Believe Your Own Bullshit
How to be wrong all the time and win anyway
The most effective people I know share an extremely weird skill that I mistook for a long time as stupid self-delusion. Only after years of watching them did I realize it was a super-power.
The skill is: Productive Delusion
A friend of mine is a ridiculously successful entrepreneur I’ve known since childhood. I’ve watched him fail a dozen times to start businesses. Every time I talk to him about his current thing he has complete confidence that it’s going to work, work fast, with an attitude of “it’s gonna be easy”.
For decades, I’ve watched this play out from up close, sometimes smugly from across the table when he was telling me about his next sure-thing and I was sitting on my high-horse being calibrated and careful.
He was wrong WAY more than he was right. He won the game anyway. He has all the freedom we both dreamed about as overly-ambitious teens. My high horse does not have a sauna, but his second house in San Francisco does…
His conviction isn’t JUST irrational confidence. His conviction is only a super-power because it’s extremely fast updating. He’s 100% all-in on a new marketing strategy. A month later, when it hasn’t worked, he’s 100% all-in on something completely different.
Pro-lusion is really two skills working together: believing harder than the evidence warrants and updating faster than your ego wants.
For us mere mortals, being wrong hurts. Everyone has been told that it’s ALWAYS better to be right than wrong. In most cases, that’s only true if you’re wrong for too long.
If you’re wrong and update quickly, being wrong all the time is a huge advantage.
Productive Delusion: “I’m almost there”
The launch has been delayed three times and now you’re worried about setting a launch date. You’re on your third round of tweaks of the thing, and it’s still not quite right so you feel defeated. The side-project you tried to finish in a weekend is completely broken so you feel disappointed and don’t come back to it for months.
No one stops in the last mile of the marathon. Refusal to look at the gap between where you are and where you need to be means that at every step you’re fully focused on the current action, propelling yourself with the excitement of success, and not distracted by the future.
The feelings that stop people from doing this: worry that you’ll let yourself down again, defeat because it’s not done yet and you have so much more to do, disappointment because the thing is harder than you thought.
Realism: “I have a lot left to do, this might take another year, I should set realistic expectations.”
Pro-lusion: “I’m so close. Not much longer now. Just need to push through THIS part.”
For about 18 months, I studied guitar under a very good teacher with a friend of mine. It was hardcore. I was practicing an average of 4 hours a day. My wife recalls this time as me mostly sitting one room over muttering “FUCK” and “GOD DAMNIT WHY IS THIS SO HARD” over and over. Every week we’d get together to grind jazz songs and he’d say the same thing: “we’re almost there”. This went on for 18 god damn months and it nearly drove me mad.
By the end of it, we were both gigging professionally multiple nights a week.
We were almost there. Then we were almost there again. And again. Eventually, we were there.
Productive Delusion: “This will definitely work”
You have an idea, but you think it’s only 60% likely to succeed, so you invest your energy in a few other places too. You think up a new approach, but the current approach is sort of working, so you keep that going at the same time.
The prolusionary move is committing completely to a path where everyone else would hedge. Doubt is a kind of permission to half-ass the execution; eliminating doubt stops you from half-assing.
The feelings that stop people from doing this: fear of trying hard and still failing, hesitance because previous things didn’t work, dread about having to start over if it doesn’t work.
Non-focus is a hedge. Working on five things in parallel is what people do when they’re not sure any single bet is right. Better to be serially, one by one, completely wrong and to find out fast than to be half-wrong on five things in parallel. The hidden cost of half-assing multiple things is that you’re likely to never know whether the idea was bad or you just didn’t commit hard enough to find out.
Realism: “I’m taking this action but I might be wrong.”
Pro-lusion: “This is the move. I’m all in until it’s clearly not working.”
A friend of mine started a satellite company. Way before spaceX started blotting out the stars with giant numbers of satellites, he was pitching people on the potential of putting basically iphone 5s with solar panels in space.
They had to raise a ton of money, put a shitload of test satellites in orbit, and hire about a zillion engineers, before they had a really profitable business. They had a laser focus on taking a picture of the whole earth every day. This was such an insane thing to try to do in a world where literally everyone was still taking pictures from space with gigantic, multi-billion dollar satellites about once a week.
Over many years, I really didn’t see motivation and confidence falter. There were setbacks like, idk, THE DIFFICULTY OF SENDING THINGS INTO OUTER SPACE. Always matched with a steady chorus of “why don’t you just do the thing everyone else is doing?”, y’know the obvious lower risk, guaranteed revenues option. Undeterred, he’d just talk about how once they achieved the thing, it would work and everyone would want it.
The company went public a few years ago.
Better to be wrong completely than half-wrong about ten things and unsure if you tried hard enough.
Productive Delusion: “This is actually easy”
You start on something and immediately hit roadblocks, so you question your capacity. You find out the best approach is something you’ve never done before, so you make other moves you’re more comfortable with.
The prolusionary move is to just get started doing the new thing, find people to help you, buy courses, whatever. You do all the things you’d do if you believed “if I put some energy in here, I’m sure to figure it out.” The feeling is a kind of confused unbothered-ness. People who do this look at the thing other people are scared of and can’t see what the fuss is about, even when they probably should.
The feelings that stop people from doing this: shame at not already knowing, fear that effort + failure means you actually can’t, fear of starting from zero on something everyone else already gets.
Realism: “This is hard, lots of people fail at it, I should be appropriately humble.”
Pro-lusion: “This isn’t that hard. I just have to do the obvious things.”
At my last company, my employees had a joke that “If you ask him, he’ll just say it’s not that hard.” This was said with a mixed sigh and joviality. I spent 2 years saying: “I’m pretty sure it’s not that hard to automate this complicated finance thing no one has ever succeeded at.”
At my insistence, we tried and failed at this multiple times. When it obviously wasn’t working, we dropped it. On the third or fourth attempt though, we had done enough deals and had enough information to make it work. I led the project, it wasn’t actually that hard (IMO), and we did it.
This became the basis for the company’s whole next phase of growth.
In aggregate, it wasn’t actually easy. But the confusion of trying helped us ask better and better questions until we knew how to make it work.
Observations on Self-delusion and Conviction
If you’re trying to do something hard, you’d guess that being right is really important most of the time. Be careful, know what you’re getting yourself into, say the right things, don’t overestimate.
Most of the time, being wrong isn’t that big a deal. Often, the cost of being wrong is small. But the cost of being uncommitted is big.
This is hard because it involves seemingly opposite attitudes. You have to have enough conviction to focus completely. You also have to care about being wrong enough to minimize wasting time doing something that’s not working.
I can read your mind. You think being careful is good because it increases your chances of taking successful shots. You think I’m overstating the value of action over thinking. You think THIS POST isn’t written carefully enough.
Fine, but try this: believe me more than you should about this, at least until you find out I’m wrong yourself.