistic. Once I got a taste of this way of life, there was no going back.

The delusional optimism allowed me to make an extra $70,000 a month.

It’s not the money that impressed people though. It was the fact I did it through writing. When you tell someone you’re a writer, they instantly imagine a broke, homeless man begging for food while desperately waiting to catch a break.

You’ll rarely see a writer driving a BMW or Ferrari.

Yet by being delusionally optimistic, I defied the odds and became wealthy in one of the poorest industries in the world.

This is the power of being delusionally optimistic. The self-confidence it gives you makes you think anything is possible.

Being delusionally optimistic rewires your brain

This part is hard to wrap your brain around.

When you act delusionally optimistic, other parts of your life change.

1. You have more fun. Why? Because it’s cool to believe you’re going to win even when you have no proof. It makes you more playful, so it results in you having more fun – as opposed to when life feels like a struggle where nothing is going right, you feel like sh*t.
2. You act with speed. When you already feel like you’re going to win, you don’t waste time overthinking, overplanning, worrying, being held back by fear, or waiting to feel ready. You just get sh*t done because you feel you’re #1 and you’ve already won. And action-based people get better results because they’re in the arena getting the crap beat out of them every day which is where the real learning happens, not in a video course with a bunch of infotainment and hypothesis about what might work. It goes deeper again… Money loves speed, so this makes you wealthier too. More money means more resources to help you win and hire people to bring on the mission.
3. You meet more of the right people. This happens because you’re naturally more confident, and that becomes an aura people can’t ignore. We crave it because it’s becoming rarer in society as more good people fall victim to the doomer’s view of the world – delusional pessimism.
4. You become more trusted. Delusional optimism gives you a bias for action, which makes you act faster, which attracts the right people, which gets you more results faster, so you now have the evidence of your ability. People trust evidence and proof of work more than they do fantasies, goals, potential, or “I’m gonna do it one day, Timmy, I tell ya.”

As you can see, being delusionally optimistic creates a bunch of variables in your life that are interlinked at the deepest level. The combined force is so extreme it removes any roadblock that stands in the way of you and your goal.

Anyone who has experienced this combination of factors and seen what they can do for their life is unable to NOT be delusionally optimistic ever again. It’s a drug so powerful and addictive that not even heroin, coke, or alcohol can compare.

Mantra: I am delusionally optimistic, and that’s why I will win.

You don’t dare wanna know what the alternative is

There’s a meme that says this: Job market so bad I started following my dreams.

It describes what many people are experiencing right now. The job market sucks. You can spend 6 months looking for a job and get nothing. AI now screens resumes, stripping the last traces of humanity from the hiring process. AI can screen you out by race, age, experience, perceived biases, and even your online presence.

The job market has become so stupidly tough, even for high performers, that people are wondering… what the fck have I got to lose? I may as well chase my dreams instead.*

It’s honestly easier to chase your dream than it is to become a cog in the machine and work some job where you have no freedom, get told what to do, can be laid off at any time with one email, get underpaid, and use very little creativity and imagination.

Even if you succeed at a job, you still fail (like I did) because your brain constantly asks you, “Is this all there is?” And if you don’t have that thought, then you at least experience how little the modern salary buys you with such a high cost of living.

So the alternative to being delusionally optimistic is lose-lose. You may as well follow your dreams because it’s still easier and ten times more fulfilling than applying for jobs and waiting for permission to earn a peanut salary.

Being realistic gets you nowhere. Try being delusionally optimistic for a while and chasing your dream.

So the real question is — are you delusionally optimistic, or are you just making excuses for why you’re not?