Stop Being Realistic
“Be realistic” is the most common advice given to anyone with a vision, and it’s usually wrong.
Neverland, Wonderland, Dreamland — none of them were ever meant to be realistic. They exist so imagination has somewhere to go. When you’re setting direction, vision, goals, aims — the destination is supposed to be a place realism can’t yet reach. That’s not a flaw in the exercise. That’s the exercise.
Call it Utopia. Not because it’s a fantasy, but because it’s a standard set above the current one. And here’s the part leaders keep getting backwards: living in Utopia — holding the standard, refusing to shrink it down to what’s currently achievable — usually works better than being realistic ever does.
The pattern, if you look for it
Look at where genuine breakthroughs come from. Not incremental ones — the ones that move a boundary.
In 1900, powered human flight was not a “stretch goal.” It was physically absurd to most serious scientific opinion of the day. The Wright brothers didn’t get a more realistic target and hit it. They held the unrealistic one until the physics caught up with them.
In 1961, Kennedy didn’t ask NASA for a realistic five-year roadmap. He committed the country to landing on the moon within a decade, with no working technology to do it. Realistic engineers told him it couldn’t be done on that timeline. He didn’t move the deadline to match their realism. He moved the realism to match the deadline.
Jonas Salk worked on a polio vaccine when the dominant scientific view held that a killed-virus vaccine couldn’t produce durable immunity. He wasn’t chasing the realistic outcome that the field had already agreed on. He was chasing the one it hadn’t ruled possible yet.
None of these people were dreaming instead of working. That’s the part that gets lost when “visionary” becomes a compliment for people with vague enthusiasm. Each of them worked with total discipline. What they refused to do was let the current definition of “realistic” set the ceiling on the target.
What this means for you as a leader
Every one of these people pushed the boundary of realism closer to their own Utopia. That’s the actual mechanism. You don’t wait for reality to become permissive before you set the aim. You set the aim, and then you go to work narrowing the gap.
Most leaders do the opposite. They let realism set the target, and then they call the target “vision.” A goal built entirely from what’s currently achievable isn’t a vision — it’s an extrapolation. It will never demand anything from you or your organisation that the status quo wasn’t already going to produce.
This is worth sitting with if you’re the one setting direction for other people. The standard you hold in your head becomes the ceiling everyone underneath you is quietly building toward. Set it at “realistic,” and realistic is what you’ll get — on schedule, in budget, and short of anything that was worth doing.
So, keep dreaming. Seriously. Not as a mood, and not as a slogan on a wall — as the standard you refuse to lower when the room tells you it’s unrealistic. Then work towards it relentlessly, because the dreaming was never the hard part.
