You know, I was thinking about something that sounds insane until you see it from the other side.
Every founder biography says the same thing. Steve Jobs believed he could build a computer company before he knew how to run one. Walt Disney believed he could build an amusement park when everyone around him, including his brother, thought he’d lost his mind. Rudolf Steiner (the Waldorf education guy) believed he could reinvent how children learn before he had a single school.
The pattern is always the same. Irrational belief first. Competence second.
This drives rational people crazy. I know because I’m a semi-rational person and it drove me crazy for years. How do you believe you can do something you’ve never done? That’s not confidence. That’s delusion.
Except.
Except it keeps working. Over and over, across industries and centuries, the people who build extraordinary things start with a conviction that has no business existing yet. The proof comes later. The skills come later. The “how” comes later. The belief comes first, and somehow the belief is what creates the conditions for everything else to follow.
I listen to the Founders podcast obsessively (if you haven’t listened, go fix that), and David Senra has read 300+ biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs. The through-line is not intelligence, resources, or timing. It’s this irrational belief. The willingness to be completely wrong about your own abilities and to act on that wrongness anyway.
When I started Heritage Films, I had a camera, a loose idea, and the unearned conviction that people would pay me real money to make documentary films about their families. I didn’t have a business plan. I didn’t have a client list. I had a belief that this should exist and that I was the person to build it.
Was that rational? Absolutely not. Did it work? I’m sitting here writing this, so yeah, I guess it did.
The trick is that belief doesn’t replace ability. It precedes it. You believe first, and then you do the work to become the person who deserves the belief. Jobs learned how to run a company by running one badly. Disney learned to manage a theme park by building one and nearly going bankrupt. The belief gives you permission to start. The work makes you worthy of continuing.
If you’re waiting to feel ready before you start something, you’ll wait forever. Every person I admire started before they were ready. Every single one.
Belief comes before ability. It has to. Otherwise nobody would ever begin.
Heritage Films produces personal documentary films across the United States. Every great family story starts with someone deciding it’s worth telling.