being realistic is a disguise
Friday, May 15, 2026
Today:
- the quiet way "being realistic" sometimes kills the thing you actually want before you have even tried it.
- a sculptor who walked away from a stable career at 38, and what he said when people called it irresponsible.
- Perplexity, one question that cuts through noise in under two minutes.
- write down the thing you have been calling unrealistic, and sit with it for ten minutes before tonight.
I was on the phone with a friend on Wednesday night and she said something that has been stuck in my head since. She had been offered a chance to go freelance, full-time, doing the thing she has wanted to do for three years. She said no. I asked why. She said: "I'm just being realistic."
I didn't push back in the moment. But I kept thinking about it after I hung up. Because I have said the exact same thing. More times than I want to admit.
Your perception^
What is the one thing you have been calling "unrealistic" that you have not actually sat down and stress-tested with real numbers, real timelines, or a real conversation with someone who has done it?
There is a version of being realistic that is genuinely useful. It keeps you from betting the house on a coin flip. It keeps you grounded when everyone around you is high on their own idea.
But there is another version of it. The one that arrives before you have gathered any real information. The one that shows up the moment something feels a little too close to what you actually want. That version is not realism. It is fear with better posture.
It sounds responsible. It sounds mature. Nobody calls you out on it because it sounds so sensible. "I'm just being realistic." And maybe you are. Or maybe you reached for that phrase because it ends the conversation in a way that "I'm scared" does not.
The distinction matters. Real realism asks: what would it actually take? Fake realism asks nothing. It just closes the door and leaves you standing in the hallway pretending you never wanted to go in.
I have been on both sides of this. The times I was genuinely realistic saved me from some genuinely bad ideas. The times I was fake-realistic, I look back on those with a particular kind of regret. Not loud regret. The quiet kind. The kind that shows up at 11pm on a random Thursday.
"The most regretted things in life are the things people did not do, not the things they did."
Daniel Kahneman
Your acceleration^
There is a sculptor named Constantin Brancusi who grew up in rural Romania in the late 1800s, the son of farmers, who walked on foot from Craiova to Paris in 1903. Literally walked, most of it, roughly 1,200 miles, because he could not afford the train. He arrived with almost nothing.
He was offered a position as an assistant in the studio of Auguste Rodin, who was at the time the most famous sculptor in the world. Most young artists would have treated that as the answer to every prayer. Brancusi left after two months.
He said: "Nothing grows in the shadow of great trees."
He went on to make work that nobody had seen before. Smooth, stripped-back forms that looked almost nothing like the ornate figurative sculpture that dominated the era. When US customs officials saw his piece "Bird in Space" arriving from Paris in 1926, they refused to believe it was art. They classified it as a metal kitchen utensil and tried to charge import duties. He fought them in court for two years.
Brancusi won. But here is the thing I keep coming back to: at every single point in that story, the "realistic" move was to stay with Rodin, compromise the work, accept the customs ruling, stop fighting. And at every point he chose the other thing.
Not recklessly. He understood exactly what he was doing and what it would cost. He just decided the cost was worth it.
What would it cost you to stop hiding behind realistic?
Your move^
Try this today: open Perplexity (perplexity.ai, free, no account needed) and type in the thing you have been calling unrealistic. Not "is this a good idea" but something specific: "What does it actually cost to start X" or "What do people who do Y for a living typically earn in year one." Get real information. Take five minutes. You are not committing to anything. You are just replacing the fog with something you can actually look at. Most fears shrink the moment you shine a light on the specifics.
Your destination^
Tonight, before you do anything else, write down the one thing you have been labeling "unrealistic" and then write one sentence underneath it: what you would need to know, or have, or try, to find out whether that label is actually true. Just one sentence. You do not have to act on it. Just write it down and let it exist somewhere outside your head.
Is "being realistic" protecting you from a bad outcome, or protecting you from finding out that the thing you want might actually be possible?
Floyd
P.S. My friend is still thinking about it. I hope she calls back with a different answer.