I am really beginning to appreciate the small things. All of my life, I have tried to study people who have accomplished great feats, especially in the context of group effort. From my point of view, it always seemed like they bit off more than they could chew, yet somehow, they’re able to impose their unrelenting will onto big visions. They force their vision into being. It is very impressive, and I hope to have that power one day.
In my own experiences up to this point in my life, the closest thing I have found to having that ability is two-fold: 1) Don’t accept limiting beliefs, especially that others try to impose on your reality or vision; and 2) In a consistent, discipline manner, apply effort over time. Thinking of what you can accomplish in a year’s worth of work is really hard to become motivated to achieve. But it is easy to understand when you think about it as accomplishing 1 hour worth of work everyday. If you can make yourself do that, you will get to 365 hours worth of work. You can accomplish a lot in 365 hours.
The little things really do matter. The little things always add up to a big thing. But that knowledge comes with a warning: The little things can add up to a bunch of useless bullshit. If you’re going to focus on the small things, you better make sure the direction that you’re headed is toward the things that really matter. It’s crazy how unimportant so many things are when you put them against the bigger scale. In the moment, they’ll seem extremely important, but when you are doing a month in review or a quarter in review, then in hindsight, those little things didn’t matter. In fact, a lot of times, if you would not have done them at all, it wouldn’t have mattered. This is one of the most valuable lessons that experience grants when you’re managing systems. There are always those attaching themselves to your systems, hungry for the energy your system has. Sometimes, feeding energy into those things causes it to just dissipate into nothing that is helpful for your crew or your ship. You have to make sure the only things that you are feeding on your ship are beneficial to the crew and ship.
By the way, it’s the same thing with your mind. Sometimes, negative thoughts try to take our mental energy. If you feed them, you’ll go down a path of misery, suffering, shame, guilt, self-doubt, and self-deception. You must starve these thoughts and only allow productive thoughts to eat.
Healthy ships have good diets. If you maintain a continuous fitness level, then there are times to break the plateau and push upward. There are times to cast a bigger vision, to stretch the muscles of the ship and crew, and to force a new vision into reality. If you make that stretch with a ship behind you, then it’s not on one person to sustain the energy. This is simply one path.
There is another path. A really strong person can use their personal strength to cause a ship to jump to new plateaus. They do this by essentially forcing people and their environment to change; to force people to come along with them. A lot of times they do this by overwhelming people’s resistance. People do not want to experience conflict, but the powerful person is not afraid of conflict. They’ll use the strength of the “rightness” of their vision to overcome, downplay, or dismiss your objections. Frequently, they’ll view your objections as small-minded limiting beliefs. They’ll adopt a, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way” mentality and refuse to accept people who try to be hurdles. I’m going to call this person the Visionary.
It’s tough when you are the hurdle because people are generally the hurdle with good intentions. A person who is raising objections to someone else’s energy generally has their own mindset or perception of the world that is. That mindset is in conflict with the new vision. Sometimes, that mindset is simply a resistance to change. In change, there is insecurity; in homeostasis, there is the comfort of security. Sometimes, the mindset is based in religious beliefs. Sometimes, the mindset is simply from a different set of life experiences, leading to different values or conclusions of how the world works, that are in conflict. Whatever the reason, the person wouldn’t stick to that perception of the world unless they are also convinced of the “rightness” of that perception. When their initial perception is in conflict with the new vision, then that is what causes them to be a hurdle.
Perception of the world is always subjective, and there is not a “right” perception. Instead, perception should be thought of like this: The world is comprised of “what can be” and “what can’t be”. However, these things are not equal! The key distinction here is that nearly anything can be if the right forces are applied. It’s only limiting beliefs that make us think that something can’t be. Instead of limiting beliefs, a Visionary believes that something that isn’t yet can still be if we would simply find the way to make it so. All the Visionary is doing is finding a path to the mountain’s peak. They can see the peak, but there is a jungle in the way. They say, “Come on. Follow me. There may be huge snakes and rodents of unusual size in this jungle, but we will find a way through it to the mountain peak, to beauty.” Sometimes, people are cajoled into following this person through the jungle. They still are in disagreement; they don’t think that this is a wise plan. It goes against their beliefs and perceptions of the world, but they’re willing to suspend their own thinking. “Maybe this person is right.” If someone has a lot of faith in their plan, faith is contagious. A person becomes willing to suspend their doubt and to follow the leader simply based on the leader’s faith. If the leader ends up being right – that there was a way through the jungle – then the followers doubts are no longer sustainable. The follower has experienced for themselves an internal conflict: I thought that this wasn’t possible, but yet here we are; therefore, it must be possible. I must change my beliefs. This is personal growth.
Further, once a group has experienced this type of personal growth, the group will “lock in” to this new reality. Because reality is just the shared (collective) beliefs of a group, because the group all now has that belief through experience (the whole group made it to the mountain top), now the whole group shares the vision of the leader. The leader’s vision has become reality because it is the shared belief of the group.
Once something is reality, it doesn’t just fall back down if the energy stops. Sure, it may degrade in performance, but absent some overwhelming negative power, it takes time for reality to morph into despair and darkness again. In other words, like a rubber band, once it is stretched out, it can go limp, but it’ll never be the same again. Visionaries can push the rubber band, force their vision into reality, and once they’ve done that, that new reality locks into place. The crew can’t deny that it was possible anymore; the evidence was in front of their face. They’ve experienced it. We humans do tend to forget our potential pretty quickly though. It takes discipline to sustain it.
I have been using the term Visionary, and I think now that I have developed the thought further through this writing, we can define that term better. Visionary people are people who (1) do not limit their thinking; (2) they have caught hold of a vision on a visceral level of what the world could be, even if they have have trouble explaining that vision intellectually (this could also be called faith in their vision, since faith is “strength of conviction of belief”); (3) they advocate for and influence others towards coming along with them on the journey; (4) they are honest about their progress, and they make course corrections as needed; and (5) they do not stop until the vision is achieved, the mountain peak is ascended, the hill is taken.
Edit: From talking to Visionary people, one other thing that they have added is (4) Make course corrections as needed. In other words, don’t get lost in the jungle. If the path wasn’t clear, if the mountain peak that you think you saw was hidden behind fog, don’t have blind faith that there is a mountain peak there. It’s a very fine line between forcing what could be into existence and knowing what is not worth forcing into existence. Likewise, you have to be realistic with yourself about whether or not you are making it to the mountain. If you aren’t making forward progress or your progress is too slow, sometimes you have to be willing to admit to yourself: “Something needs to change.” And if you start from there, you may be able to break a paradigm, consider new resources, or find something different to do that will increase the probability of making it up the mountain.
Edit 2: I had (4) as maintaining positive, optimistic energy, but this isn’t actually a universal to a visionary. A visionary is unrelenting, and they generally aren’t negative, but they can be, and they can still cajole people along the path. If anything, they face the truth.