Articulating Your Vision

I am writing a book on networking and the importance of making and building connections for collaborations pursuing your big vision.

One of the key issues here is the piece around the big vision. If you have a vision that you can articulate you will stand out in a crowd and become attractive to those you talk to. Without it, you are quickly forgotten.

To paraphrase Brian Tracy:

Today I want to explain the importance and utility of this big vision. Then I want to test my contentions against a real-world scenario. - The recent US elections.

What is a vision?

A vision is a future state that you want to bring into existence.

This future state can be detailed and specific, or it could be vague. Churchill’s future vision during the war was to avoid being subjugated by the Nazis. It wasn’t too specific but it was powerful.

There are two main parts of a vision. The vision itself, and the articulation of it.

It's important to get them both right. Neither works without the other. You can articulate well, but with a wishy-washy vision, it's not going to work. And if you have a great vision but can't articulate it, that'll probably inspire and empower you, but it won't lead to collaboration and enrollment of others. So, you need to do both.

A powerful vision statement stands out because most people don't have one. If you don't have a powerful vision for where you want to go and what you want to do, you will naturally find someone who has and adopt their vision. This is a fundamental part of the human condition.

If you doubt this, consider the visions that people follow as their own. We see this in religion, politics, and activism. Even super fans of bands or sports clubs have adopted the vision of that entity as their own. Activists and some businesses have this kind of vision, and when it happens, it stands out.

The vision you subscribe to must be authentic and something that fires you up. It has to make you feel empowered just by pursuing it. You can't give lip service to a vision. Finding that vision takes introspection and self-reflection.

The role of a vision

Your big vision is a compass that puts you in the right direction for all your actions. Are your actions supporting the vision or not? This is the fundamental level of a vision, but there's more to it than that.

A big vision is a vehicle that you can get people to climb on board. A well-articulated vision will gather others who will support you and offer skills or resources that you don't have to make that vision a reality.

This is what we're looking for in the networking environment.

If you have a sense of your vision and can articulate it, you immediately stand out from the crowd. It's a point of differentiation and can attract people who are looking for a purpose in their lives.

A vision can be a grand purpose or a smaller one, such as a project. When creating a project, particularly one where others are required to help, it's important to define the vision for that project and how it fits with your overall vision.

A great example of this is in the film industry. No great film was ever made without the vision of a producer, director or writer who shared their vision with others in order to attract the resources (funding), talent, (both performance and technical), and ultimately the audience.

But once that film is out the vision is satisfied and there will be a new vision for the next project.

However, it is worth noting that these project visions will usually fit within a wider vision that the person has for their career as a whole.

How do you articulate your vision?

Going back to fundamentals and the Pitching Pyramid, the first phase is clarity. You must be very clear on what your vision is, why it is important, who it impacts, and what your level of commitment is to the vision.

But let’s say you have gained clarity.

To articulate the vision, you need to focus on the future impact and the change it will bring to the present or past state of being. The envisioned future state must represent a significant and meaningful change.

Articulating any vision is a right-brained exercise. It is emotional rather than logical. If we go back to the Pitching Pyramid, we see the next stage is the Audience and in this context, we are talking about knowing who our audience for this vision is. How are they feeling now? What are their concerns? Where do they want to be?

This ties into the next stage of the Pitching Pyramid, the Audience Journey. This is the core of articulating your vision. You need to repeatedly contrast the present undesirable state with the ideal future state into which you want to enrol your audience.

It is important to keep this right brained. Emotional, creative, and imaginative. You don't want to go into detail about how to achieve the vision at this stage, as that belongs in the planning phase after the audience is enrolled.

Some of us feel the need to get into the planning side as we are left-brain dominant, and it helps those people if you can address these things. But don’t dwell on this or go too deep into the details lest those discussions derail the articulation of your vision.

Organise separate discussions on the details and policies. Share those with people who are already enrolled or inclined to be enrolled if the details make sense to them.

In the networking environment, this means you would not talk about details at the event, instead, you tell them you would love to get together to discuss the details. If they are willing to invest the time to do that then they are enrolled or inclined to be enrolled.

The US elections

I've been looking into articulating your vision in some detail and wanted to validate it against things in the real world. I thought I'd look at the recent US elections.

The US presidential elections may give us insight into what it means to express a vision. It was a surprise to many, including myself, that Trump swept this election. So how did he do it? What was his message? What was his vision?

It could be said that there wasn't a coherent vision. In fact, that's what most of us thought throughout the election process. But I think there was. One way of summing up his vision was "The enemy of your enemy is your friend".

Trump did a lot of moaning and whining, commented on by many people, including late-night show hosts. I found it annoying, but there was more to it than I gave him credit for.

Effectively, he was creating a vision of grievance.

"These people have been doing me wrong. They've been doing you wrong. They've been doing me wrong, so I will fight. I will fight for you. We're in this together. They're taking me down. They're going to take you down. Together we will fight."

That was the vision. Let's face it, he didn't say much else. There was no detail on how this might happen or what policies would be in there.

But there was this consistent drumbeat of "They don't play fair. They're doing us dirty, doing me dirty. They'll do you dirty. I'm going to fight. Are you going to fight? Are you coming with me?"

That was his whole message. I wouldn't say it was a great message, but that's the message he used and it's the message that won the election for him.

Battle of the visions

But these things aren't in a vacuum. It's not just one side. What was Kamala's message?
Kamala's message was "We're not going back."

Effectively, it was an anti-Trump message.

Now she did try and broaden that out and do some other things, but she didn't paint a picture around those other things. She threw out some policies and she tried, but she didn't quite put a coherent or consistent message about what she could do to help others.

Trump’s future state was "They’re coming for me. They're going to come for you. They’re coming for me. They're going to come for you". And that is all he said over and over again.

