Big Little Things“Having vision” is crap
[Insert cheesy stock photo of a banker with a telescope here]
A friend of mine from college made a comment not long ago that I haven’t been able to get off my mind. He said, “I can really tell the difference between our friends who have vision and those who don’t. And I’m pretty sure I’d be more successful if I had it too.”
I definitely agree that vision helps. What bugs me about his comment is that it frames vision as something you either have or you don’t. But vision is not a gift you’re born with nor an object you possess. It’s not an animal you pursue and catch. Vision is the pursuit itself: a constant questing, a constant questioning, a pursuit of answers that do not sit still. Vision is a practice.
The practice of being visionary is a matter of looking out as far as possible, setting your sights on a destination in the deep distance, and using that to inform your next small step. It ain’t easy to set your sights, especially when the landscape is dark or cloudy or hazy, but you do it as best you can, and you take a step in one direction or another. Along the way, your eyes change, and so does the landscape, and this prompts you to reset your sights on a new and presumably better destination. Then you take some more steps and get your bearings again.
Being visionary requires imagination (to dream of new worlds), wisdom (to choose between them), and faith (to persevere in a task that defies certainty and is designed to be “too big”). These are things that every human is born with. So it stands to reason that anyone can be visionary if they choose to practice.
As a practice, vision can be taught. Maybe not by me, but my friend wants help, so I’m gonna try.
The first thing is that you can never stop asking yourself big questions, because the big questions challenge your imagination and wisdom and faith all at once. They force you to look far far out, right into the vanishing point. And it doesn’t matter which big questions you ask—or whether they are abstract or concrete—so long as they are big as can be.
The second thing is that the answers to these questions will always change, just like you and everything else. But often the answer of the moment will help you answer a smaller, more immediate question.
Easier said than done, mind you.
Here are some questions I’ve been caught up with lately. Maybe they’ll help you:
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
If you could change or create one law, what would it be?
If you had 2 minutes to speak to the world population all at once, what would you say?
What would your ideal city be like?
March 2nd, 2007 at 6:24 pm
“Being visionary requires imagination (to dream of new worlds), wisdom (to choose between them), and faith (to persevere in a task that defies certainty and is designed to be “too big”). These are things that every human is born with. So it stands to reason that anyone can be visionary if they choose to practice.”
I notice that many people have one or two of these traits but not all of them. There are some people who are blessed with faith and will easily see most difficult tasks to completion. While others may think up one hundred good ideas a day. It seems, however, that these two traits come into conflict in people’s personality types. The dreamer rarely sticks with it long enough to see it through and the patient one is resistant to take the risk and go for it. I think because of this, learning to be visionary is very difficult.
I think the key to pursuing a vision for most people is through collaboration, finding another person who is strong where you are weak and vice-versa.
I also think that not all people are socialized to be visionary. Sometimes a person outside that socialization can expose the confines created by an individual’s experience (society.) That is why I think travel really helps people become more visionary.
March 3rd, 2007 at 12:29 am
Thanks abc, I think you bring up a bunch of good observations that point to a need for a *balance* of imagination, wisdom, and faith. I hadn’t considered that aspect before.