When I was in third grade, I took a statewide end-of-year exam.
There were ten kids in my class. A tiny school. The kind where everyone knows how everyone else is doing, academically and otherwise. Almost the entire class scored exceptionally well. But the biggest outlier was me.
I struggled in school. Badly. Reading didn’t come naturally. I had a learning disability that made everything feel slower and harder than it looked for everyone else. I was constantly self-conscious. Embarrassed. Being behind in school slowly turned into a quiet certainty that I just wasn’t very smart.
Then the test came back.
I scored off the charts.
I still remember the moment. Not because of praise or celebration, but because something internal shifted. For the first time, there was proof. Maybe the intelligence was there. Maybe it was just buried. Maybe it needed the right environment to show up.
That single data point rewired how I saw myself.
Two years later, my entire attitude toward school had changed. I raised my hand more. I tried harder. I stopped assuming I’d fail before I started. I wasn’t suddenly a straight-A student, but the internal story was different.
That same year, a secret about our third-grade teacher came to light.
It turned out she had been going back and adjusting her students' answers so they would score better. She wanted to look like a great teacher.
Which meant those test scores were likely heavily assisted. Possibly complete nonsense.
And it turns out, it didn’t matter.
By the time the truth surfaced, the belief had already done its work. The confidence was real. The trajectory had already shifted. Whatever happened on that exam, the outcome it created inside me was permanent.
That was my first exposure to how belief actually works.
Years later, I found myself on the other end of the spectrum.
My restaurant business was failing. I was staring down personal bankruptcy. I was depressed in the quiet, non-dramatic way that comes from sustained pressure and no clear way out. I wasn’t looking for inspiration. I was looking for something to hold onto.
That’s when I came across The Secret.
For context, The Secret is a popular book built around the idea that visualization and gratitude can shape outcomes. It’s often dismissed as hocus pocus. I dismissed it too.
My first reaction was exactly what you’d expect. This is some out-there, crazy stuff. But desperation changes your tolerance for trying things. I remember thinking, what do I have to lose?
So I tried it.
For six months, I practiced gratitude meditation. Not for things that had happened, but for things that hadn’t. I visualized outcomes that were nowhere near reality. I didn’t do it casually. I did it intensely. I tried to feel the emotions as if those outcomes had already occurred.
And something strange happened.
My body responded as if those futures were real. The same adrenaline. The same calm. The same certainty. Those outcomes stopped feeling like hopes and started feeling inevitable.
As inevitable as the sun coming up tomorrow.
Don’t get me wrong. Most of those things took longer than I expected. Some took years. And they took a huge amount of effort. But nearly everything I truly focused on and truly believed eventually happened.
At the time, I didn’t have language for what was happening. Looking back, it makes sense.
Everything humans create starts as a belief before it becomes an action. And belief, real belief, changes behavior long before results show up. It alters how risks feel. How setbacks register. How long are you willing to stay in the game.
If you’re certain something is going to happen, small setbacks, even big ones, don’t stop you. You just keep moving forward.
There’s research that helps explain this. Brain imaging studies show that vividly imagined actions activate many of the same neural pathways as physical execution. Visualization isn’t pretending. It’s rehearsal. Athletes have known this for decades. The best performers don’t just train their bodies. They train their expectations.
Belief primes behavior. Behavior compounds.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped apologizing for how certain I sound about things that are still far away.
I live my life on the border of what other people would call delusional.
When we raised money for Petfolk, I said in our first deck that the business would be worth $10 billion in ten years. Not to aggressively pitch investors or push valuation. But to define the journey I already saw as inevitable. If you were joining, you needed to understand where this was going.
That number hasn’t changed. The timeline might be three to five years aggressive. But the outcome hasn’t moved an inch in my mind.
Every morning on my walk to the train, I see us ringing the bell. I see the ticker. I see the market cap cross that number. It doesn’t feel like imagination. It feels like replaying something that’s already happened.
This is usually where skepticism shows up.
People hear belief and think denial. Or fantasy. Or motivational nonsense. That’s not what this is.
Belief isn’t ignoring reality. It’s choosing which future you’re willing to organize your behavior around before the evidence arrives. The alternative isn’t neutrality. It’s organizing around doubt. And doubt compounds just as efficiently.
The bigger the thing you’re trying to do, the more unreasonable certainty will look to people standing safely on the sidelines. History is full of examples that felt delusional right up until they didn’t.
Every impossible thing you see around you started the same way. Someone believed something long before it made sense to anyone else. Long before the math worked. Long before the world agreed.
That doesn’t mean belief guarantees success. It does mean disbelief almost guarantees mediocrity.
Sometimes I think back to that third-grade test. A score that might not have been real. A belief that absolutely was.
What if the most important part of that moment wasn’t intelligence at all, but permission.
Permission to try. Permission to expect more. Permission to stop assuming the ceiling was real.
If belief can do that, even when it’s built on something imperfect, imagine what it can do when you choose it deliberately.
I’m not suggesting you lie to yourself. Or ignore reality. Or start saying things you don’t yet understand how to achieve.
I am suggesting this:
Pick one thing you care deeply about. One outcome you’ve quietly labeled unrealistic. Try believing it fully before the evidence shows up. Not publicly. Not performatively. Just internally. Over and over, until it no longer feels like the future and starts to feel like the past.
This will take time, intention, and focus. It won’t happen overnight. But it will happen.
Then see what changes.
Belief doesn’t need to be accurate to be effective. It just needs to be held long enough to change how you move.
And once you see that, it’s hard to unsee.
Belief really is one hell of a drug.