Sometimes you can look at things in life, in business, and your visual acuity is perfect.

You look at a spreadsheet and you see a spreadsheet. You look at a new product you designed from scratch and there it is, just what the prototype envisioned. You may be pleased with the way it turned out and you may be disappointed, but you can see it with such extraordinary clarity that the decision to proceed to wholesale manufacturing or not is based on quantitative projections. Will it sell is the issue, not does it look like I wanted it to look.

Difficult as this decision may be, it is cake compared to the decisions you have to make when you really cannot see what you are dealing with. When you work, in a labor of exceptional love, to build something truly special, and when you try to take it all in, to truly soak up the magnificence of what you thought you helped to create, you cannot because for some inexplicable reason, you can’t see it clearly.

In the thousand and one complex issues that sweep through every major business issue, every product development, every client relationship, the black and white it all started as turns to grey. And you have to judge what you have with the opposite of visual acuity.

You have to peer through a fog and try to determine if what you have helped to create is real, deserves investment or is a figment of your imagination. And because there is no reliable book for the really difficult things in life, you have to go by instinct. Will it sell? Will it be a hit? Or is it something you should write off, go back to the drawing board and try again?

If you believe in what you have created - a product, a campaign, a formula - you stick with it because, fog or not, you see the beauty of it. Your mind can do that work for you. So you find a way to proceed and you move ahead even though it would be so much easier to scratch it all than to make the dream come to life. You don’t like the easy way. You prefer the hard, the true, the tough, the magnificent and if that means you do so without visual acuity, you do it because you want what you helped to create to make a difference and you believe it can.

The easiest thing in life is to walk away. But easy and exceptional are rarely paired. So regardless of what the critics say, what the press says, what the whole damn universe thinks, you are determined to make your butterfly, fly. That’s the story of every great achiever in history. Every Van Gogh now hanging proudly on every otherwise ordinary wall made magnificent by its presence.

This is the stubborn quality we must bring to our most important works. We have to find a way to believe. We have to insist that Starry Night is a masterpiece even if no one would give the artist a penny for it in his time.

And then the fog can settle so deep and thick that it becomes invisible and against your better judgment, you think it’s best to move on because it appears, for all of the grandeur of what you helped to create, you’re the only one who wants it to endure.

The world won’t buy it. And you have only one option. It’s called Next. It may not be as great as the Now, but there’s a life to be lived. A career to be built.

The great thing about the future is that it brings another opportunity to make the pure dream a reality.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Business, Small Business, Unconventional Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.