The hardest thing about entrepreneurship is that it feels inauthentic. Aspiring to do something great makes you feel like you’re playing pretend, spinning tales of something that you’d like to be real but know doesn’t exist quite yet. It is this dance between being a visionary CEO and being a little girl wearing your mother’s high heels that defines Silicon Valley. Every sweating engineer at YC Demo Day feels this same thing – the Stripe founders often joked about feeling like “two kids stacked on each other in a trench coat” while they were starting out.
This act of playing pretend to make something real – the “reality distortion field” – isn’t exclusive to Silicon Valley. I remember reading about it in the childhood morality stories that my parents gave me. In one of the stories, a hungry traveler pretends that a stone in his bag is actually a magic stone that makes delicious soup. He tricks the villagers in the town into believing in the stone’s powers, and the villagers are duped into donating ingredients that morph the rock water into an amazing stew. The traveling chef is admired for the results of his actions (the town joyously comes together and eats great food.) Was he playing pretend, or was he actually turning the stone into a symbol of magic and togetherness via his actions?
In the entrepreneurship stories of the last century, these types of reality distortion fields are often attributed to God. In 1948, when LEGO was going bankrupt while attempting to manufacture little plastic bricks, its employees wanted to go back to their successful wooden toys business. The bricks didn’t even work yet – they didn’t stack the way modern LEGOs stack! But the founder of LEGO convinced the employees and investors to persevere in plastic by appealing to their faith: “Don’t you have faith boys? I have prayed to God and I believe in bricks.” Was that a stone soup situation? Ultimately, he was absolutely right – over the years they were able to iterate on the plastic bricks until they worked, and LEGO is a brick company today.
I think that the bulk of our discourse is so preoccupied with the blurry line between “faith” and “fraud” – we tell the story of Theranos as a cautionary tale too often – that we forget that faith in your vision is the precursor to doing everything hard. There is a lot of truth to the old Henry Ford aphorism of “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” If you can’t believe it, it’s probably not going to happen. That part isn’t logical, it’s ideological.
Functioning reality distortion fields go beyond persuasion. They use the power of belief to change the real world. In LEGO’s case, they were able to use their belief to spend years iterating on the product to make the brick actually snap together. In the original Steve Jobs case, the engineers were able to get the Mac to boot up in under 10 seconds. You don’t just convince the villagers that you have a magic stone. You don’t just put the rock water on the fire. You must use it all to make delicious soup!
Yes, after you convince the villagers, you must actually deliver. This distinction is what makes one a genuine entrepreneur and the other little more than a common charlatan.