There’s a certain amount of delusion required to change your life.
I actually think we’ve given “being delusional” a bad reputation.
Sometimes you need the audacity to believe you can have a life that doesn’t remotely resemble the one you’re currently living. You need to believe you can move to another city, change careers, start the business, make more money, buy the house, leave the relationship, become a completely different version of yourself—or finally become the version you’ve been imagining all along.
That part doesn’t always need to make sense.
The plan does.
There’s a difference between being delusional about what’s possible and being delusional about what it will take to get there.
And maybe the easiest way for me to explain it is through real estate.
You can want the million-dollar house.
I would never tell someone they shouldn’t aspire to own a million-dollar home simply because they can’t afford one today.
Want the house.
Save it on Zillow. Drive through the neighborhood. Screenshot the kitchen. Decide which bedroom would become your dressing room before anybody has approved you for a mortgage.
Be completely ridiculous about it.
But when it’s time to actually purchase a house, we have to come back down to earth for a minute.
What’s your income?
How much have you saved?
What does your credit look like?
What payment can you comfortably afford?
What needs to change between where you are now and where you want to be?
Maybe the million-dollar house isn’t the first house.
Maybe we buy the $300,000 house, build equity, increase our income, clean up our credit, save more money and eventually trade up.
The fact that you cannot buy it today doesn’t mean you were ridiculous for believing you could own it eventually.
That’s the balance.
Your current circumstances are information, not instructions.
I think this is where people sometimes confuse realism with limitation.
Being realistic doesn’t mean looking around at your current life and deciding this must be as good as it gets.
Realism is simply acknowledging where you’re starting.
If you have $500 in your savings account, pretending you have $50,000 isn’t manifestation. It’s bad math.
But having $500 and believing you are capable of becoming someone who has $50,000 saved?
That’s vision.
Now we can build a plan.
How much do you need to earn? What needs to be paid off? What habits have to change? What opportunities do you need to pursue? And, perhaps most importantly, what are you willing to temporarily give up for the thing you say you want permanently?
That’s where dreams start becoming goals.
Sometimes the plan will change.
This is another place where I think we unnecessarily beat ourselves up.
We make a five-year plan and then act personally offended when life doesn’t follow the itinerary.
You are allowed to reroute.
If I’m taking a buyer to see ten houses and we realize after house number three that the neighborhood they swore they wanted isn’t actually right for them, I don’t say, “Sorry, you put it on the original list. We’re buying here.”
We adjust the search.
Maybe the budget changes. Maybe the neighborhood changes. Maybe what they thought was non-negotiable suddenly isn’t.
The goal was never to follow the original search criteria perfectly.
The goal was to find the right house.
Life works like that too.
Changing the route doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve abandoned the destination.
And changing the destination doesn’t mean you’ve failed either.
Sometimes you learn enough along the way to realize you want something completely different.
The dream requires a little audacity.
Most major changes look unrealistic before someone actually does them.
There will always be a reason to wait until you’re more prepared, have more money, feel more confident, know more people or have some magical guarantee that everything will work.
That guarantee isn’t coming.
At some point, you have to be delusional enough to think:
Why couldn’t it be me?
Why couldn’t I build that business?
Why couldn’t I live there?
Why couldn’t I make that much money?
Why couldn’t I start over?
Why couldn’t my life look completely different a year from now?
You don’t need to shrink the dream until it matches your present circumstances.
You need to build a realistic bridge between the two.
Reality builds the plan. Delusion gives you the nerve to follow it.
Maybe that’s the sweet spot.
Be realistic about the numbers.
Be realistic about the timeline.
Be realistic about the work.
Be realistic about what has to change.
But when it comes to what you believe your life can become?
Be a little delusional.
Save the million-dollar house.
Apply for the position that feels slightly above you.
Start the thing before you feel completely ready.
Make the move that everybody else thinks is crazy.
Give yourself permission to imagine a life bigger than the evidence currently in front of you.
Then open your laptop, pull out the calculator and figure out how the hell you’re going to get there.
Because the dream doesn’t have to be realistic.
Until Next Sunday,
Morgan
