Why Painted Pictures Fail (And How to Build a Vivid Vision)

I'm going to tell you why I changed the term or the wording for something that I'm very well known for and the reason for doing it. So years ago, before you heard of the term Vivid Vision, I wrote a book called Double Double. In fact, way before I even wrote my book Double Double, which was back in 2010, I was being paid to stand on stages all over the world, being paid to speak at events for entrepreneurs all over the world. And one of the core concepts that I used to talk about was called the painted picture, which is now what I call the vivid vision. The reason I changed the term from painted picture to vivid vision is painted picture was confusing. Vivid vision is the 3 or 4 page description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like 3 years in the future. Okay, so it's that 4 page description of what your company looks like in the future. It's describing sales and marketing and operations and IT and engineering, customer service. Describing paragraphs of every single aspect of your company, almost as if you were walking around the business and describing what it felt like, what it looked like. You're not quite sure how it comes true, but you can definitely describe the feeling and the energy and everything that your business looks like in the future. That's the Vivid Vision document. When people were talking about the term painted picture, they thought it was like a vision board, right? That concept that John Assaraf popularized in the movie The Secret. Where he talked about cutting out a bunch of pictures and putting up on the wall. Well, a picture says a thousand words, right? If I showed you a picture of this room, you might see this fancy light behind me, but what I was really wanting to illustrate was a podcast room, but all you saw was the light. So for me, the picture means something very different. But if what I described was a podcast room in Byron Bay, Australia, where I was able to go in and film some videos, you would understand that it had nothing to do with the light behind me. It just had to do with a private room where I could actually do some video filming. Go check out the Second Command Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. We've interviewed over 450 of the top COOs on the planet. The vivid vision is that description. The painted picture got confusing. So that's why I changed it. I'm very well known for the term painted picture. I'm very, very well known now for the term vivid vision. So if you hear people talking about the painted picture, yes, that's where it came from. I learned the concept of the Painted Picture back in 1998. I was at an entrepreneur's organization lunch in Vancouver, Canada. There was about 120 entrepreneurs were invited to this lunch and about 20 of us showed up. Brian, who was there from 1/8 Under Got Junk, it was actually called the Rubbish Boys back in that day, he showed up. Another guy, Dan, who was in my forum group showed up and we all learned the concept of the Painted Picture that day from this Olympic coach. Dan went back to his company. Brian went back to his company. I went back to the barter company that I was president of, and we all wrote descriptions of what our company looked like. We all wrote our initial Vivid Vision documents. Brian called his the Painted Picture. So that was the term that we started to call it in the early days. But that's where we learned it. It wasn't Brian's idea. It wasn't my idea. It wasn't Dan's idea. It was an idea we got from this Olympic coach of how to document what the vision of our company looked like in the future. And then how to recreate that and get our teams to figure out how to make that come true. So that's why the term changed from painted picture to vivid vision. And that's the document that you're using to align your company, your suppliers, and your employees today.