Michael Dell walked into his University of Texas dorm at 19 with $1,000 and decided to compete with IBM, then the world's most valuable company. The speaker argues this kind of delusional confidence is what entrepreneurs need to attempt impossible things.
Michael Dell has this great line in his autobiography where at the time he's 19 years old, he's in his dorm room at the University of Texas. He's got $1,000 and he's like, I'm going to compete with IBM. That is delusional. IBM at the time is the most valuable company in the world. It was the first company— I didn't even know, I had to go back and research this— the first company to get to $100 billion market cap in history was IBM. And you have this kid that's like, I'm going to compete head to head with them. And the next line when he's talking about this is Was I a little full of myself at 19? Sure I was. I think you have to be to do anything special. So I always had this like deep delusional self-confidence and like default optimism that like, I focus on something, I will figure it out. I will figure out how to do this.
