What Is Your Destination?
“The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision.”
-Theodore Hesburgh
There is a well known proverb that says, “Where there is no vision the people parish” (Proverbs 29:18) This is true.
Start on a trip without a destination and you will never know if you arrive, because you don’t know where you are going. There has to be a destination, some place that you are trying to get to. Wandering aimlessly will lead to aimless discoveries and locations.
Too often people live this way. They never chart a course, look at a map and much less never know if they are even heading in the right direction. They say they know where they want to go and what they want to do with their lives but they have no idea where they are headed.
Creators start at the end. They ask the vital question, “What do I want to create?”
Most of the time we go through life as if we have been given a car and told to drive down the freeway of life with no particular destination in mind. The signs let us know an exit is coming up soon, and we must make a choice, “Do I stay on the freeway or do I take the exit?” When we feel a need – hunger, pain, thirst, etc. – we turn off looking for relief. We make a choice. Once we are satisfied we usually get back on the freeway driving aimlessly in no particular direction.
Many of us stay on the freeway of life because it’s the easiest; society hands us a set of keys and tells us to go for a drive. We may not have anywhere special to go but parents and peers expect us to take our place on the freeway. So, we just keep driving until we have to make another choice out of need.
Creators start with their destination fully locking in their mind. It may be across the mountains where there are no roads. If that’s the case, they get rid of the car and get a mule or start walking. If it’s on the other side of a lake, they find a boat. The process becomes dependent upon the desired destination.
The destination is the creation. The true creator knows what they want to create and they set out to create it.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” -The Koran
In order to create you must have a destination, a vision of where you want to be when you finally get there. Even though great artists’ works sometimes look like they just threw the pain on the canvas, and many times that is just what they did.
World famous Jackson Pollock is a good example of this (Look Above). But the absolute truth is he never did it without calculations. It was purposeful and in a destination of his vision. He set out to make a painting look a certain way or represent a certain feeling or emotion, or elicit a purposeful response, or was designed to generate many different responses – but that was the vision in the very first place – not aimless wandering, or aimless splattering of color on a canvas.
If you don’t know what outcome you want, or even a slight idea, how can you possibly know what to do or how to do it to generate any outcome that would be valuable or important to you as the creator.
Creators create creations of value – remember that. Set your course and create!
