Are You Hallucinating?

Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd president of the United States Of America, said “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Let’s think about that for a minute.

Many leaders have a great vision. They’ve laid out everything they want to accomplish. They know how it begins, how it goes, and how it ends. The vision sounds amazing.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

But, then the leader runs into a major issue. They fail to execute the vision.

Let’s Stop Hallucinating

I hallucinated for a long time about my book. I had the vision of what Reel Leadership could look like. I knew how the chapters would go. I could envision the movies I would use. I even began dreaming of cover designs and page layouts.

What didn’t I do? I failed to execute the vision I had for Reel Leadership.

This meant the book never got written. I held the vision close but didn’t execute.

This was my hallucination.

What are you hallucinating? What vision do you have that you haven’t executed?

Maybe you’ve dreamt of taking your organization from one million dollars to ten million dollars. Or you have the vision of multiple facilities. Your vision may be like mine, to write a book.

We cannot survive on vision alone. We have to execute our vision.

Let’s Execute

How do we execute our vision? How do we take our vision from our minds or pen and paper to reality? You can execute your vision by:

Keep the objectives limited:

We fail to execute our visions because we’re scared of how complicated they are. We can limit the complexity by keeping the objectives of the vision limited.

When you begin to execute, you have to make sure the things you want to accomplish are limited to what is important. You don’t want to have 100 objectives. Instead, limit the objectives you set out to accomplish to five or ten.

Establish what needs to happen:

Next, you need to establish what needs to happen. These are often action steps. Action steps are what you will do to complete the objectives you’ve laid out. Sometimes there will be two or three action steps. Other times, the action steps can be 20 or more steps.

Establishing what needs to happen to complete the objective will get you headed in the right direction.

Hand out roles:

You know what you want to happen, you know what needs to happen, now you need to find the people who will be able to help you execute the vision. Look for people who are willing to buy into the vision 100%. These people will stand behind you and champion the vision throughout the organization.

Give these people roles in helping. You will give them the objectives and power to complete them in the way they see fit. It’s scary giving them this kind of power but they will run with the ball and get things done.

Recalibrate:

Successfully executing a vision will take trial and error. What you laid out as the objectives or ways to execute the vision may change. You may notice something midway through that you didn’t expect. This hurdle then makes you decide to change the strategy of the vision.

Know that recalibrating is good. We do it with our tools, our lives, and even our minds. Recalibrating will make sure you’re on the right path and continuing in the right direction.

Are You Hallucinating?

Think about this today. Are you hallucinating? What do you need to do to kick yourself into gear to accomplish your vision? It’s time to stop hallucinating and start executing.