“You do realize that you are a father of three and are working full-time as head of department and professor, do you?” my wife said to me recently over a creamy Italian espresso.
I was a bit puzzled because I thought I was well aware of these facts. What I realized during the following conversation was though, that I seemingly was suffering from a delusional time perception I haven’t been fully aware of. Because apparently, all the other things I am doing or planning or about to be doing - and was telling her about - seemed to demonstrate that I had either forgotten about these facts or a serious issue with time perception.
Jobs had his reality distortion field. Musk has his. I am not them, and I don’t intend to be. But their results fascinated me enough to ask: what would it look like to build that mechanism for myself?
But I often get asked about how I am able to do all of the things I do - running a surgical department, in-depth academic work, teaching, hosting a podcast, building a speaking career, making music and being a passionate father and husband in a family of five. I have started writing this newsletter to identify the answers to this question.
And after that conversation with my wife, it became clear to me that one of these traits that help me with everything I do, is this:
I am delusional.
Not so much in the clinical sense, but close enough to be useful.
Psychiatry has a precise definition for delusion.
ICD-10 code F22 describes delusional disorder as a fixed belief system maintained with full conviction despite contradictory evidence, while the individual’s general cognitive function remains intact.
That last clause is the interesting one.
The person reasons logically, plans effectively and acts in the world without impairment.
Except for one thing: they live in a reality others cannot see.
The clinical definition describes a disorder. What I am about to propose is the deliberate practice of the same mechanism, pointed at your own potential instead of away from reality.
I call this Deliberate Delusion - a self-constructed belief about what is normal for you, maintained despite evidence to the contrary, while your reasoning and execution remain intact.
The belief is not there to describe reality accurately. It is there to help you decide direction and optionality. Reality still corrects the path.
What is normal?
We think normal is what everybody else thinks normal is. Everybody is eyeing the others to find out what is acceptable and adjusting to stay part of the group.
These definitions are fluid and differ widely — historically, culturally as well as geographically.
But they are all regressions to the mean.
Normal is not reality. It is the average of other people’s limits.
Deep inside we know that “normal” doesn’t really exist as it is a social construct, and thus it doesn’t serve our very personal needs. But as long as we don’t challenge our need for belonging, it will influence our every decision and action.
Everything you can see around you right now, the device in your hands, the chair you sit on, came to life through someone’s thought. It didn’t exist before. Someone was delusional enough to imagine it and persistent enough to make it real.
This is nothing new. Every religion, every nation, every currency is a shared delusion that enough people decided to treat as real. Every company is this. The difference is that you don’t need to warp anyone else’s reality. You only need to do it for an audience of one - yourself.
I have developed a delusional view about what I consider normal for myself. In that view I consider myself as much a single person as I see myself as a family father. I can hold opposing perceptions simultaneously - a form of compartmentalisation that lets me treat each identity as fully real, even when they contradict each other in terms of time, energy and attention. I consider my day job that objectively takes 8–9 hours each day as only filling about 20% of my time.
It is a perceptual mechanism I have built - partly deliberately, partly not - that makes the impossible feel normal. I am still fully present while I do what I do and when I am where I am.
I just don’t see why it would prevent me from doing everything else as well.
If I were to draw an “objective” outside view of a standard day time allocation, it would look like this:
If I were to draw my internal perceived daily time allocation, it would look like this:
Which brings us back to reality distortion fields, because this is what it is. A distortion of reality.
We all distort reality. The question is not whether, but how deliberate that distortion is. And it touches something deeper: what your definition of normality - and thus reality - actually is.
Human history is filled with people who held delusional beliefs for decades and turned them into reality. It is also filled with billions of delusional ideas that failed. Survivorship bias is real and this is not a framework for predicting success.
It is a framework for expanding what you consider possible for yourself.
But Deliberate Delusion has an Achille’s heel , and it is worth being honest about.
I recently watched a portrait of Joe Alexander. He desperately wanted to become a professional NBA basketball player. Coming out of high school, he wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
What followed was by his own account a state of Deliberate Delusion. He decided to hold two very firm beliefs.
#1 If he outworked every other player on earth, he could reach the NBA.
There was absolutely no evidence for this. The belief was, by any reasonable standard, delusional.
#2 The only thing that matters in life is basketball.
That if he failed, his life would be miserable. It was a deliberate axiom, where he decided to stay away from anybody who believed otherwise. He explained, that you cannot spend time with people who question your belief. You cannot even think it once. Because the moment you do, the belief loses its strength, and without it, you cannot produce the work that closes the gap.
Through that fixed conviction and relentless work, he transformed himself and was drafted 8th overall in the 2008 NBA Draft.
And then? His NBA career lasted roughly two seasons. He went on to play professionally overseas for over a decade, in Russia, Israel, Italy, Turkey and France. A real career, but not the one the delusion promised.
The delusion got him in the door, which alone was extraordinary. But the isolation it required, the refusal to let anyone question the belief, also made him lonely. When reality pushed back, there was no community around him to absorb the shock.
This is the difference between what I call lonely delusion and Deliberate Delusion.
Lonely delusion demands that you cut off anyone who doesn’t share your belief. It produces intense short-term output at the cost of sustainability, relationships and the ability to adapt when the world doesn’t match your delusion.
Deliberate Delusion, as I practice it, works differently. You hold the fixed belief about what is normal for you. But you don’t isolate. You communicate it, you let it pull others in, and you stay embedded in the life you are building across all its dimensions.
You can also make an argument for a delusional belief you first buy into yourself, but then communicate it so strongly that others can’t help but follow along and help you build towards that goal together.
It comes down to aligning your inner and outer communication.
What to do with this?
You have been rational and realistic your whole life - you know how that feels.
How about trying to be delusional for a while and see how that feels.
Here is what I want you to do:
Create a current realistic time allocation bar.
And then create one where you allocation more time to the areas you want to have more of in your life - despite “better knowledge”. For a week pretend that that is how your time is allocated and see what happens.
My wife asked me if I knew I was a father of three working full-time as a professor and department head. I do. I just refuse to let that define the boundary of what is normal for me.
To more in life,
Nicco
Listen to the song:
