Word.ws English Dictionary

reality distortion field

reality distortion field noun: the persuasive ability of a leader or entrepreneur, especially in misleading or convincing others in order to promote a product or service.

reality distortion field: the persuasive ability of a leader or entrepreneur, especially in misleading or convincing others...
Image: Aljawad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

reality distortion field (plural reality distortion fields)

  1. (idiomatic) The persuasive ability of a leader or entrepreneur, especially in misleading or convincing others in order to promote a product or service.
    • I fell silent under her stony glare. I tried to keep going, but I couldn't. Blight had the opposite of a reality distortion field. A reality assertion field.2007, Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, Thunder's Mouth Press, →ISBN
    • Small lies are essential. They create your reality distortion field. They are a necessary part of being an entrepreneur. But if you start believing your own hype, you won't survive.2013, Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz, Lean Analytics, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 3
  2. (literally) An environment which alters one's perception of reality.
    • At present we sometimes experience what can be interpreted as a "reality distortion field" built upon arguments that have been developed by the innovators and early adopters within the sustainability movement.2012, Mats Larsson, The Business of Global Energy Transformation, Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN
    • If you're on social media at all, and follow many news sources, you're bombarded with stories of other people's successes […] This generates a "Reality Distortion Field" in which everyone else appears to experience 95% success and 5% struggle.2019, Aaron Ross, Jason Lemkin, From Impossible to Inevitable, Wiley, →ISBN, page 222

Examples of reality distortion field in a sentence

  • Jobs used his famous reality distortion field to bend the news media and investors and everyone else to his will.2018 August 16, Kara Swisher, “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech”, in New York Times:
  • If your work takes you regularly into the world's boardrooms and C-suites, it really is hard to miss the reality distortion fields such places generate.2020, John Elkington, Green Swans, Greenleaf Book Group Press, →ISBN:
  • The most accurate way to describe our mind is as a reality distortion field.2021, Michael Sahota, Audree Tara, Leading Beyond Change, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, →ISBN, page 54:

Forms of reality distortion field

pluralreality distortion fields

Origin of reality distortion field

In the idiomatic sense, coined by software developer Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs' charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Mac project: "Steve has a reality distortion field. […] In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything." The term was borrowed from the 1966 Star Trek episode "The Menagerie", in which the humanoid Talosians are able to create lifelike illusions using such fields.

Questions about reality distortion field

What does reality distortion field mean?
Reality distortion field means the persuasive ability of a leader or entrepreneur, especially in misleading or convincing others in order to promote a product or service.
How do you use reality distortion field in a sentence?
Jobs used his famous reality distortion field to bend the news media and investors and everyone else to his will.
What part of speech is reality distortion field?
Reality distortion field is a noun.
What is the plural of reality distortion field?
The plural of reality distortion field is reality distortion fields.

Words near reality distortion field in the dictionary

  1. reality bender
  2. reality benders
  3. reality challenged
  4. reality check
  5. reality checks
  6. reality distortion field
  7. reality distortion fields
  8. reality gap
  9. reality mining
  10. reality pornography
  11. reality principle

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reality distortion field (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-reality distortion field.wav.

Cite this entry: “reality distortion field.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/reality_distortion_field. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.