“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
~Abraham Lincoln
When you’re walking along the beach, early in the morning, everything past the waves on the beach is invisible. You know there’s an ocean out there, but due to the fog bank, you can’t see it. Just like you know there’s a future out there, but you can’t see it.
This is where so many visions fail. The people involved can’t see past the fog bank, so they avoid anything about the future, missing the people on the small fishing boat and the ocean liner carrying passengers to far away places. There’s a critical shortage of the Christopher Columbuses, John Glenns and Elon Musks who saw a future and made it happen.
Some of this is a simple vision block, we tell ourselves we don’t have a vision and so concentrate on the tactics that wind up taking us nowhere. But some of it is also because we’re so tactically oriented that we don’t take the time to dream. We think we have to be in a state of constant busyness – and you know what they say about a body in motion staying in motion.
Finally, there are those who think that planning gets in the way of a grander scheme to which we’re only a part of. There’s an almost Biblical ban on strategy because it could get in God’s way. I could be wrong, but I subscribe to what a famous dreamer, Galileo once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, intellect and reason intended for us to forgo their use.”
The perfect way to predict the future is to create it. There’s a wonderfully simplistic, strategic sense to that, Abe.
