🌀Au Contraire: Why being delusional is your secret weapon

And if you are one of the ones that get it… really get it, this will be good for your soul. Like good chicken wings for the soul kinda good.

You see there is an advantage to being delusional. And some of you need to hear that. I need to hear it every once in awhile to remind myself that being a little crazy is a whole lot better than being normal. There are too many normies out they are making the earth boring enough. So what the hell am I talking about?

If you are an entrepreneur, you probably have some delusional tendencies.  Some people will call you erratic. One person called me manic. Ouch. That really hurt my feelings. But the people that push the edges even just a little bit belong to this group. And they are people that make shit happen. I do feel sorry for the people that work for us sometimes though. I put them through some crazy shit, but the upside is worth it.

90% of new businesses fail. To think you can beat the odds is delusional.

Many great ideas are born out of delusion. Like the company Ship Snow, Yo. They sell snow. This weird couple was shoveling their driveway, and thought “I wonder if we could sell this shit”. And they sell a shit tons of it.

So if you are little crazy, that is a very good thing because it means you can come up with unconventional ideas and more importantly as an entrepreneur… you can come up with unique ways to solve problems. If you have been in business for any period of time, you know that your job title is “problem solver”, and the bigger the problems, the more money you make.

But… but… but… but. Many of your ideas are crazy. Like shitty crazy not good crazy. So you have to allow yourself to be ok with coming up with 19 terrible ideas for every 1 good idea. Normal folks aren’t gonna like this because they want solid stable ideas, but your genius just doesn’t work that way. You will have to sift through a bunch of shitty ideas just to find one that “might” work.

But the thing about ideas is that a good idea can make you millions of dollars. I know a few of my marketing ideas turned into millions of dollars in sales… but I had to wade through some really shitty ideas to get one to pop off. I wish I could express that like it felt… that isn’t shitty enough. It is like banging your face with your nose against a wall for 50 days straight failing at everything you are trying until 1 thing kinda pops… like a spark…. Then that leads nowhere, then you beat your nose against the wall for another 200 days until its a pulp until BAM! Something happens. You gotta do a lot of head banging to get lucky. You have to endure a lot of pain to test your ideas. That is why you are crazy… you believe that your shit might actually work. And you are right about 1% of the time. It is just getting to that 1%.

Most people don’t know that Christopher Columbus was delusional. He was delusional AF.  In fact, Christopher Columbus demanded to be call “Grand Admiral of the Ocean” and he even started signing his name toward the end of his life as some sort of deity. Most people don’t know that he wasn’t even that good of a sailor. He could never determine latitude and longitude and confused islands for vast continents. BUT, he could inspire people to go with him to the ends of the earth. He even convinced the Queen of Spain to back his ventures even after failing on his first mission. She knew he was off his rocker, but she also knew this kind of brazen discovery would require this type of craziness. He had an idea, and he knew how to make it happen.

Now delusion is also dangerous. Like having the key to all of your wildest wishes, it turns out that many of those wishes are curses. So you have to learn to harness your delusions. You have to create a system to filter through ideas from a delusional frame of mind and then test them in ways that will not bankrupt you. It also helps to have a special person around you that will not crush your delusions but rather be a positive guide to refine, test and weed out the grenades. If this person is smart, they will realize that you are the key to their success. You want your ideas to explode… just not in your hand.

There is also a curse of being a “creative”. Mood swings up and low that are hard to control. It takes years to understand your own emotional state of being. It is the price to pay for being able to tap into abnormal ideas. Being creative isn’t a state of mine, it is work. It is constantly putting the time in to capture that 1% of gold. There is a misnomer that creative types are hippie fanciful beings that laze around and think up good ideas… no the successful creatives put hours of grueling work in to harness their creative side. Hours molding that lump of clay until it doesn’t resemble a blob.

You probably haven’t heard the term hypomanic. I haven’t until this year when a blurb of Patrick Bet-David mentioned one his 5 of his favorite books “The Hypomanic Edge.” This book really hit home as it described most entrepreneurs as being hypomanic.

See if any of these quotes from the book resonate with you:

“Their “flight of ideas,” jumping from topic to topic in a rapid energized way, is a sign of hypomania.“

“The most we can say is that hypomanics are at much greater risk for depression than the average population. The things most likely to make them depressed are failure, loss, or anything that prevents them from continuing at their preferred breakneck pace.“

“Mood is meant either to facilitate or inhibit action.“

“The drives that motivate behavior surge to a screaming pitch, making the urgency of action irresistible. There isn’t a minute to waste—this is going to be huge—just do it!“

“Depression, he felt, forced one to face the deepest existential truths of sin, suffering, evil, and death, which the more superficial “healthy minded” are able to deny. Depression can transform people into seekers of ultimate truth“.

“Brilliant creativity and gross lapses in judgment often have shared roots in hypomania.“

“Attracting attention, of course, is one of the things hypomanics do best.“

“When you are hypomanic, everyone knows it, because they must suffer your arrogant, erratic behavior. When you are depressed, quite often you suffer alone.“

“For the hypomanic, the only escape from a black hole is a big bang. For Venter to avoid Lewis’s fate, he had to take on an even more ambitious project.”

So if any of these describes you in the slightest, it is time to start learning how to harness your genius and your curse. We all want to make millions of dollars, but for entrepreneurs we don’t just want millions… we want to build. We want to create. We want the world at our fingertips. We want to etch our name in the ether. We want it all. And some of us just have to do this or we will be flat miserable. We don’t have a choice, it is just the way we are.

~Blue