Secret A1 - Hold your vision accountable

“It’s not what a vision is,” says Robert Fritz “it’s what a vision does.”

What does your vision do? Does it give you energy? Does it make you smile? Does it get you up in the morning? When you’re tired, does it take you that extra mile? A vision should be judged by these criteria, the criteria of power and effectiveness. What does it do?

Robert Fritz is widely quoted in Peter Senge’s business masterpiece, The Fifth Discipline. Fritz is a former musician who has taken the basic principles of creativity in music composition and applied them to creating successful professional lives. Life gets good, he argues, when we get clear on what we want to create.

Most people spend most of their waking hours trying to make problems go away. This lifelong crusade to solve one’s problems is a negative and reactive existence. It sells us short and leaves us at the end of life (or at the end of the day) with, at best, the double -negative feeling of “fewer problems”!

“There is a profound difference between problem solving and creating,” Fritz points out in The Path of Least Resistance.
“Problem solving is taking action to have something go away—the problem. Creating is taking action to have something come into being—the creation. Most of us have been raised in a tradition of problem-solving and have little real exposure to the creative process.”

Step one in the creative process is having a vision of what you want to create. Without this vision, there is no way to create. Without this vision, you are only problem-eliminating, which is double negative. It’s impossible to feel positive about a life based on a double negative.

So the way to alter your thinking is to notice when you’re drifting into, “What do I want to get rid of?” and mentally replace that thinking with, “What do I want to bring into being?”

When Fritz says that we have been “raised in a tradition” of problem solving, he is almost understating it. We are programmed and wired to think that way everyday. Notice the thinking of people as they approach a challenge (even a challenge as small as an upcoming meeting with other people):

“Here’s what I hope doesn’t happen,” one will say. “Well, here’s how you can avoid that,” someone else will helpfully say. “The only problem we have is this,” a third person will say, attempting to make the meeting seem less frightening.

Notice that nowhere was there the question, “What would we like to bring into being as a result of this meeting?”

Whether the situation is as small as a meeting or as large as your whole life, the most useful question you can ask yourself is, “What do I want to bring into being?”

It’s a beautiful question, because it makes no reference to problems or obstacles. It implies pure creativity. It puts you back into positive side of life.
My friend Steve Hardison made an observation about self-motivation that I have always remembered and agreed with.

“It’s just one thought,” he said. “Motivational teachers repeat it in many different ways, but it’s just one thought: It’s a binary system. Are you on or are you off?

Are you positive or are you negative? Are you creating or are you reacting? Are you on or are you off? Are you life or are you death? Are you day or are you night? Are you in or are you out? “Is you is or is you ain’t?”

And there’s nothing more motivational to flip your binary switch to “on” than a clear vision of what it is that you really want. What do you want to bring into being? It doesn’t matter what that vision is or how often it changes. It only matters what that vision does.

If your vision isn’t getting you up in the morning, then make up another one. Keep at it until you develop a vision that’s so colorful and clear that it puts you in action just to think about it.