Visionary Imbalance

Vision is the ability to see ahead multiple steps down the line of whatever you are working on.  It’s the ability to predict–with clear instinct–how your little steps, right now, will engage and formulate the bigger picture of success.

Vision can be deceiving, because it’s easy to build levels artificially.  It’s an easy–sometimes too easy–way to feel productive.  It’s deceiving because it’s a simplified way to trick yourself into believing that you’ve made substantial progress on anything, when the only progress you’ve made is in your own mind and ego.

I think of it as two vertical bars:

The first bar is the real progress–where you are, what you have, what you’re working on and what you’ve actually completed in present time.  The second bar is the subjective vision–where you want to be, what you want to have and how it will blend together multiple steps down the line.

The second bar–the vision–typically gets inflated.  This is natural, because having a vision of where you see your project is a vital aspect of progress.  But, the problem incurs with hyperinflation–when the second bar tips and pulls away from your true progress.

Hyperinflation occurs because at a certain point, people praising your ideas will just be marginal.  Your press and media attention will be meaningless.  The redundant chats with “experts” will be diminishing.  The scary thing is, we often don’t realize it because of our own bias.

It’ll feel so productive and real, but none of it means anything without focusing on your first bar of reality.  And it’s dangerous, because you’ll get to a point where you’ve done so much marketing, so much communication and so much building up your personal future vision, that the real progress will become secondary.

Vision is important, but the goal should be to balance it with reality.

The visionary imbalance can cause an ego to get out of hand and narcissistic tendencies to be counter productive.  But most of all, it’s a common cause of failure.  You’ll find yourself in a position of half-attempts to fill other people’s vision expectations for you, when you’ve failed to show anything actual for yourself.

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