Vision

Have you ever noticed that the first step to building a house is to visualize what you want?  In some way, shape or form, you need to get some picture of the house you want to live in.  It’s always the first step to building a house.  It’s not the only step.  It’s not the last step.  It’s the first step.  A rough vision leads to a more detailed plan leads to blueprints leads to a whole host of other things that need to happen in reality.  I know this is obvious, but now think about how most of us react when asked to create a vision for our lives, to fantasize even about the type of life we want to lead and the type of world we want to live in.  When it comes to our lives, our deepest desires, our visions for what we want our lives to be are shrugged off as mere fantasy.  “C’mon, I don’t have time for dreaming.  You need to get yourself into reality, Giruzzi.”

Good idea.

So, in reality, the first thing you must do if you are to build anything in the future is craft a vision of it.  Again, it’s not the only step, but when it comes to our lives and the type of world we want to live in, creating a vision is looked at as some frivolous, almost irrelevant activity.  “There’s too many serious problems in the world to spend our time dreaming.”  Following that logic, if one wanted a new house, the excuse would be that we are too busy fixing up the old house to think about the new one.

With a house, a car, a chair; with things, we can distinguish the difference between fixing the old versus building or buying a new one.  It’s not that envisioning the new car you want to buy is some magical trick that you use, but it’s also not that envisioning the new car is some totally fantastic act showing you’ve had a complete break with reality.  I’m not suggesting the level of complexity of a life or the world is the same as a house or car.  I’m distinguishing the underlying mechanism that is at play whether we are talking about a house, a car OR a life and the world.

It’s natural to be cynical in a world where part of the predominant world view is that “Talk is cheap.”  It’s challenging to think about crafting a vision when the next step after the vision seems so monumental.  So yes, there are a few more things to understand so that our vision has real power to it.  It really is possible to create a vision so that action flows naturally from it; rather than being confronted by what’s next.  We’ll explore what these things are in upcoming posts.

For now, I challenge you to take some time, sit down with pen and paper, and think about what you really, really want either for your life, some aspect of your life, or for the world.  Heck, how about a vision for your life AND the world.  Your job is to write something that leaves you inspired to act.  Yes … inspired!!!  If you can get excited and inspired about a new car, a new tv, or a new house, it really is okay to get excited about your life and the world.