Why Entrepreneurs Need To Be A Bit Delusional
by Ashok Nayar
Delusion. Often derided, sometimes embraced, yet rarely so. Obviously, delusion has its negative connotations. The craziness, the unexpected, the misunderstood. But as an entrepreneur, being delusional, albeit, and maybe oxymoronically, rationally delusional, is as important as any piece of execution. When the world says no, the entrepreneur must say yes. As Reid Hoffman put it, “An entrepreneur will jump off a cliff and figure out how to make an airplane on the way down”.
The business world is a hard world. And trying to start a business is even harder. The numbers are just simply against you. The majority of businesses fail, the majority of entrepreneurs fail, and the logical person would never get into either game. But as any entrepreneur will tell you, it’s all they know. It’s all that logically makes sense to them.
Entrepreneurs are optimistic animals by trade. Everyone around will tell them they can’t do it. And they will always tell themselves they can. And this singly handedly is the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful business. The ability to keep going, to keep hustling and to keep believing when everything and everyone tells you otherwise. As Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can or cannot, you’re right”.
[...] After reading that quote, I’ve considered myself to be part of that third group. Now thinking back, it was almost out of a process of elimination. I wasn’t born in NYC (first group), I don’t commute to NYC (second group), so I must be part of the third (with the assumption that the three groups cover all of NYC—impossible, but go with it). But there’s another reason I put myself into the third group. It’s because, while I think I can achieve what I’ve set out to achieve much faster and much more efficiently in NYC, it’s that NYC stands as a beacon of hope for so many. It stands as a light in the darkness of all the troubles that people live with. And while I generally don’t like to talk in intangibles, the intangibility of hope is often the single biggest economic driver in a person’s success. It’s that they believe there may be a better tomorrow. [...]