Successful Delusion

July 2026

There are a few things that I really do not enjoy to do. I realised that it was because I had never done them successfully before, or gotten any kind of consistent positive feedback at them. Naturally, my brain has learned to anticipate failure and regulate my feelings toward those activities in a way that makes it feel negative.

However, I read through the full 'Raise a Genius!' Book by Laszlo Polgar the other day, and in this book he explains the framework on how genius really comes about and the psychology behind it (and as it turns out, genius tends to manifest in the form of ludicrous success in competitive fields).

One of the key points he mentioned was that, to raise a genius, you must give them constant positive feedback and success. This trains their brain to continue persevering and motivates them to keep going at something with sufficient vigour to achieve ludicrous outcomes.

This point raised a paradox: if constant positive feedbacks and successes are required to train your brain to enjoy something enough to achieve ludicrous outcomes, but you are too far out to be able to sit in a sandboxed environment that fakes those inputs, yet you are not far out enough to have a natural aptitude toward them, what do you do? Well, you really only have two options:

• Continue with a form of delusional, dogged determination.
• Work around the chemical reactions.

However, working around the chemical reactions in most situations that require genius is really just not a good choice. It's too slow and does not guarantee success.

So you're left with a single choice: Delusional, dogged determination. Or you can give up too I suppose.

Coincidentally, a form of this trait is inherent in most, if not all, successful founders. In fact, it is praised in founder culture. And so it hit me: this delusional determination is not a complete re-fabrication of reality in an abstract sense, but rather it is synthesising the genius' learning method so that it works in real time, in a real-time environment.

It is important to note that this delusion is not really delusional at all (as much as it may seem to the outside world), but rather it is a careful balancing act. This delusion is a deliberate affective override and selective attention strategy that, in its essence, recreates the Polgar-style positive feedback environment inside the adult brain.

So, what kind of delusion actually works? Well, I can not say for certain, but I do have some ideas:

• Manufactured process rewards: Redefine the unit of success until it becomes something that is under your control.
• Adaptive positive illusions: Selectively overweight evidence of competence while still living in reality and getting feedback. In fact, this is something where there exists some literature on (notably Taylor & Brown - Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health, 1988)
• Affective override: Deliberately create some reward signal for the activity until your brain automatically starts creating this positive reward signal. In a way, you can think of it as training your brain to respond a certain way to specific inputs.

So, it is not that delusion equals to eventual reality, but rather that it functions as a synthetic regulator of how the brain rewards and processes inputs tied to the activities taking place. Flat out denying reality is almost guaranteed to lead to failure.

Along with this observation, and a fair warning that this is only vaguely related to the topic, I'm beginning to believe that luck isn't really the abstract concept we tend to believe in either, but rather it is something that occurs mostly due to our deliberate action.

It is not a coincidence that the luckiest people we read about in startups are also those who try, read and do everything at their disposal.