The dreamer was right

My manager chose her words carefully: “I feel you are disillusioned.”

I can’t remember the context. Just the setting: a routine performance review. But the sentiment rhymed with what I had been told throughout my school years, in one way or another. Sometimes it was literal: I was daydreaming. Later, it became metaphorical: I had my head in the clouds. Later still: I was too idealistic.

What struck me, much later, was the specific word she’d chosen. Disillusioned.

She spoke as though the problem was that I possessed illusions in the first place. As though the correct response to the world was to have them beaten out of you by a certain age, and I had somehow missed the appointment. She meant it as a diagnosis. I’ve come to think of it as a description, and actually not an unflattering one.

There is an assumption buried in that kind of feedback, so old it now passes as common sense. It goes something like this: reality is fixed, and the mature response to it is to lump it whole. To grow up is to narrow the gap between what you believe is possible and what the world has agreed to offer.

But history suggests that “realists” are often just people who have mistaken the current house rules for the laws of physics. They believe that because a game has been played a certain way for decades, the universe itself forbids any other way of moving. They forget that while rules are made to be followed, they also can be rewritten. Every limit the world has ever agreed on has eventually been proven wrong. Not occasionally, but with predictable frequency.

Consider a few examples:

* In 1876, Western Union’s internal memo dismissed the telephone as having no commercial value whatsoever.

* In 1899, a patent office clerk, surveying the landscape of human invention, reportedly recommended the office be closed. Everything that could be invented, he reasoned, already had been.

* In 1977, Ken Olsen, who built one of the most successful computer companies of his era, saw no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.

These were not stupid men. They were reading reality carefully, seriously, with the full weight of their experience. They were, by any reasonable measure, the realists in the room.

And yet they were monumentally wrong.

The ceiling keeps moving, and it moves precisely because someone refused to treat it as one. The realists of one era become the cautionary tales of the next. Which means the problem isn’t being idealistic: the problem is when you repress the idealism within you. It is a fundamental obstacle to progress.

Back to the time I mentioned at the outset.

Some time after my performance review, the company laid off half its staff. In the aftermath, I learned this was a known pattern within that specific company. It was a tool in their playbook that they had used before to artificially inflate the bottom line.

Nevertheless, my manager’s word stayed with me. Disillusioned.

She had meant it as a diagnosis of my character. But most of the people who lost their jobs that day didn’t arrive disillusioned. They left that way. It was manufactured, quickly and efficiently, by people at the top who are incentivized to be ruthless towards those at the bottom. I’ll go deeper on that subject another time.

But how was the dreamer right?

Not because everything worked out. The dreamer always has dreams, and those are what move the world. Dreamers are the inventors and creators who refuse to mistake the “playbook” for the physics of the possible. They see the status quo not as a permanent cage, but as a set of arbitrary rules that can be challenged.

They are the necessary antidote to the patent clerks of the world who remain convinced there is nothing left to discover. Fortunately, history is written by those who ignore that view. If we had all listened to the realists, we would have no internet, no global communication, and no way to heal what was once considered terminal. We would still be staring at the horizon wondering what’s on the other side.

Refusing to dream isn’t wisdom. It is more like surrender with better branding.