Having what it takes

There is this popular trope in movies where the hero is this weak guy who takes on a villain who is 10x stronger than himself, yet either by sheer luck or pure determination, this hero is able to defeat the villain. I think this whole gimmick started with the duel between David and Goliath. Ever since them this has been taken to crazy new heights with countless movies depicting even more unrealistic scenarios.

The funniest of these scenarios are in those movies where a woman takes on legions of men and defeats them one after the other just to make it to the final boss. Forget about women, even a single man defeating legions of other men to make it to the top is unrealistic and for anybody who has been in a single fight, you’ll understand how taxing that can be to your stamina, now imagine having to fight off 500 men in under 1 hour (sometimes 30 minutes) which is the movie time. No matter how much karate you know, your stamina has a very limited supply. As if this wasn’t enough, the hero gets to the boss of the villains who is supposedly 10x stronger than everyone else and he is still able to defeat him in record amounts of time. This is just fantasy; these aren’t action movies, they are just pure sci-fi.

I say all this so you understand that the media has a way of reinforcing some ideas in our minds which are utterly false and unrealistic. What I described isn’t one movie but the whole action genre in the entertainment industry, but it gets even worse. The media also reinforces some ideas which are not only exaggerated but also very misleading and sometimes harmful, the story of the underdog who can conquer the mountain of odds before him.

You may have heard that Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his dorm room or Bill Gates dropped out of school, or your local restaurant food chain started as a food truck, but what all these stories fail to point out is the context these people had isn’t the same for you. Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room was in Harvard, and Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, which is the most prestigious university in the world and one of the hardest to get into, meanwhile you are trying to drop out of a public university no one wants to even go to. The stories also fail to mention that they were both from very wealthy families and had enough financial backing to fund their ideas, which I doubt is your case.

What’s the point of this

It’s important you understand the point of these stories and why the media continues to push these narratives despite all the lies they have. The reason is simple, if people knew the reality they’ll just stop trying and eventually nobody will be able to accomplish anything consequential. There is a famous quote which says; repetition is the mother of science which basically means 99% of all human creations were done after countless trials and errors.

You need a good number of people constantly trying to achieve great things for innovation to be even possible. A great majority of the companies which exist today aren’t they pioneers in their fields which means they didn’t invent it, they are just continuing the work started by others, that’s why its important to put people in a state of mind where they are striving to beat the odds which seem impossible, eventually enough people will fail for one person to succeed. This propaganda is very important for innovation.

You are more likely to fail

What I dislike about this propaganda is that it makes people delusional; they see fewer of their flaws but focus more on their dreams. Even though delusion might have some merits in certain fields, for the most part, it just guarantees a person is going to fail more times than not. Let’s take a crazy example: Flying cars, any person in their right mind would think that’s just something impossible to do but it takes a delusional person with enough dreams to even endeavor to get on this path of trying to make a flying car. If you focus solely on rationality, your entire being will tell you it’s simply a waste of time. Maybe that’s a huge example, lets go with another, let’s say you want to create a company bigger than Google, do you know how delusional you have to be to even think that’s remotely possible?

Reality vs Dreams

No matter what you want to do, there is a reality you just can’t escape from and even though luck might absolve you from some of the consequences of that reality, it can’t always protect you. There is definitely some value to being delusional because it protects you from seeing the obstacles which are ahead of you, this really comes in handy especially in the entrepreneur lifestyle. You may not always have what it takes but when you have a thick skin, you might make it further than you could every imagine

Conclusion

Not knowing what it takes is what holds back a lot of people out there. Delusion does have it perks but it also comes with a lot of downsides overall. Knowing how to mix both is key if you are going to accomplish the impossible.

Thanks for reading ☺️