970x125
Well-adjusted individuals are often described as being “in touch with reality.”
They see the world as it is, not as they wish it to be, and we think they are all the better for it. But what if being a little out of touch is precisely what we need to build, love, and persevere instead?
We tend to celebrate realism as a virtue and mock delusion as a flaw, yet many of humanity’s greatest leaps from entrepreneurship to art to love depend on some level of self-deception.
The belief that we can create something extraordinary is rarely rational, given the odds at play, and what drives us to greatness is aspirational fiction at best.
And yet, that fiction is also exactly what moves mountains when we deploy it with strategic intent.
The clinically delusional and the artfully adjusted
Before we dive deeper into why certain delusions might be useful, let’s first acknowledge the clinicians in the room before they stage a revolt.
In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), delusions are defined as false beliefs held firmly despite clear contradictory evidence. McKay, Langdon, and Coltheart (2005) emphasize that such delusions typically impair daily functioning, disrupting the individual’s ability to distinguish imagination from lived experience. Delusions of this kind are not quirks that we should trivialize in the name of self-help; instead, they’re symptoms of serious disorders that can cause immense suffering to those they afflict.
But there’s a softer, more adaptive version of being “out of touch” that psychology has long documented from the “positive illusion” research of Shelley Taylor and Jonathan Brown to the self-serving biases that help us recover from failure. Their work suggests that these small distortions of reality do much more than just protect our self-esteem by also supporting our capacity for empathy and happiness.
These are the strategic delusions that keep us going and the ones that bend reality just enough to make it bearable, and sometimes, outright beautiful.
And nowhere are these functional delusions more visible than in entrepreneurship.
Find an entirely sane entrepreneur, and I’ll show you someone who’s not going to be a billionaire
Starting a company is one of the least rational things a person can do.
By all external accounts, the probability of success is low, the stress is high, and the statistics are merciless. Rational analysis alone would dissuade most people from even trying.
If everyone acted rationally based on what the external world is signaling to us, innovation would stop, and much of our economies would grind to a halt. Economic progress depends on people who, against all evidence, believe their idea will work when almost all others fail. They look at the same data, but interpret it as a challenge, not a cage.
Everett and Fairchild (2020) theorize a fascinating U-shaped relationship between overconfidence and success in entrepreneurship. Moderate overconfidence often correlates with failure, while both high and low extremes show greater success. In other words, a sprinkle of delusion in the form of a deep, irrational conviction can sometimes yield better outcomes than balanced realism.
Consider Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” that affected those who spent time around him.
His near-mythical ability to convince people that the impossible was possible didn’t make him delusional in the clinical sense; instead, it made him a master of self-belief so powerful that it became reality. The same pattern repeats across visionaries regardless of their industry, where those who refuse to accept external reality as the final word tend to be among the ones who ultimately reshape it.
Of course, too much delusion can lead to implosion. But too little leads to stagnation. The trick is learning to harness irrational confidence without losing touch entirely, which entails finding a balance between self-belief and feedback, as well as dreaming and doing.
It is fascinating to see a similar pattern unfold in another, far more ancient arena—namely, the search for love.
The evolutionary advantage of not taking no for an answer
Rejection is one of life’s oldest teachers.
Rationally, repeated rejection should encourage us to conserve our energy and stop trying. Yet, across both romantic and professional domains, many who eventually succeed are those who didn’t take one rejection as proof that there isn’t a yes to be found somewhere else.
In the mating market, this adaptive persistence is much more than cultural myth.
Haselton and Nettle (2006) argue that our minds evolved to favor what they call “error management” biases. When the cost of underestimating one’s chances is higher than the cost of overestimating them, natural selection rewards optimism. In other words, it’s often better to be delusionally hopeful than realistically hopeless.
Imagine two potential suitors. One assumes rejection and never approaches; the other assumes attraction and tries anyway. The latter may fail often, but eventually, they’re far more likely to connect. The same logic extends to careers, creativity, and personal growth. Most of us encounter far more nos than yeses in life, even when we operate at the top of our game. If we calibrated our self-worth strictly to external feedback, we’d never reach our hand out in search of greatness again.
In this sense, strategic delusion acts as psychological shock absorption. It gives us permission to keep playing the game even when the scoreboard looks grim. And since human reality is co-constructed and defined not by absolute truth but by shared perception, our internal stories can shift the field we play on.
In that sense, “being in touch with reality” is a moving target itself.
The world changes, others’ perceptions change, and our self-concepts evolve. Our selective delusions, when adaptive, help us navigate that flux by keeping us motivated enough to engage with it at all.
The art of staying slightly out of touch
From the outside, it’s easy to label self-belief as arrogance or denial. But examine what’s happening more carefully, and you see that much of human thriving depends on our capacity to imagine better worlds and insist, against all odds, that they can exist.
The real challenge we face isn’t to eliminate our delusions, but to properly calibrate them. As the philosopher William James wrote, belief often creates its own verification in fact, and sometimes, believing before seeing is the only way to make anything worth seeing at all.
So yes, it’s important to stay grounded, but a little distance from reality can give you the leverage you need to move it.
