How to Own Your Vision

Whether you are conscious or unconscious throughout your life, your life's decisions were leading to a vision. And today is a good opportunity to say, is this the vision? Is this what I wanted or did I not know what I wanted? Did I just go along the ride with everybody else and do what everyone else told me my whole life? Or did I architect this? Today's a good day to look at the vision you have for your life and ask, does it match what your reality is today? And if it doesn't? Now the fun part, the hard decisions, leadership. The delegate dance is always about the vision decision. It's about you or the leader or the group of leaders taking the mantle and that authority and accountability to say, okay, we've listened to all interested parties, we've done our best to understand what everybody needs and wants, but ultimately, this is the vision decision. This is where we are going to go together as a group. Someone's got to hold that space, take that mantle, lead that charge, repeat that vision over and over and over. Somebody or some group's got to own that. When you look at great movements that could have been, they didn't have someone or a particular group owning that vision decision. Because, right, you've heard also the phrase, too many cooks in the kitchen, too many voices, lacking aim or organization and alignment is ruined. So you've got to decide, okay, I have this movement, I have this idea, are you going to be the vision decision maker or among that group? Like in companies today, right? In the crazy times we're living economically, where there's so much funding of new startup companies, as an example, it's all about, okay, who's on this team? Who's the decision maker? What are they capable of and where do they want to go together? And if you believe in them and you want to, if you're investing in a company, you want to believe in that team or that board. And that's going to define so much of how you invest more than their metrics, because it's about that dream team who's making the decision. But ultimately, leadership is going to rest on one, two, three people. And that's why you have CEOs of organizations, right? That's why you have the big leaders of movements from throughout history. It always kind of fell on someone who had to make the tough calls. And that business decision shapes everything, you know, organizationally, economically. You think of, like when a Steve Jobs left or was forced out of Apple and came back in, the approach that he had to take a vision decision was, oh, you know, what we're doing all these things. I think we need to go over here and it might not be popular and there's other voices saying, support these things, but this is the track we're going to have to take and have to make those hard decisions. So it's always those things. Have open ears, make the hard decisions. The first principle, open ears, second principle, vision decision. You have to own the vision decision. You have to be open to it, you have to be adaptable with it. But, but you've gotta be the most committed person on the team in the organization, in the culture, in the family. You've gotta be the person who holds that thing together, who's entrusted with that. I always say leaders are really entrusted with service, they're entrusted with the vision. And as they're entrusted with that vision, they're also relied upon to make the hard decisions. What's some of the hardest decisions you ever made in your life? Like the hardest decisions you ever made in your life could be in any area. Your relationships, your finances, your career. What are some of the hardest decisions you've ever made? If you think about those hard decisions that you made, those hard decisions ultimately were made because you had a different vision at that moment. You didn't like where things were, you wanted to go in a different direction. And you bought into a vision of how things need to be different. Whether that was from depletion, you were just exhausted, tired, didn't like it. Whether it was from a place of just like, oh, I recognize all the problems here, or I know there's a better solution, or it was highly aspirational for your future, you bought into a different vision and you made a decision from that vision. Well, I share that with you because part of the principle here, a vision decision, is to be aware, oh, your whole team is making hard decisions based on the vision. You're going to have to make hard decisions based on the vision. So here's a tough question. What the heck is the vision? What is it that you are acting after? What is it that you collectively want to move towards, want to achieve? And it doesn't have to be some pie in the sky forever, you know, 100 year out vision. It might be a three month out vision, it might be a six month out vision. But if you're not crystal clear about that decision with your, that vision, with yourself, what will happen is as people support what they create, as you open those ears, as you have those other conversations, you'll be unmoored to the beliefs, the values and the direction that you want to go, you'll lose yourself in the noise. And this is the number one thing I see great leaders do to fail. They lost themselves in the noise. So much noise from the stakeholders, so much noise from the shareholders, so much noise in social media, the bad article written about them, the. The people trying to cancel culture, them. They lose their foundation of their vision of themselves and their future, and they start becoming a ghost, fully adaptable and flexible into everything else everybody else wants. And now what they really are is a vessel carrying everybody else and everything else. Without that command level internally of, oh, I am in charge of this. If you read the motivation manifesto, you get the ethos of this right? Every morning you gotta get up, you gotta pick up that spear of purpose. You gotta cast as far as you can see it today, throw that spear of purpose as far as you can today, as far as you can. And then your day is to go march towards that spear with so much commitment, so, so much discipline, so much resilience, that then you get that spear, you get to throw it out as far as you can. Again, that is having the vision, and that is having the discipline to go get it. The interesting thing is you have to take that outside of your head. You probably have a clearer vision for what's important to you. Then your wife does, then your partner does, then your friends do, then your family does. And so a huge part of the vision principle is you've got to communicate it more. You got to help everybody see what that vision ends up being, where they participated or they didn't, depending on your timing. And now it's like, oh, this is the thing we're rallying around. This is the spear. I'm going to throw it. We're going to go together. Okay, great, let's go. And that command of the vision is what I mean by the vision decision. It doesn't mean other people didn't participate, but you own it. You own it. A big part about it is your life's decisions. Whether you are conscious or unconscious throughout your life, your life's decisions were leading to a vision. And today is a good opportunity to say, is this the vision? Is this what I wanted or did I not know what I wanted? Did I just go along the ride with everybody else and do what everyone else told me my whole life, or did I architect this? Was I thoughtful about what the decision was, what I was after? Today's a good day to look at the vision you have for your life and ask, does it match what your reality is today? And if it doesn't. Now, the fun part, the hard decisions, all of personal development, the good part about it is about the difficult decisions. I really believe that. It's about the difficult decisions and it's about the disciplined habits that keep us growing, extending and reaching new levels of our potential. That's why I love it. That's why I love personal development. That's why I love it so much. Doesn't matter how much I'm working, how tired I am, where I've been in the world, how much travel, how much work. Doesn't matter what's going on with my family, my life, my finances, whatever. I love personal development because it commands so much from you. It says, oh, you want to grow? Look at where you are, young man. Look at where you are, young lady. Decide. Is that the vision you have for your life? No. Then make the hard decisions. Practice those discipline habits to go where you want to go. I love that stuff. Today's a good day to evaluate the vision you have for your life. Overlay that to how your life really is, and then make the difficult decisions to start more disciplined, moving towards that vision that you want. It's the stuff of accountability that lies within this principle. So when I talk about the vision decision, it's you own it, you're responsible for it, you've got to communicate it, and you got to be real about whether that vision is mapping to today. And if it's not, you got to initiate the decisions or the discussions with others to make the decisions. And you've got to discipline the habits to move towards that vision. You got to own it. That's the hardest party.