Creator Dan Koe has published a new essay, "You need to be delusional if you want to succeed," making a blunt case: if someone wants results that go beyond what most people achieve, the goal itself cannot stay comfortably "reasonable."
He writes that when goals come from parents, school, social expectations, or the friends a person is around most often, that person can end up treating "the life other people see as reasonable" as their own finish line.
Why "reasonable" goals may keep people where they are
Koe says most people begin goal-setting with a narrow question: "What can I realistically do?" Then they trim the target a bit more so they do not sound exaggerated or unrealistic. What they end up with is a goal that still fits their current abilities, current resources, and existing way of living.
That is exactly where the problem starts. If a goal can be achieved with today's skills, habits, and work patterns, then there is no real need to change. The person only needs to do more of what they are already doing. Koe calls this "linear thinking."
He gives a simple example. If someone's goal is only to land a decent-paying job, their attention will naturally lock onto education, resumes, promotions, and job openings. Even if they later encounter an entrepreneurial opportunity that could completely change their income source, the brain may classify it as irrelevant information.
Change the goal, and the filter changes too. If the target becomes "build a content business that generates $100,000 in monthly revenue within six months," attention moves elsewhere. Posting consistently, waiting for the algorithm, and slowly building an audience may suddenly look too inefficient. The person starts thinking about products, distribution, partnerships, leverage, business models, and how to borrow other people's audiences.
Koe's point is not that the person has suddenly become smarter. The target has changed how that person sees the world.
A goal is not only an endpoint
Koe argues that one of the most important human abilities is to simulate the future and decide what to do now based on that imagined future. In that sense, the real function of a goal is not only to hit a number at the end. It also creates an attention filter.
Set a different target, and the information, opportunities, and problems a person notices will also differ.
To explain the idea, Koe points to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the well-known "Reality Distortion Field." Jobs often presented teams with product requirements or launch timelines that looked impossible, sometimes announcing them as if the decision had already been made: "We're launching in January, and the product has to do these things."
Engineers may initially see that as impossible. But once the team accepts that future as the working premise, the line of thinking can shift from "Why can't this be done?" to "What would we have to do?"
That, Koe says, is where the value of a "delusional" goal sits. It does not require people to ignore reality. It forces them to stop projecting the future only from present conditions.
Ambitious goals push people into unfamiliar territory
In Koe's view, a truly effective big goal should carry two traits at the same time: the result looks impossible, and the timeline looks unreasonably short.
If a person's current income and current skills make it nearly impossible to reach a target within a year using the way they already work, that pressure is what pushes them to look for a different method. If the goal can still be reached by adding more hours, then it is still a linear goal.
The strongest goals, he says, make a person recognize one thing clearly: using my current way of operating, I absolutely cannot do this.
That recognition can push someone to learn new skills, enter new circles, redesign a business model, and even remove many things they once thought were necessary. Koe also says that a difficult, unfamiliar, and challenging environment is more likely to trigger learning and behavioral change. When curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery appear together, a person may enter a highly focused, almost obsessive state.
Koe's three-step method
Koe breaks the process of building this kind of "Reality Distortion Field" into three steps.
Step one: choose a goal your current self cannot achieve
The first step is to choose a target that is big enough.
If someone does not know what they really want, Koe suggests starting with the most painful issue in life right now, especially one that affects other problems as well. For many people, that may be finances. For others, health.
- Instead of "start working out," the example becomes "enter a physique competition in six months."
- Instead of "increase income," the example becomes "reach the first month with $100,000 in revenue."
Then comes the question: can the current version of me do this with my current methods? If the answer is "yes, but it would be hard," then the target may still not be big enough.
Koe says a goal with transformative force should exceed a person's present skills, habits, and assumptions. Just as important, it should be singular and self-chosen. If someone is trying to build a business, get promoted, grow a social account, get fit, travel, and study for certifications at the same time, the competing demands on attention make it difficult to form a clear decision framework.
Step two: define what not to do
Once an extreme goal is in place, the next step is not to pile on more tasks. It is to remove things.
Koe argues that most people do not mainly suffer from a lack of effort. They are doing too many things that do not serve the core goal. He says people should recheck their work, projects, clients, habits, social life, routines, and everyday obligations.
The next question is simple: does this actually move me closer to the target? If the answer is no, it needs to be considered for removal. In his example, the move is not "go to fewer weekend gatherings." It is to stop altogether. Once standards rise, he says, life can actually become simpler because there are fewer options left.
Step three: find the highest-leverage path
After the goal is clear and low-value activity has been removed, the remaining question is what has the biggest effect on the outcome.
Koe uses his own first attempt to reach $100,000 in monthly revenue as an example. At the time, he had about 1,000 followers, and as a freelancer he had previously earned less than $100,000 in an entire year.
If he had simply kept posting every day and slowly grown the audience, he says the goal was unlikely to be reached in the short term. So he started looking for "force multipliers" — leverage.
First, he could no longer treat posts themselves as the product. He needed to build something that people could actually pay for, while social content became the distribution channel. Second, 1,000 followers did not provide enough distribution, so he needed to borrow someone else's audience. One route was to build partnerships with creators who had 50,000 followers and trade value for broader exposure.
Koe's conclusion is that the goal itself does not hand over the answer directly. But when the old method clearly cannot get the result, the search for a new answer begins.