Personal Vision

PERSONAL VISION

Personal vision comes from within. Several years ago I was talking with a young woman about her vision for the planet. She said many lovely things about peace and harmony, about living in balance with nature. As beautiful as these ideas were, she spoke about them unemotionally, as if these were things that she should want. I asked her if there was anything else. After a pause, she said, “I want to live on a green planet,” and started to cry. As far as I know, she had never said this before. The words just leaped from her, almost with a will of their own. Yet, the image they conveyed clearly had deep meaning to her—perhaps even levels of meaning that she didn’t understand.

Most adults have little sense of real vision. We have goals and objectives, but these are not visions. When asked what they want, many adults will say what they want to get rid of. They’d like a better job—that is, they’d like to get rid of the boring job they have. They’d like to live in a better neighborhood, or not have to worry about crime, or about putting their kids through school. They’d like it if their mother-in-law returned to her own house, or if their back stopped hurting. Such litanies of “negative visions” are sadly commonplace, even among very successful people. They are the byproduct of a lifetime of fitting in, of coping, of problem solving. As a teenager in one of our programs once said, “We shouldn’t call them ‘grown ups’ we should call them ‘given ups.’”

A subtler form of diminished vision is “focusing on the means not the result.” Many senior executives, for example, choose “high market share” as part of their vision. But why? “Because I want our company to be profitable.” Now, you might think that high profits is an intrinsic result in and of itself, and indeed it is for some. But for surprisingly many other leaders, profits too are a means toward a still more important result. Why choose high annual profits? “Because I want us to remain an independent company, to keep from being taken over.” Why do you want that? “Because I want to keep our integrity and our capacity to be true to our purpose in starting the organization.” While all the goals mentioned are legitimate, the last—being true to our purpose—has the greatest intrinsic significance to these executives. All the rest are means to the end, means which might change in particular circumstances. The ability to focus on ultimate intrinsic desires, not only on secondary goals, is a cornerstone of personal mastery.

Real vision cannot be understood in isolation from the idea of purpose. By purpose, I mean an individual’s sense of why he or she is alive. No one could prove or disprove the statement that human beings have purpose. It would be fruitless even to engage in the debate. But as a working premise, the idea has great power. One implication is that happiness may be most directly a result of living consistently with your purpose. George Bernard Shaw expressed the idea pointedly when he said:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one … the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.8

This same principle has been expressed in some organizations as “genuine caring.” In places where people felt uncomfortable talking about personal purpose, they felt perfectly at ease talking about genuine caring. When people genuinely care, they are naturally committed. They are doing what they truly want to do. They are full of energy and enthusiasm. They persevere, even in the face of frustration and setbacks, because what they are doing is what they must do. It is their work.

Everyone has had experiences when work flows fluidly; when one feels in tune with a task and works with a true economy of means. Someone whose vision calls him to a foreign country, for example, may find himself learning a new language far more rapidly than he ever could before. You can often recognize your personal vision because it creates such moments; it is the goal pulling you forward that makes all the work worthwhile.

But vision is different from purpose. Purpose is similar to a direction, a general heading. Vision is a specific destination, a picture of a desired future. Purpose is abstract. Vision is concrete. Purpose is “advancing man’s capability to explore the heavens.” Vision is “a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.” Purpose is “being the best I can be,” “excellence.” Vision is breaking the four minute mile.

It can truly be said that nothing happens until there is vision. But it is equally true that a vision with no underlying sense of purpose, no calling, is just a good idea—all “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Conversely, purpose without vision has no sense of appropriate scale. “You and I may be tennis fans and enjoy talking about ground strokes, our backhands, the thrill of chasing down a corner shot, of hitting a winner. We may have a great conversation, but then we find out that I am gearing up to play at my local country club and you are preparing for Wimbledon. We share the same enthusiasm and love of the game, but at totally different scales of proficiency. Until we establish the scales we have in mind, we might think we are communicating when we’re not.”

Ultimately, vision is intrinsic not relative. It’s something you desire for its intrinsic value, not because of where it stands you relative to another. Relative visions may be appropriate in the interim, but they will rarely lead to greatness. Nor is there anything wrong with competition. Competition, which literally means “striving together” (from the Latin competere), is one of the best structures yet invented by humankind to allow each of us to bring out the best in each other. But after the competition is over, after the vision has (or has not) been achieved, it is your sense of purpose that draws you further, that compels you to set a new vision. This, again, is why personal mastery must be a discipline. It is a process of continually focusing and refocusing on what one truly wants, on one’s visions.

Vision is multifaceted. There are material facets of our visions, such as where we want to live and how much money we want to have in the bank. There are personal facets, such as health, freedom, and being true to ourselves. There are service facets, such as helping others or contributing to the state of knowledge in a field. All are part of what we truly want. Modern society tends to direct our attention to the material aspects, and simultaneously foster guilt for our material desires. Society places some emphasis on our personal desires—for example, it is almost a fetish in some circles to look trim and fit—and relatively little on our desires to serve. In fact, it is easy to feel naive or foolish by expressing a desire to make a contribution. Be that as it may, it is clear from working with thousands of people that personal visions span all these dimensions and more. It is also clear that it takes courage to hold visions that are not in the social mainstream.

But it is exactly that courage to take a stand for one’s vision that distinguishes people with high levels of personal mastery. Or, as the Japanese say of the master’s stand, “When there is no break, not even the thickness of a hair comes between a man’s vision and his action.”9

In some ways, clarifying vision is one of the easier aspects of personal mastery. A more difficult challenge, for many, comes in facing current reality.