Why being “realistic" is holding you back.

The kid sitting across from me couldn't even spell diligence. No joke, I'd seen him misspell it in three separate emails that week. Then the director walked into the Goldman conference room, clapped him on the shoulder, told him he'd earned a promotion, and asked me to be patient.

I'd been doing most of his work for six months…

That night I went to an expensive restaurant by myself, ordered a bottle of wine I couldn't really afford, and made the decision that ended up building most of my net worth. I was going to start acting delusional. Specifically, I was going to assume I deserved more than what the world was offering me, and I was going to behave that way until reality caught up.

Three months later I asked for a raise so absurd my boss laughed in my face. I got half of it, which is to say I got way more than I would've gotten by staying quiet.

Ten months after that I was buying into laundromats, car washes, and the kinds of unsexy cash-flowing businesses bankers love to make fun of at dinner parties. Today I own pieces of dozens of them.

Those bankers still work for someone else.

The delusion had to come first for any of the other skills to matter, and it cost me years to figure that out.

And here's the line that really pisses people off:

Spare me the manifestation TikToks.

I'm describing the kind of belief that lets you walk into a room, ask for the unreasonable thing, and act like the answer was always going to be yes.

Most people roll their eyes at that sentence, but that eye roll is part of why their bank account looks the way it does.

This was bouncing around X a while back.

And I think it's the subconscious line that matters most.

Your brain is like a court reporter. It will dutifully transcribe whatever case you keep arguing for yourself, and if your case is, “I'm not the kind of person who could pull this off,” your brain will spend the next decade gathering evidence to win that argument.

Congratulations. You'll be right.

You'll probably never live out your dreams…

But you'll be right.

Mark Manson keeps hammering on a concept I think about all the time.

Most of your problems aren't because you tried hard and failed. They're because you never gave yourself permission to try at a level that actually scared you.

We dress this up in nice phrases.

Being realistic.

Managing expectations.

Staying grounded.

Elegant cover for the fact that we're terrified of looking stupid in front of people whose opinions don't even pay our bills.

Looking stupid is free, but staying small is what costs you money.

Delusion alone makes you Adam Neumann.

It makes you Elizabeth Holmes.

It makes you the SBF mugshot.

It makes you that guy at the bar who's been "about to launch" for nine years.

Delusion uncoupled from skill, reps, and a real Walk-Away Test is how people blow up. Not the boring kind of blow-up either. The federal-indictment kind.

So when I say be delusional, I'm not telling you to skip the work. I'm telling you the work alone has never been enough. You've probably met the operator who's twice as smart as you, twice as hard-working, and somehow makes half the money.

It's because they aren't thinking big enough. They've got the skills, but they aren't DELUSIONAL about how far they can go.

Skill without delusion plateaus, and delusion without skill detonates.

The Premium lives in the overlap.

I've been investing in Main Street businesses for over a decade. The operators who 10x their outcomes all run the same play. I call it the Delusion Premium.

Belief Before Evidence (B2E). Commit to the move before the data justifies it. Evidence is a lagging indicator. By the time you have enough of it, somebody braver has eaten your lunch.

I bought my first car wash with no operating experience, a team I hadn't hired yet, and a spreadsheet that didn't survive month two. It still cash-flowed. The next three were easier because I had the guts to bet on myself.

The Bandwidth Bet. Block calendar time for the operator you haven't earned the right to be yet. A $5M owner who books the $50M owner's schedule tends to grow into it faster than anybody expects.

When I owned three laundromats, I started taking the meetings I'd take if I owned thirty. The behavior dragged the portfolio behind it.

The Asymmetric Ask. Request the deal, the discount, the partnership that feels too big for you to ask for. Worst case, a polite no. Best case, you compress two years of grinding into one conversation you almost didn't have.

One operator in our community emailed a third-generation owner she'd never met and asked if he'd seller-finance 90% of a $1.2M deal. He laughed at first… then he called her back. She closed it four months later with only $40K of her own money down.

Identity Override. Start saying "I'm the kind of person who…" about eighteen months before it's actually true. Behavior follows identity in almost every case I've watched.

I called myself an investor for two years before I had any meaningful ownership of anything. The portfolio caught up to the sentence. It always does.

The Premium itself is the dollar gap between who you currently are and who you'd be if you actually believed the next version of yourself was inevitable.

For most people that gap is six figures a year. Minimum.

Run the math across a decade.

Two operators, same capital, same market. The realistic one tops out around $3M of net worth after ten years of doing things "the right way." The delusional one rounds to nine figures. The variable isn't intelligence, and it isn't talent. It's the size of the asks they were willing to make in year two.

And that applies across all categories.

You don't get what you never ask for.

This tweet has 1.3 million views right now, which is a polite way of saying the algorithm is screaming at us.

He's right.

The cheat code is hiding in plain sight, and most people refuse to use it because using it feels embarrassing for about six months.

This isn't fringe advice. It's the operating philosophy of basically every person who's built anything that matters.

Sam Altman, in How to Be Successful: "…self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion." It's a competitive advantage most people refuse to use because it feels cringey.

Steve Jobs' engineers had a name for what he did to them. The Reality Distortion Field. He'd insist a six-month project would ship in two weeks, and somehow they'd ship it in four. Without his delusion, that same timeline would've stretched to nine months.

Elon Musk, on starting SpaceX with no rocket experience and three failed launches in a row: "When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor." That's a job description if you read it right.

Marc Andreessen has been saying for years that "the world is a very malleable place." Most people read that as a quote about the world. Read it again pretending he's talking about you.

And Chris Do, who put it ever-so-bluntly on my podcast, “You are the master of your destiny.” Decide what you want, and go after it.

(The whole episode is great btw.)

You can watch it HERE.

Run this on yourself this week, and be honest. It doesn't work if you lie to yourself.

1. The Ask Test. What was your biggest ask in the last 30 days? If it didn't drop your stomach a little, you're underpricing your own confidence.

2. The Calendar Test. Look at last week. If 80% of your hours went to work a $50-an-hour version of you could've done, you've got a belief problem hiding inside what looks like a productivity problem.

3. The Room Test. Are you the dumbest person in your top five conversations? If you can't honestly say yes, you're cheating yourself of growth.

4. The Embarrassment Test. When did you last say a goal out loud that embarrassed you with its size? If you can't remember, you've gotten too polite in public. Or you're thinking too small in private.

5. The Walk-Away Test. Could you walk away from your income tomorrow and bet on yourself? If the answer is no, your delusion isn't backed by skill yet. Build the skill until it is. That's your homework.

Pick one ask you've been rounding down on and make it at full size. Today.

Send a voice memo, make a call, or do it in person. Text and email strip out tone, and tone is a massive part of what confidence actually is.

It might be messy or imperfect, but the only thing that matters is that you start.

Maybe it’s time to ask your boss for a raise.

Maybe you ask your dream client for a meeting.

Maybe you ask yourself to finally go all-in on that side-hustle.

Or maybe you just get up the courage to attend my FREE webinar so you can finally start your own business-buying journey.

Once you decide, hit reply and tell me what you went for.

I genuinely love reading them.

So here's the question I'll leave you with.

The ask you've been postponing, the move you're scared to make…

How much longer can you afford to stay small?

-Codie