Realistic 

Is the Most Expensive Word in Business

24 Oct 2026 · @Guinevere

The most sensible word in your vocabulary may be the one setting your prices, your plans and your weekends. It has never once been asked to show its workings.

There is a word that gets far more respect in business than it has ever earned.

It turns up in management meetings and pricing conversations. It appears in the notes app at eleven at night, when you are working out next year. Nobody challenges it, because it sounds like good judgement. Say it out loud and you instantly become the grown-up in the room.

The word is realistic.

“Let’s be realistic about the numbers.” “A realistic target for next year.” “Realistically, I can’t charge that.” “I’d love a proper holiday, but realistically, not this year.”

I spent the early part of my career in finance. I was a Head of Finance within British Aerospace at 27, and I’ve sat through plenty of forecasts that were basically last year’s numbers with a bit added on. 

That is enormously useful for planning cash flow. It’s a terrible way to decide what you’re allowed to want. And yet it is exactly how most founders, business owners and leaders decide what they are allowed to want.

What “realistic” really means

When someone calls a goal realistic, they don’t usually mean they’ve tested it. They mean it resembles what has already happened.

They look at their past and current revenue, their experience, their contacts, their peers and their industry. And then extrapolate that into the future.

Here’s the difficulty. Your past is information. It’s not a prediction.

I call this False Logic®: reasoning that feels sensible, sounds factual, and rests on an assumption nobody has ever checked. It’s not a label for every difficulty you face. Markets are real. Cash flow is real. Capacity and skills are real. But a large amount of what passes for commercial judgement is simply a conclusion drawn from the past and filed away inside our heads as a fact about the future.

“People in my industry won’t pay that.”

“I need a bigger audience before I can sell something serious.”

“If I want more money, I’ll have to work more hours.”

Each one sounds like experience talking. Each one deserves a second look, because each one is already making decisions on your behalf.

Why clever people are so good at this

This is the part nobody mentions. The more intelligent you are, the better your case for staying exactly where you are.

A clever founder doesn’t say, “I’m nervous about raising my prices.” She builds a spreadsheet. She references the competition, the economy, and a client who once queried an invoice in 2019. It’s a beautifully argued case. 

But a good argument does not prove the conclusion. It simply makes the conclusion very comfortable to live with.

I have watched brilliant people talk themselves out of their own futures with explanations that sound so real they’d bet their life on them. The intelligence is never the problem. What it has been asked to defend is.

Where it actually lands

False Logic® is not a philosophical problem. It’s a commercial one, because it always lands on a real decision.

The price you propose, and the discount you offer before anyone has asked for one. The person you never approach, because people at that level surely won’t take you seriously. The hire you keep postponing until you have “more evidence”. The target you trim every January so it looks sensible in front of the team. The holiday you move to next year, again.

Watch that last one closely. It may be the most expensive piece of False Logic® in business, because it doesn’t only cap revenue. It costs people their evenings, their weekends and their peace of mind.

Somewhere along the way, a great many successful people accepted a rule that more success means more sacrifice. They have plenty of evidence that it worked. What they don’t have is any evidence that it is the only way it could work.

“This is how I succeeded” is a fact. “Therefore this is how I must keep succeeding” is an assumption. Your experience proves the first sentence. It does not establish the second.

I know this one personally. In my corporate years, long hours were a status symbol, and leaving at five thirty was brave. When I built my own business, I made my first seven figures in revenue working mostly during school hours. I worked on my mind and questioned what I thought I ‘should’ do, including the assumption that earning substantially more meant working longer hours.

Beyond realistic is not unrealistic

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not suggesting you ignore the numbers. Please don’t ring your bank manager and explain that Guinevere said the overdraft was a state of mind. Ambition without commercial judgement is just a dream.

Beyond Realistic® asks a different question. Not “what does my past say is possible?” but “what would I choose if my current circumstances weren’t deciding the size of my ambition?”

Then the real work begins: finding the thinking that keeps recreating the same result, and changing the decisions it has been making for you. That part matters, because an inner shift that never shows up in a decision is just a pleasant afternoon.

When the destination changes, the questions change with it. A founder aiming for a sensible bump on last year asks how to squeeze a little more out of the current model. A founder aiming for something far larger asks entirely different questions. Who should I be talking to? What would I stop doing tomorrow? What would I charge if I priced from where I am going, rather than where I have been?

Same person. Same skills. Same market. Very different Monday morning.

A ten-minute audit for this weekend

Over coffee this weekend, think about one decision you keep putting off. What reason have you been giving yourself? And have you actually tested it?

You may have a sound reason to wait. But you may also discover that something you’ve been calling commercial judgement is an assumption you’ve never questioned.

After years of reviewing numbers, I’m accustomed to asking people to show their workings. The assumptions shaping your future deserve the same scrutiny

Your current circumstances provide information. They do not get to determine the destination.

Beyond Realistic®. Expect Extraordinary.

Guinevere Ellis is The Mind Director™ and founder of Beyond Realistic®.