The bridge of success

Delivered August 25, 2025 @ 11:00am ET

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Table of Contents

• The Bridge of Success (and the Dialogue That Build …

My name is Gerry Hays, Founder & CEO of Doriot® (pronounced “Doe-ree-oh”), named after French-born American U.S. General Georges Doriot, the father of Venture Capital.

I’m also an author (First Time Founders’s Equity Bible), inventor (U.S. patents for ads on t-shirts, coat checking, and VentureStaking® - pending), and 21-year professor of venture capital and entrepreneurial finance at Indiana University.

Democratize Venture is my platform to explore the venture markets and share the insights, strategies, and frameworks I bring into the classroom. It’s where practical advice meets mindset meets execution—for anyone ready to play the startup game.

The Bridge of Success (and the Dialogue That Builds It)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about alignment — how outcomes accelerate when your vision and actions are in sync. Today I want to take that further. Because even when you’re aligned, there’s still the craziness (and the messiness) of closing the gap between the vision in your head and its actual manifestation in the world.

Neville Goddard, a mystic of the mid-20th century, taught that imagination is the true starting point of creation. Before anything can exist in the real world, it has to exist vividly in your mind. And not just as a passing thought — you must emotionally invest in it, believe in it, to the point that it feels inevitable.

From there, you begin to walk, talk, and act as though it already exists. That’s what Goddard called faith. The actions to take along the way? That’s worship.

And then one day — maybe after years of obscurity — the world suddenly sees your “overnight success.” Goddard called the sequence of events that got you there the Bridge of Incidence: the unpredictable chain of moments, connections, and opportunities that could never have been mapped out from the beginning, but in hindsight make perfect sense. This can also be referred to as the Bridge of Success.

So the real question for founders isn’t “How can I work harder?” The real question is:

👉 “How do I close the gap between my vision of the future and that future reality as quickly as possible?”

The answer is twofold: prepare your company and prepare your mind.

And this is where we stub our toes — not on the external bridge, but on the internal one.

Because what happens in between those events that make up the Bridge of Success is something we rarely talk about: inner dialogue.

It’s comfortable to default to negative scripts about ourselves.

• “I’m so stupid.”

• “I’m not good enough.”

• “I don’t get the breaks.”

None of these are facts. They’re stories — conceptions of ourselves that we may hear and then repeat until they sound true. And every time we repeat them, we pinch off progress.

The alternative is simple, but not easy: observe your inner dialogue with the same attention you’d give to a business model or investor pitch, or a job interview.

Ask yourself:

• Is what I’m saying to myself nourishing or depleting?

• Does it encourage me, or does it diminish me?

If it’s nourishing, keep it going. If it’s not, you have to flip the script. See yourself now as the very person you want to be in the future. Speak to yourself as if it’s already true.

That shift doesn’t just change how you feel — it changes how you act. And action is what places you squarely on the bridge that leads to your so-called “overnight success.”

The world won’t believe in you until you believe in you. And that belief begins not with investors, customers, or co-founders — but with the words you whisper to yourself every single day.

The Bridge of Success is built on the outside by circumstances you can’t predict. But the courage to walk it is built inside your own head.

When the two align, the future doesn’t just happen. It arrives.

Wishing you a focused and fulfilling weekend,