“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results” - General George S. Patton
It’s one thing to realize one day that you have no idea where you’re headed. Quarter life crisis, college stress, too many tests, whatever. It’s scary becoming an adult; it’s scarier making decisions that will affect all aspects of your future life.
But it’s a entirely different matter to realize that you have no idea where you’ve been traveling with no heading for the past two years. You’re lost in the forest halfway between the homestead and your grandmother’s house with no fucking clue how to bring your sweet little nanny her picnic basket, and no idea how to make your way back home.
It’s a failure of tactics – of knowing where the heck your going. You’ve got to college, put your head into your books, and woken up two years later with a bit of drool, suddenly realizing you have no idea what how these courses on philosophy and astronomy are going to do a goddamn thing for you in your future life.
Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.
There’s nothing wrong with being embroiled in the day to day stuf, you know, day to day; being strategic with your life is essential in order to get things done. But there comes a point in time where you need to stop, stand back and ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing getting me to where I want to be?” It’s about being tactical, at least occasionally; like Patton, it’s essential that you tell yourself about the “what”, and worry about the “how” sometime later.
But it’s more than that. It takes vision – not the cruddy, pontificating type – to unite what you’re accomplishing in your god awful psychology class with your maniacal goal to make millions of dollars during your late twenties. It’s about being able to understand how the squad charging on that hill will capture the airfield to establish a beachhead to sweep through Brittany to move past the Sigfried Line on the way to the Reichstag in Berlin. And then continue onto Moscow, if you’re so inclined, like Patton.
Vision is what’s essential. You don’t have to be the best calculator puncher. You don’t have to be the best multi-phase proposal writer.
Success is driven by understanding how you can use one to get to the other.
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