Vision vs. Strategy

By December 3, 2016Uncategorized

Yesterday I wrote about vision (your why) and stressed the importance of identifying and following that vision throughout your entire process.  Monday’s post will be focused around how to identify your vision and boil it down into an elevator pitch and expand it around a mission, but before I dive into that I want to stress the difference between vision and strategy and explain why you need to have a grasp on both.

Vision is the belief that humans could one day master flight and fly through the air like birds. The strategy is building the first plane, or maybe even strapping some wings to your arms and jumping off a building.

Vision is colonizing Mars. Strategy is systematically eliminating all of the impediments that currently make that unrealistic.

Vision is losing 20 lbs. Strategy is the diet and exercise routine you write down and follow with extreme discipline until your vision is reality.

Vision is the end goal and strategy is the plan.

It’s crucial to seperate these things, because not every plan we make is going to work and sometimes the strategy needs to change, while keeping the vision in tact.

This type of adjustment is called a pivot, and very simply it is a change in the overall strategy without changing the vision. The first attempts at flight didn’t work (and some are even laughable now), but the goal to fly through the air like birds didn’t change, just the strategy to get there.

I’ll go more in depth on pivots and when to pivot in a future post, but for now just understanding that you need both and that your vision needs to remain solid through adversity is key.  That is not to say that your vision can’t change, it is just a much bigger deal and usually requires a complete overhaul instead of a minor shift.

Tomorrow I’ll write about my strategy and the steps I’d like to see completed in over the rest of the month and into the beginning of the new year.

In addition to day 3 of posting, I updated the theme today to a paid theme, which gives me much more control than the free one I was using before. A $39 theme called Salient. I began to tweak the settings, just a bit and the site already looks better. Each small step is building upon the work of the previous day and that consistency is culminating into something almost shareworthy.  And that’s only three days.  If you haven’t read it yet, go back and read my first post on the 31 day challenge and the power of consistency.

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