Wild fantasy → disciplined questioning → crystallising vision → action → new data → wilder (but now grounded) fantasy.
1. The 3 a.m. Click
A few nights ago I woke at three in the morning with the difference finally clear in my head. I had spent years treating my own daydreams like a guilty habit: pleasant for a moment, then immediately filed under “waste of time”. I would picture a sharper version of myself – calmer, wealthier, more useful to the world – enjoy the little rush, and then feel faintly stupid for bothering.
That night the thought arrived whole: the daydream itself was never the problem. What turned it poisonous was the absence of the second half. Fantasy without Vision is delusion. Fantasy with Vision, kept in constant contact, is the most powerful engine a person can run.
I lay there in the dark and felt the two pieces click together like the last bits of a puzzle I had been carrying around for decades. The relief was physical. Everything worthwhile I have ever finished – everything I built or shop I created, every relationship that lasted, every pound of weight lost and kept off – had used both fuels at once. Everything that quietly died had used only one.
This essay is simply the map of how the two halves work, why most of us keep them apart, and how to wire them together deliberately so the loop starts running on its own.
2. Fantasy – The Emotional Rocket Fuel
Fantasy is the vivid, private film of the life you want. You are in it, but better: more capable, more admired, more at ease. The camera lingers on the details – the office with the view, the calm way you handle a crisis, the quiet pride in your children’s eyes. It feels good because it is the brain’s way of tasting meaning before it arrives.
We are built for this. A human who cannot imagine a better tomorrow loses the will to move. Children do it without shame; adults learn to do it in secret. The trouble starts when we treat the film as the finished product. We replay the highlight reel, get the chemical reward, and then change nothing in the real world. The same neurons fire, the same warmth spreads, but the external world stays exactly where it was. Over years this becomes a silent addiction: cheap hits of identity with no lasting cost and no lasting gain.
I used to finish a fantasy session by telling myself it was “unrealistic”. That verdict felt disciplined at the time. In truth it was a defence mechanism: if I declared the film impossible, I never had to look at the price of admission.
The hidden truth is gentler. Even the wildest fantasy contains a legitimate desire. The mind is not lying to you; it is simply showing the destination without the road. The error is not in watching the film. The error is in walking away from the cinema and expecting the credits to roll in real life.
3. Vision – The Engineer’s Antidote
Vision is the road. It is the sequence of ordinary, often unglamorous steps that actually move you from where you are to where the film takes place. It answers the boring questions: What must I learn? Who must I become? What must I give up or endure?
Vision ruins the pretty picture at first. Where Fantasy shows the triumphant moment on stage, Vision shows the 400 nights in a bedroom learning to code, Carson’s disease-level caffeine addiction, the savings account that stays flat for three more years. It is unflattering and exact.
People who live only in Vision become highly efficient at things they secretly do not care about. They reach the top of a ladder and discover the view means nothing to them. I have watched friends execute flawless five-year plans for careers that left them hollow. The machinery worked perfectly; the heart had quietly left the building.
The discomfort of Vision is the point. It is the necessary friction that keeps the fantasy honest. Without it the fantasy drifts into pure indulgence. With it – and only with it – the fantasy begins to feel inevitable instead of childish.
4. Delusion vs. Ambition – Where Most People Break
Delusion is Fantasy that never meets Vision. It is the man who has been “about to launch” his app for eight years, the woman who knows exactly how her novel will end but has not written a new page since 2019. The film still plays, the reward still comes, but reality never moves. Over time the gap becomes painful, so the mind protects itself by lowering the volume on ambition altogether.
The second failure mode is rarer but just as deadly: perfect Vision with no Fantasy. These are the straight-A students turned highly paid consultants who tick every external box and wake up at thirty-five wondering why nothing feels like victory. They followed the map so faithfully that they forgot why they wanted the destination in the first place.
I have been both people, sometimes in the same month. In my twenties I could describe in detail the person I wanted to become – the persona, the tone, the quiet authority – yet the actual daily work count stayed near zero. Pure fantasy. In my thirties I built small businesses with crisp spreadsheets and ruthless execution, hit every revenue target, and felt nothing when the numbers turned black. Pure vision.
The difference between those periods and the years that actually moved the needle was never intelligence or willpower. It was the presence of both channels running at once, correcting each other in real time.
5. The Oscillation Loop – The Actual Superpower
The winners do not achieve a perfect fifty-fifty balance and then relax. They oscillate quickly and repeatedly between the two modes.
The loop looks like this:
- Fantasy (uncensored, 5–10 minutes of pure indulgence).
- Vision (immediate, brutal path questions).
- Reality check (smallest possible experiment shipped to the world).
- Emotional update (how did that feel? What new detail can now be added to the fantasy?).
- Repeat tomorrow, or next week, or next hour.
Speed matters more than perfection. A rough loop run daily beats a perfect plan run annually.
