We create powerful intentions in our businesses, our governments, our charitable organizations, and our community groups.
By god, we damn well mean it when we say that things are going to be different around here.
The intention is palpable. It’s honest, earnest, and noble.
We look around at the gathered talent, intelligence, and dedication and we like what we see. Not perfect. But people we’d be happy to go into battle with. The potential is not only there, it is brimming over.
Now, we take that strategy out into the world and we make the mistake of thinking we’ve actually got it figured out and have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to go. It’s actually the story that we tell ourselves and perpetuate in the media. The common knowledge is that “Knowing the path and charting the risks is the primary way to success.”
We tell ourselves that those with the best strategy will win. We tell ourselves that those with the best strategy will win.
But if you actually listen to those wildly successful people being interviewed, what they talk about is what they learned. They talk about when they were scared and when they were excited. They talk about where they screwed up and how they pulled something out of the fire. They talk about when they had to take yet another deep breath and jump off another cliff to see what would happen. They’ll share what their strategy was, but the important part of what you’ll hear from them is what they did, and how they approached it, each and every time something went wrong with the strategy.
Your approach to your strategy breaking down and failing, and it will, is vitally more important than whether you had the right strategy. Who do you know that ever had their strategy right the first time, anyway?
