The Importance of Vision | brokeGIRLrich
Have you ever tried to write a vision statement? I mean, your own personal, life vision statement?
Maybe you work for a big company and were part of the team that developed the vision statement. Maybe you worked on a little startup that had a killer vision statement that you repeated all the time to get investors interested. Maybe you have your own blog and took some time to come up with a vision statement for it.
But have you ever applied it your life?
I mean, I just started a rough draft of one for work and the vision statement I suggested was “to present the best traditional, European style one-ring circus in America.”
It’s not a small sentence. I mean, it doesn’t have a lot of words, but aspiring to be the best anything in all of America isn’t a tiny goal.
I’ve been turning over my thoughts on our work vision statement for months. No one really seemed convinced we needed one but we kept hiring people that were frustrating the Chairman and other upper management because they were making aesthetic choices that seemed crazy to them. It really felt, to me, that we needed a clear vision to point them to – and when new hires deviated from it, we could point to it and say that doesn’t fit in the company vision.
brokeGIRLrich also has a vision statement. The dream here is to “improve financial education for millennials and people who work in the arts.” In retrospect, maybe I should dream bigger. I’d love for brokeGIRLrich to the the financial resource for people in the arts one day, but I did write that vision three years ago, so, like anything, developing your vision might have a learning curve.
The thing is though, you know who I’ve never made a vision statement for? Me.
I am the epitome of a human pong ball, just careening through life. And, when I think of my vision statement, money doesn’t really factor in. I mean, a rough shot at a vision statement for my life would be –
I literally just sat there and stared at the computer for five minutes. I got nothing.
It’s clear though that having a vision is incredibly useful.
In the Harvard Business Review, Tony Mayo said this about vision:
The ability to visualize and articulate a possible future state for an organization or company has always been a vital component of successful leadership. In fact, when initially describing someone as a “great business leader,” the knee-jerk reaction is often to cite something about his or her strategic ability or vision.
If it works in business, maybe it would work out well in our lives too?
While my overall vision for my life is still a little murky, if you break it down into subdivisions, my financial life is not murky at all.
My financial vision has been “to reach and maintain a financially stable position as early as possible.” It’s super easy to build out how from that sentence. It’s easy to look at a choice and go – does it help this goal or hurt it? Not everything actually hurts it. My vision is financial stability – not independence, not any other huge success that would be icing on the cake. If the goal is stability, some years I do have to say no to a lot, but some years I can yes a lot too, as long as I’m still maintaining the vision.
Clear vision has always been a large part of my success.
Another subdivision of my life has been my career. My career vision has been “to always be able to pay all of my bills as a stage manager.” That’s it. That’s always been the whole goal.
That goal kept me from getting distracted by the glitz of Broadway. It kept me from feeling like I needed to chase an Equity card and their ridiculous tiny wages anywhere off of Broadway. It kept me from taking (too many) jobs that wildly underpaid me – because it didn’t fit with the vision.
