Tell me if any of these sound like you:
1) You feel like you’ve been lied to about what a good life looks like.
You’re pursuing a goal that sounds nice when you mention it at dinner with grandma. Or a goal that wouldn’t make your parents think you’re a disappointment. And you don’t see it going anywhere.
If you ignore that feeling, you wake up 10 years later with a degree, decent job, and a never ending sense of despair that you’ll never be able to chase your own dreams.
2) You’re productive, but not actually making progress toward anything.
You wake up early. You listen to podcasts. You journal, you lift, your calendar is full, but you don’t know where you’re going.
Give it 5 years and you’ll still be “figuring out what to do with your life.”
3) You’re ambitious, but stay quiet because it sounds embarrassing to your friends and family.
You want a unique life. You don’t want to fit in. But when people ask about your future, you water it down so nobody laughs at it.
You get stuck performing mental masturbation. You feel special for wanting to be unique, but you still do the same thing as everyone else.
Nobody wants to end up in any of those 3 situations.
This letter will change that for you.
Because one of my favorite things to do is study the actions of both successful and mediocre people. And that’s all success really is. Doing more of what leads to success and less of what leads to mediocrity. The next few letters will be dedicated to just that.
When we reverse engineer the people who have done the impossible - Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and any of the other greatest creatives, thinkers, and builders of the past - there is one pattern I’ve noticed between them all.
Their goals are delusional.
That’s the key to their success.
And that’s exactly what we’re going to go over - why average goals lead to failure, the psychology of delusional goals, how to enter the same reality as ultra successful people, and how to achieve what most people think is impossible.
Why “realistic” goals lead to failure and mediocrity (you fall into this category by default)
The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.
– Elon Musk
You have goals, even if you didn’t set them.
That’s how the mind works. And if you become aware of this, you can quickly see why you aren’t able to stick to any of the goals you set.
We’re not talking about New Years Resolutions or some other surface level goal you set and immediately quit because you felt bad about how you looked in the mirror and forgot about it the next day (because another unconscious goal (usually convenience and comfort, or the goal of not drawing attention to yourself) was more important to you than finally getting in shape).
We’re talking about how every thought you have or action you take is aiming toward a goal. Like a heat-seeking missile. You are silently optimizing for a goal you never chose, or someone else chose for you.
Take a second and think about that.
Every single thing you think or do is toward a goal.
That’s important. Extremely important. It means that if you don’t know what those goals are, you are not in control of your life.
Here’s how it goes:
You are born
Your first goal is survival
Your parents have been thinking about what goals they want you to pursue for quite some time now. They “want the best for you”
Your parents teach you how to walk, how to communicate, and eventually what their version of success for you looks like, which is usually the goals that society passed down to them (go to school, get a good job, praise your god)
You go to school, then college because that’s just “what’s next”
You get the job, you hit the milestones, you check the boxes
And then, after almost a quarter of your life, you start to wonder if this was even what you wanted in the first place.
Entropy illustrates that systems trend toward disorder. Applied to the mind, psychic entropy means that your mind, and therefore your life, drifts toward disorder and chaos.
At some point, a system becomes unstable and a new, more ordered structure must emerge, like how a faucet spurting out water eventually turns into a whirlpool.
In your life, you hit a point where the lower part of you wants to stay the same and the higher part wants something more. It feels like you’re being ripped in half. That is a signal to completely turn your life around.
The reason realistic goals lead to failure and mediocrity is because of how you choose them. You look at what you think is possible, then water it down a bit more so that people won’t laugh or think you’re an idiot. A goal only feels realistic if it fits the life your parents, teachers, or five closest friends already expected you to have.
In other words, your mind is in a cage.
And if you keep choosing to live in that cage, you’ll never have the chance to notice a potentially life-changing opportunity, let alone act on it, and your life slowly gets worse until the pain is so great you either get crushed or decide to pursue a delusional goal anyway.
The psychology of delusional goals
The man who conceives himself to be a “failure-type person” will find some way to fail, in spite of all his good intentions, or his willpower, even if the opportunity is literally dumped in his lap. The person who conceives himself to be a victim of injustice, one “who was meant to suffer,” will invariably find circumstances to verify his opinions.
– Maxwell Maltz
Humans aren’t unique because they have memory or consciousness or a more refined intelligence than animals.
