The Visionless Generation
There’s a common misunderstanding that undermines our ability to improve results and draw out potential into performance. The mistake is made in thinking visioning is exclusively the domain of senior leaders.
Very few people have a personal and professional vision. The absence of a clear and precise image of the success you desire nullifies the very creative abilities that are central to all human achievement, hence the wisdom found in Proverbs “where there is no vision the people perish”.
This goes far deeper than most people know. If you can’t define in your own mind what success looks like for you, it will never materialize in your physical reality. The root cause of all anxiety, fear and worry is the absence of understanding who you really are and what it is that you truly want.
Just as it is with organizations, a clear vision provides clarity and momentum. Even some of the most senior leaders who are charged with creating a vision for the corporations they represent fail to create a personal vision that is linked to their professional objectives. The implication is a growing sense of dissatisfaction, a “selling out” in a career spent filling the bank account and emptying the soul.
Chasing financial reward alone to the detriment of all other aspects of success is a recipe for disaster. There can be nothing worse than reaching the end of your working life and observing decades of delivering in the pursuit of organizational growth targets, decades of life shaped by the objectives of others in the pursuit of being financially “comfortable”.
Think this through deeply. Beyond primary education we are not taught and raised to work with our imagination to create a vision of success for ourselves, so many of us end up in careers by default, ones that are often meaningless to us, pursuing promotions for no other reason than being seen to get up the ladder and the trimmings that go with it, all the while the sand is pouring through the sand timer…. the only thing we spend and cannot earn is slipping away. It’s the proverbial hamster on a wheel scenario, trading a life hoping to make it safely to just a few years of comfortable retirement and death.
If you are one of the visionless generation, ask yourself: What are the implications of continuing as you are? Without a personal vision of what you want to achieve in your life, where are you likely to be in 3, 5, 10 years time? What do you want to observe about this life when it is coming to an end?
It’s your life and your career, to live both outside of your own terms is a criminal waste of your potential. Where there is no vision, the people perish.