Kamala’s message was effective: "We won't go back. No Trump. Never Trump."

The problem here is that her message is falling into Donald Trump's message. She's reinforcing his message.

Because if Donald Trump's spoken about your grievance and you feel that. You truly feel the grievance, you feel the problem. And then somebody effectively says, "Donald Trump's a terrible guy and he's a threat to us all and we're going to destroy him."

Your reaction might be “He was telling the truth! They are out to get him. And if he was telling the truth about that, then maybe he was telling the truth when he said I was next!”

This worked for Trump because he engaged the emotion first. If he hadn’t managed to emotionally connect that message in the first place then that reaction wouldn’t have occurred, but I believe he managed to engage that emotion and have it continuously reinforced by his surrogates so that when Kamala made her pitch it bounced straight back at her.

So what would I recommend?

What do I think would work in its stead?

I am not a politician, but using what I know, I think the Democratic Party in the States (and liberal democracies around the world) need to create a different platform on which they're running.

They can't run on "never Trump" because that's far too limited. Trump may not even be involved in the future. He may not survive this term. He's an old guy not in great health, so who knows? I personally would not be surprised if, once he's got his legal affairs all tied up, he resigns and lets J.D. Vance take over. But regardless of what happens, the Democrats need a different focus.

I think the platform should be that of fighting inequality.

Make inequality the enemy.

Inequality is something that, if you frame it correctly, if you articulate it correctly, it resonates with almost everybody. And you can bring both wealthy people in on a platform of inequality, as well as the working class.

Explaining what inequality is, and more importantly, going deep on how inequality feels, what it feels like now and what it will feel like in the future, what the billionaires are doing, how they think about people ‘below’ them.

Focus on the oligarchs that are now a real part of the American government.

The inequality of being able to give away a million dollars a day for 150 days to buy an election, because you know that if your company stocks improve by 0.1 percent, then that $150 million investment will bring in almost a billion dollars of profit to you.

That's the face of inequality.

If you can articulate that well, and articulate it at a visceral level, at a feeling level, so that you talk about how these people use workers. How these wealthy plutocrats, oligarchs, don't consider you human. They consider you a tool. You are a capital asset.

That's why minimum wage is not something they feel they should have to deal with, because you are their asset. You're not a human being. You're an asset. Why should we give you paid sick leave? You're an asset.

If you can paint that picture well enough, run on that, and articulate it across enough platforms, in enough different ways, not all political, but all sorts of different podcasts, channels and social media accounts. Then I believe the Democrats can come back from this.

Anyway, that's my hot take on how this factors into the American presidential election.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Snippets is a section where I comment on interesting text I encountered in the previous week.

Below is a piece from Professor Galloway’s newsletter this week. You can read his full newsletter here.

New forms of media periodically reshape our culture and politics. FDR mastered radio, JFK leveraged TV, and Reagan nailed cable news. Obama energized young voters via the internet. Trump hijacked the world’s attention on Twitter. This year it was podcasting. The three biggest media events of this fall were the debate and Harris and Trump’s respective appearances on Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience.

Almost half of adult Americans, 136 million people, listen to at least one podcast a month. The global audience is now 505 million, a quarter of the internet’s reach. When Trump went on Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and This Past Weekend w/Theo Von, he was embracing the manosphere and riding a tectonic shift in media: The most efficient way to reach the largest and most persuadable audience (i.e., young men) is via podcast. Nothing comes close.

Reach and Focus

Rogan has 16 million Spotify subscribers and can reach many more people across a variety of other platforms: In just three days after the live podcast, his three-hour-long conversation with Trump was viewed 40 million times on YouTube. The audio downloads likely exceeded 15 million. There will be a lot of second-guessing re what the Harris campaign should have done. Getting on a plane to Austin to visit Rogan would have been a layup.

I thought I would share that piece of information in Snippets as it has come up several times in several different ways over the past week. Podcasting seems to be a major thing these days and becoming more influential as we move forward.

Actually, I feel that using the term ‘podcasting’ is too restrictive. I believe that a better term might be channels of content creation. Because it isn’t just audio podcasts, it isn’t just YouTube channels, it isn’t just newsletters like this one, or blogs, or online communities. It is all of these things together.

Wherever content is being created and shared.

In the past, these things have been ‘stand-alone’ existing in the internet like islands. I believe the next evolution will be creating ecosystems of these content islands collaborating to better serve the interests of their audiences.

Unpacking Wisdom is a weekly section in which I explore a famous (or not so famous) quote and how it applies to the Compelling Communicator.

This quote leapt out at me after writing about Articulating Your Vision. It seems the perfect quote to include in this issue.

What I think is interesting is that there is a base level of competence required. You need talent to hit the target. Both the genius and the talented person must hit the target.

But to be perceived as an order of magnitude better, as a genius rather than merely talented, all you need to do is to hit the target nobody else was looking at.

Or more specifically you articulate that this is the target, and why this is an important target, and when you hit this target you are not just talented, you are visionary. - A genius.

What I am up to this week…

Professionally:

Having just recovered from a week in bed with a cold, I am deep into catching up with instructional design work for New Zealand Football.
I am also working on a series of books that I want to publish in the coming year. This is going a little more slowly than I would like.

Recreationally:

A recent health scare has put me back on track with diet and exercise and I am pleased to have lost about 7kg since early October. So my focus is on this at the moment.

What I am reading:

I recently re-read Oversubscribed by Daniel Priestly. So many lessons in there, and one I read frequently. I am looking forward to the latest in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman which I have pre-ordered and will be out today.

What I am watching:

I recently re-watched and recommended Smoking causes coughing to a bunch of friends. This sub-titled French film is mental and is not for everyone. But the impact it had on me after first watching it a couple of years ago made it a favourite.