They’re unique because they constantly simulate the future to steer the present.
You think more about the future than the past, and the future is what causes your present behavior. Not the reverse. Your actions do not create the future. You create the future first, then act toward it.
It’s called selective attention.
Your brain either gets pulled by stimuli or directed by a goal.
And when you focus on one thing, that means, by definition, you’re not focused on the 99.99% of other things you could be focusing on. Your attention is goal directed rather than tossed around like a rag doll looking for the next cheap dopamine hit.
Delusional goals force this to happen.
Imagine two people with drastically different goals.
Tommy has the same goal as almost everyone else - go to school, get an education, get a decent job so he can finally afford a nice apartment, and acquire enough material status symbols to attract a mate.
Johnny has a goal that seems impossible - build a content business that makes $100k a month in 6 months.
Will Tommy ever have the possibility of making more money than what a “decent job” would pay him? Will Tommy ever learn something outside of school that allows him to pursue a more lucrative opportunity? No, because that’s not what his attention is selecting for. He could come across life changing information and his mind will consider it “noise” just because it’s not necessary to achieve the goal he’s pursuing.
Johnny, on the other hand, cannot think like the average person. To achieve that delusional goal, he realizes that most actions he’s taking are completely useless.
A properly set delusional goal pushes your brain into the unknown, accelerating neuroplasticity. Consistency reinforces pathways in your brain, but novelty and challenge stimulate learning and change faster. Flipping the switch and going all in on a goal throws your brain into an environment where it has no choice but to rewire, fast, and the new behavior becomes your new baseline.
That’s when flow state and obsession start to create a blissful quality of life. 5 intrinsic drivers start to stack.
Curiosity – The desire to explore the unknown, learn how to change, and fill knowledge gaps. Results in good dopamine from novelty and norepinephrine, which heightens attention, preparing you to learn.
Passion – An intense enthusiasm is built for the path that allows you to change your life. Results in more good dopamine and norepinephrine.
Purpose – The feeling that your actions contribute to something larger than yourself. Achieving goals results in more dopamine which reinforces behavior. Serotonin stems from significance and belonging. Oxytocin stems from connection.
Autonomy – The desire to direct your own life and work. To control your choices, actions, and environment. Results in yet again more dopamine and a reduction in cortisol (the stress from feeling put in a box), allowing for creative decision making.
Mastery – The process of learning and growing is its own reward. Results in sustainable good dopamine that keeps you in the game.
This all sounds great, but I can hear your objection.
“But Dan, I’ve tried setting a goal like this before, but none of this happens.”
Yes.
Your goal needs gravity. It needs to be so strong that everything else in your life seems stupid and pointless.
That’s difficult to do, and I’ll be writing another letter about the intricacies of how to become obsessed with a life-changing goal, but for now let’s learn how to properly set a delusional goal.
How to enter the same reality of ultra successful people
Every great idea starts out as blasphemy.
– Anthony De Mello
Steve Jobs would walk into a room, state an impossible deadline or an impossible product as if it were already decided.
“We’ll ship it by January, and it will do this” with such total conviction that the room of engineers who knew it was impossible would leave believing it, and then build toward it like it was simply the plan.
This was Job’s Reality Distortion Field.
Most people dismiss it as charisma, or manipulation, or him being an asshole, when it was simply him re-aiming the room’s attention.
Jobs refused to be pulled by the stimuli of “this timeline can’t possibly work,” and overrode it with a future target. Every brain in the room started selecting for a path instead of selecting for reasons it won’t work.
And that’s the thing.
Your goal is not a destination you hit. That’s one of the greatest self-help-esque interpretations of a goal there is. Instead, a goal is a filter that decides what your brain sees as important and what it ignores. A goal is a point of view. Whether you actually hit the goal or not is irrelevant because you will at least land near the goal, making progress you never thought possible before.
To properly set a delusional goal and create your own reality distortion field, here’s what needs to happen.
Pull out a notebook, write these down:
Step 1) Install the point of view.
First, think of a goal so big you think it’s impossible.
Then, set a timeline so short you think it’s impossible.
If you don’t know what goal to set, or even what to do with your life, it helps to think of the most painful problem in your life right now that makes other problems easier to solve.
For most people, that’s usually their fitness or finances.
