Be Delusional: Bend Reality To Your Beliefs

About the Lecture

Join us for a lecture about believing something about yourself long before anyone else does:

Kanye West recorded an album with his jaw wired shut. Stallone turned down serious money rather than give up the lead role. What were they running on, years before the proof arrived?

The question is whether a certain amount of delusion is rational. Harinder Singh Pelia takes the obvious objection, survivorship bias, we only hear about the ones it worked out for, head-on, and makes the case that belief ahead of evidence is a reasonable bet when your downside is capped and your upside isn't.

From there the session moves into what the research actually says: the Pygmalion effect and the Israeli military studies behind it, Bandura on self-efficacy, Vroom's motivation equation. Then into the mechanics, how the confidence-competence loop turns a belief into a skill, and how streaks and the No Zero Days framework keep it running on ordinary days. Expect an interactive turn partway through, built around Maslow's "if not you, then who?", and one concrete assignment to take home.

The session explores:

Why belief tends to run years ahead of proof, and what that looks like up close
The survivorship-bias objection, and why capped-downside bets are worth making anyway
What the research says: the Pygmalion effect, self-efficacy, and Vroom's motivation equation
The confidence-competence loop, and the No Zero Days framework for daily execution
Bezos's regret-minimisation framework, and the "when-then" trap that keeps people waiting

About the Speaker

Harinder Singh Pelia is an author and entrepreneur who has led marketing teams at Amazon, Ajio Luxe and Diesel, among others. A LinkedIn Top Voice, TEDx speaker and PhD scholar at XLRI Jamshedpur, he is the founder of 10Xer Club and Talent Labs.

About unLecture

unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from college who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive — unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.