Let me give a concrete example from the tech world, stripped of names.
A founder wants to build a company that changes how people interact with artificial intelligence – something personal, almost intimate, rather than the current corporate megaphone tools. Fantasy version: millions of people waking up to an assistant that feels like it truly understands them, a quiet revolution in daily life, the founder as the quiet architect of that shift.
Without the loop that is pure daydream.
He starts the oscillation.
Vision questions: What is the smallest version I can ship to fifty people in four months that would still feel magical? What data do I already own that no one else has? Which open-source model can I stand on the shoulders of today?
Reality check: he builds a crude prototype in six weeks, gives it to twenty friends, watches how they actually talk to it. Half the fantasy turns out to be wrong; people do not want certain features he thought were essential. The emotional hit is sharp, but useful.
Updated fantasy: the film now contains quieter, more accurate scenes – not a dramatic overnight revolution but thousands of small daily moments of being understood. The picture is less cinematic and far more believable.
Updated vision: pivot the roadmap, cut two planned features, double down on one that surprised everyone.
Six months later the company is still tiny, but it is unmistakably moving. The founder no longer needs motivational speeches. The future is pulling him forward because he can now see the footpath.
That is the loop working.
6. How to Install the Loop in Your Own Head
You do not need extraordinary discipline. You need a repeatable ritual that forces the two halves to talk to each other.
Here is the version I use now.
Every Sunday evening I sit with a blank page and let the fantasy run for ten minutes without judgement. I describe the future self in first person, present tense, as vividly as possible. No editing, no realism filter.
Then I immediately flip the page and write the hardest questions:
- What is the single hardest thing this future depends on that I am avoiding?
- What is the smallest experiment I can run in the next seven days that will give me real data?
- Who do I need to become in twelve months that I am not today – and what is the first visible sign of that person?
I force myself to answer in concrete terms: dates, numbers, specific actions.
On Wednesday morning I do the experiment, however small. I ship, send the cold email, have the awkward conversation, run the test. Then I record what actually happened and how it felt.
Friday evening I revisit the original fantasy and rewrite it in light of the new evidence. Some parts get richer; some parts get deleted. The picture changes, but it always feels closer.
Tools that help:
- A running document titled “Fantasy – Current Version”. It lives on my desktop and gets updated every fortnight.
- A simple table: Experiment | Date | Result | Emotional tone | Next action.
- One trusted friend who is allowed to ask “What did you actually ship this week?” and nothing else.
Start small. The first loop might be about getting fit, or finishing a side project, or repairing a relationship. The muscle is the same whatever the scale.
Within a month the loop starts running without effort. You catch yourself drifting into fantasy on the train and immediately hear the follow-up questions in your own voice. That is the sign it has installed.
7. The Quiet Payoff
When the oscillation loop is running cleanly, something strange happens.
The fantasies stop feeling stupid. They start feeling inevitable.
You no longer need alarms, accountability buddies, or motivational playlists. The next step is simply the obvious thing that keeps the film and the footpath in alignment.
I still catch glimpses of futures so large they would have embarrassed me five years ago. The difference is that I no longer flinch. I open the document, ask the hard questions, and get to work.
The closer your two channels stay in tune, the less the world is able to keep your future away from you.
References & Further Reading
The essay is deliberately written without footnotes or academic apparatus, but the core distinction and the practical loop draw from a handful of sources that crystallise the same idea in different language. For anyone who wants to go deeper, these are the originals:
- Scott Adams – “Goals vs. Systems” (blog post, 2013) The single clearest popular articulation of the fantasy-vs-vision split before I re-derived it myself. https://www.scottadamsblog.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/
- Gabriele Oettingen – Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation (Princeton University Press, 2014) Introduces “mental contrasting” (fantasy → reality check) and WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan). The entire oscillation loop in Section 5 and the practical ritual in Section 6 are field versions of her laboratory protocol. Book page: https:// Rethinkpositive.com (or any bookseller); summary of the method: https://woopmylife.org
- Peter Gollwitzer & Paschal Sheeran – “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Effects and Processes” (Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006) The original research showing that moving immediately from fantasy to concrete “if-then” planning dramatically raises follow-through. Underpins the rapid switch from indulgence to brutal questions. Open-access PDF: https://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Seifert_Brandstaetter_Implementation_Intentions.pdf
- Eugene Gendlin – Focusing (Bantam Books, 1981 edition) Less direct, but the practice of letting a “felt sense” of the desired future emerge and then checking it against lived reality is the deeper bodily root of the loop. Official site & free excerpts: https://www.focusing.org
- Derek Sivers – “No direction is better than wrong direction” (blog post & commonplace observation) Short, brutal reminder that pure fantasy with no path is often worse than temporary aimlessness. https://sive.rs/nogoals
These five sources together contain 95 % of the underlying model. The rest came from living through the mistakes they describe.