Hopium

There is a word I picked up recently that I cannot stop thinking about. Hopium.

It is hope and opium, fused into one ugly, accurate little word. It started on trading floors, where it describes a very specific kind of person: someone holding a position that has gone wrong, refusing to sell, waiting for the bounce that will prove they were right all along. The price keeps falling. They keep holding. Not because the fundamentals changed. Because admitting the fundamentals never supported the position in the first place is more painful than watching the number get smaller.

I read the definition and felt something uncomfortable, which is usually a sign that a word has found its target. Because I have held that position. More than once. I have been the trader who would not sell.

This is not a piece about staying positive. There are enough of those, and most of them are useless, because they treat optimism as a single thing you either have or don't, a tap you turn on with enough willpower and gratitude journaling. That is not what I want to write about. I want to write about the difference between two things that feel identical from the inside, conviction and hopium, and why that difference is one of the most expensive things a founder can fail to notice.

What hopium actually is

Hopium and its cousin copium showed up together in internet slang, and the distinction between them is worth keeping. Copium is what you take after the loss, the story you tell yourself about why it didn't really count. Hopium is what you take before the loss is final, the belief that lets you avoid finding out. Copium explains the past. Hopium delays the present.

What makes hopium dangerous is that it is not stupidity. Stupid decisions get corrected, because eventually someone points out the obvious and you see it. Hopium survives contact with the obvious. It has a built in defense for every piece of contrary evidence. The numbers are bad, but the next quarter will be different. The client went quiet, but they are probably just busy. The market hasn't caught up yet, but it will. Each explanation sounds reasonable on its own. Strung together over months, they form something closer to a religion than a strategy.

This is also why it sits so close to gambling and addiction, and why I think the trading floor origin of the word is the right one to keep in mind rather than the political meme version. A gambler at the table chasing a loss is not behaving randomly. They are running a very specific calculation, the one that says if I just stay in long enough, the thing that has not happened yet will happen, and it will retroactively justify everything I have already lost. The sunk cost stops being a cost and starts being a reason to continue. That is not a financial error. That is a psychological one, and it runs on the exact same machinery whether you are sitting at a blackjack table or sitting in front of a cap table that has stopped making sense.

The two startups, and the line I almost didn't see

I have built more than one company from nothing, and both times there came a point where I had to ask myself a question I did not want to ask. Is this still going to work, or have I just decided it has to?

The honest answer is that for a long stretch, I could not tell the difference. Early on, in the first company, doubt and conviction look almost identical from the inside. Both involve waking up at five in the morning thinking about the same problem. Both involve telling people things will work when you are not entirely sure. The founder who is right and the founder who is wrong say nearly the same sentences in nearly the same tone. This is the part nobody warns you about. It is not that hopium feels different from belief. It is that it feels exactly the same, which is precisely why it is so easy to keep drinking it.

What eventually separated the two, for me, was not a feeling. It was a behavior. When something I believed turned out to be wrong, what did I do next?

In the company that survived its hardest stretch, when the original plan stopped working, the plan changed. Not the ambition, the plan. We had built something for one purpose and reality made it clear that purpose was not going to pay the bills, so we found a different one that the same work could serve. That pivot did not feel like giving up. It felt like the opposite of giving up, because giving up would have been continuing to insist the original plan was about to work if we just held on a little longer.

In the other company, in a much harder stretch, I caught myself doing something different. I was not updating. I was defending. When a deal fell through, I had a reason ready before the email finished loading. When a metric stalled, I had an explanation that protected the underlying belief rather than testing it. I was, without ever using the word, smoking hopium. I was holding a losing position and calling it conviction, because conviction is a word with dignity in it, and admitting otherwise felt like admitting I had wasted years on something that was never going to work.

The thing that finally broke through was not a single dramatic moment. It was the accumulation of small ones, the slow recognition that I had stopped asking the position a real question. I was only asking it questions I already knew the answer to.

The actual test

So here is what I have come to use, and what I would offer anyone reading this who is in the middle of something hard and trying to figure out whether they are holding a real position or a losing one dressed up in confidence.

Conviction has a falsifiable line in the sand. Before the test, before the launch, before the deal, you said out loud, to someone else, what would have to happen for you to know you were wrong. Hopium never drew that line, or drew it somewhere so far away it could never actually be crossed.

Conviction updates. When new information arrives that contradicts the plan, the plan changes, even if the goal stays the same. Hopium absorbs contradiction and converts it into more reasons to wait.

Conviction can be argued with. You can sit across from someone whose judgment you respect, lay out the bear case against your own position, and either walk away more certain or walk away changed. Hopium cannot survive that conversation, which is exactly why people running on hopium tend to stop having it. They get quieter around the people who ask hard questions and louder around the people who only ever agree.

And there is one more tell I trust more than any of the others. Hopium needs an audience. It needs to be said out loud, posted, declared, because saying it convincingly is part of how it convinces you. Conviction does not need anyone else in the room. It was true before you announced it and would still be true if you never mentioned it again.

None of this means optimism is the problem. Every founder needs some irrational excess of belief, because the rational case for most ambitious things, looked at coldly at the very beginning, is usually not strong enough on its own to justify the years it will cost you. The skill is not getting rid of hope. The skill is knowing which parts of your hope are load-bearing and checking them, on a schedule, whether you feel like it or not.

What this is actually worth

Here is the part I actually want you to leave with.

Most people never learn to tell hopium and conviction apart, because most people are never forced to. They get one comfortable run where the easy read happens to be the right one, and they mistake that luck for a method. The method only gets built under pressure, when staying in a bad position and getting out of it both cost something real, and you have to find a way to choose correctly without the benefit of hindsight.

If you have been through that, even once, even badly, you came out the other side with something most people in any room you walk into do not have. Not certainty. Certainty was never on offer. What you have is a working instrument for telling the difference between the hope that is carrying you somewhere and the hope that is just keeping you company while you sink. That instrument gets more accurate every time you use it honestly, including the times it tells you something you do not want to hear.

That is not a small thing. That is the actual edge. Not optimism; everyone has access to optimism, it is free, and it is everywhere, and it is usually wrong. The edge is being one of the few people who can catch themselves mid-sentence, ask the question they would rather not ask, and answer it honestly even when the honest answer costs something.

You already know how to do this. You have done it before, in rooms with no one watching, when it would have been easier not to. That is worth more than another hit of hopium ever was.

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