🧠 The Art Of Delusional Thinking

I’m delusional.

It’s my greatest strength —and my biggest weakness.

Perhaps you can relate?

Let me explain…I’m a multipotentialite.

Like you, I’m talented in multiple creative and/or academic areas.

And like you, I can connect the dots between multi-disciplined concepts to innovate new ideas.

When I had a much younger face, I discovered, developed and managed a multiplatinum pop band, and a handful of the biggest DJs in the world at the time.

Collectively they had dozens of hit records and we toured the world up to arena level. 

The chances of all this happening are a tiny fraction of 1%.

👉 I had no connections.

👉 I was shit at networking.

👉 I had social anxiety and undiagnosed neurodivergence. 

👉 I was self-medicating heavily to cope with the pressure and my emotional dysregulation. 

✅ But I was delusional.

I took ridiculous long shots that should never worked.

After all the major record labels in the UK passed on one of my unsigned bands, I sent unsolicited CDs to the managing directors of every major label.

Managing directors of Sony, Warners, Universal etc don’t listen to CD demos sent in the post from unknown sources.

Everyone in the music industry knows that.

But Nick Raphael, the managing director of Epic Records at Sony had a court case for a driving offence postponed last minute.

He had an hour to kill and picked 3 demos from one of the dozens of boxes overflowing with hundreds of CDs each.

My demo was the third one he listened to. 

He signed the band.

They had #1 singles, albums, Brit nominations, sold millions of albums and sold our arena tours in the UK.

Nearly all of my Hail Marys missed the mark. 

But now and then, one of them landed. 

In the past, my creative confidence has been extremely fragile —brittle even.

When this happens my delusional thinking inverts and works against me. 

Negative delusional thinking is more commonly known as catastrophising. 

We all know what that feels like, right?

When I fuck up, I fuck up so spectacularly it’s hard to explain the depth the levels of my fuck up—ery!

It’s car crash.

Multipotentialites are people of extremes.

I fuck up when I listen to my delusional negative thinking. 

Let’s go back to 6th April 2022.

I am shitting myself. 

I have just posted not only my first TikTok video but my first-ever social media post.

I am terrified. 

I have had a deep fear of rejection since I was a kid. 

I have re-recorded the video multiple times.

I fucking hate it.

It’s cringe as fuck. 

Here it is.

@jakecreativehackersOur strengths are in our weaknesses #introverts #creators #introverted

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Everything about this video is inauthentic.

It’s all forced.

My casual demeanour. The emotional piano track. 

Even the zip on my top. I filmed several different versions, with the zip right up and slightly down etc. 

But that’s normal for our first attempts.

I still can’t watch it to this day.

There are two ways to look at this video 👀

1) The natural way is to feel the cringe and imagine people I know watching and laughing at me 🫣

This is what had stopped me from posting on social media for years.

Or

2) I focus on the courage it took me to post a video knowing that it was cringe 💪

This is positive delusional thinking 👆

I had two options available to me:

Option 1) Do I care more about what other people think of me?

Or…

Option 2) Do I care more about what I think of myself?

I went for option 2.

Like you, I live in my head rent-free. I am my own worst critic. 

And like you, there is nothing anyone could think or say about me that I wouldn’t say to myself but a hundred times worse. 

Therefore, I should care more about what I think about myself instead of what others think of me.

This is how to leverage delusional positive thinking to gain peace of mind. 👆

In other words, it’s a decision between

Internal validation

Vs 

External validation

Or…

to put it yet another way,

Is it more important for me to be authentic to myself?

 Or

Is it more important to be a people pleaser and conform to other’s expectations of me?

I went for authenticity.

This was when I transcended my perfectionist archetype into the authentic creator archetype.

I have built a fairly significant audience now. Most creators at this level go back and delete their first videos.

I haven’t.

I fucking hate the videos. 

But I reframe this.

I’m proud of myself for not only having the courage to post my cringe videos but also for not deleting them.

This is a subtle but essential reframe for my peace of mind.

I have exchanged my inner critic for my inner coach.

I’m a black-and-white thinker.

You are too.

I have been full-time in creativity and solopreneurship for 34 years. 

This is the simple lesson I have learned. 

My delusional thinking — whether positive or negative —becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In sports, they say world-class athletes’ success is 70-90% mental.

“Tennis is 70% mental” — Serena Williams

This is also true in creativity. 

Talent is important but it’s not the most talented that succeed.

The top 1% go towards their fears and insecurities.

The other 99% avoid their fears and insecurities.

You can influence your delusional thinking to go towards your fears and insecurities by reframing your delusional thinking.

For example, my views and engagement on TikTok have dropped 80-90% in the last week.

My first reaction was fear and panic. This was delusional negative thinking. 

I started spiralling, so I did a pattern interrupt with a sports psychology technique called thought stopping.

I then reframe the situation into positive delusional thinking. 

As my views are down I can experiment with new styles of videos. 

I have wanted to do it for a while but I was fearful of trying.

When you’re getting loads of views and engagement you don’t experiment because if it’s not broken….

I will work it out. 

And so will you if you learn to channel your delusional thinking positively.

When you fall into catastrophising spirals do this:

Thought stopping:

Image a hand 🤚 in your mind, and shout “stop!” to yourself.

This is a common pattern interrupt technique used by Rodger Federer, Djokovic and many others.

Reframe the problem into an opportunity.

Keep repeating this and your mind will believe it. 

This is the basics of CBT, sports, and high-performance psychology.

✅ Thoughts create your Emotions

✅ Your Emotions create your Actions.

Be more positively delusional. This will allow you to tap into your inner coach instead of your inner critic.

It will help creatively perform higher.

Stop conforming to other’s expectations of you. It’s holding you back.

Transcend from the perfectionist archetype into the authentic creator archetype.

Be more authentic. Create more purpose and meaning in your work.

You will see a significant difference over time.

Pinky promise

Hope this helps

✌️

Michael Meinhart