Getting in the gym and dropping 20 pounds can do wonders for your confidence and energy, making it easier to start turning your life around.
Making more money relieves stress, opens your mind, and lets you invest in other areas of your life.
The specific “how” for achieving the goal doesn’t need to happen yet. Simply setting the goal lets your mind identify and learn the how.
Next, you need to ask yourself one question:
Is the goal and timeline you just set impossible for who you are now? In other words, can your current approach get you there?
If yes, the goal is linear, not impossible. Reject it and raise it further.
The goal must sit beyond your existing skills, habits, and assumptions of what’s possible because that’s exactly what creates a lens that shows you a new reality instead of a to-do list.
Last, the goal must be singular and self-chosen.
You cannot have competing goals. That splits focus and doesn’t lead to a point of view at all.
And it cannot be inherited from your parents, your culture, your industry, or your algorithm.
The finished version of setting this goal is when you can say “I do this” with total conviction and you can instantly see that most of what you’re currently doing has nothing to do with it.
Welcome to the unknown. The most meaningful place to be.
2) Set standards for what you don’t do, and stick to them.
With a properly set delusional goal, almost nothing will work to achieve it.
So, you must now audit your life. Every habit, project, client, relationship, routine, and obligation. Do any of them help you reach the goal? The answer is almost certainly no.
This is the hardest part.
You create a standard that you refuse to lower.
These are things you no longer do, period.
You don’t “almost” stop partying on the weekends or undercharging for your freelance services, you completely eliminate them.
Of course, this is easier said than done. People struggle with this because of sunk cost bias, fear, and a lack of accountability. The mind is a self-deception machine and humans love lying to themselves.
This is your chance to practice brutal self-honesty and rip multiple band-aids off.
The finished version of raising your standards is that life feels dramatically simpler. You have fewer things, fewer obligations, and fewer justifications that clog your mind and prevent you from action.
Step 3) Focus on the highest leverage path available to you.
Your goal creates a frame from which you can perceive new opportunities.
Your standards subtract everything from your life that does not serve the goal, creating space for your attention to move in the right direction.
Now you must accept that there are very few real paths to achieve the goal.
But you don’t find the path, person, or opportunity fully formed.
For something like fitness, the delusional goal (impossible outcome + impossible timeline) is to compete in a physique show in 6 months, or squat 405 for the first time this year.
When you set this, watch what happens to your attention. Suddenly the linear path of “show up, lift, repeat” doesn’t work anymore. You need structure. You may need a coach who can get you on the right track fast. Your current training program needs to solely focus on the sets, reps, and exercises that will get you there. You start seeing sleep and food as strict and non-negotiable. All things that you didn’t even think about because your previous goal filtered it out as noise.
When I decided I wanted to hit my first $100k month (delusional goal for a person who was used to making less than $100k a year as a freelancer who’s money was bound to time), I only had around 1000 followers on social media. I obviously wasn’t going to get there by “posting consistently and hoping the algorithm notices” like everyone else.
I had to find force multipliers. I needed an offer so I stopped seeing my posts as the product and started treating them as the distribution channel for one thing people pay for. I needed more distribution than my 1000 followers, so I needed to borrow from someone else who had a lot more followers, meaning I had to network and exchange value with someone who had 50,000 followers so they would share my posts to their audience, leading to more buyers of my offer.
If this is a path you’re also interested in, consider joining the Creator Bootcamp. General enrollment is closed, but it comes with the purchase of Eden.
Eden is second brain where you save any idea, research what ideas are already working, create content people can’t ignore, and soon with the next update... get paid for your knowledge (I am on a mission to make it frictionless to get your first product up, so you can start earning from your interests). At minimum, sign up for a free account and take a look around so you’re notified when that update goes live.
Now that your focus is singular, you are more “disciplined” than 99% of humanity, but you love it. It is one of the greatest things you can experience on this planet.
If you do not feel this joy, that is another problem.
In the next letter, we’ll talk about how to add gravity to your goals. That is, make your goals so meaningful that you can’t help but achieve them.
– Dan
'The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.
– Elon Musk'
Quoting 'genius' Elon Musk....after the Cyber Truck....really?
The contradiction is....amusing.
Thank you, that’s a well articulated and insightsfull post.
In my humble opinion, I think obsession ought to be included among the "5 intrinsic drivers."