Turning your Vision into Reality

I recently attended the last session of the inaugural West Island Leadership Development program, an initiative of the West Island Federation CJA that aims to foster future community leaders by training us about fundraising, entrepreneuring, and community activism. Guested by Dr. Ken Robertson, Director General of Champlain Regional College, the focus of the session concerned establishing a vision, and learning how to set goals, prioritize, and meet objectives.

I found this session particularly interesting because the issues covered not only applied to your career path (i.e. where do you see yourself in your job, or how do you envision your company's growth 5 years from now), but also to your everyday life.

There are 2 fundamental conclusions that Dr. Robertson conveyed, which I found particularly poignant:

1. Achieving future success is dependent on 2 things: the successful relationship building with others, such as your colleagues and friends; never forgetting to look back to see how you arrived to your current situation in the first place.
   
   Personally, I'm completely turned off by arrogance. I distate people who are so arrogant, they feel it necessary to belittle you in order to maintain their level of arrogance. This applies to people who do not feel it necessary to even speak to you if they feel you have nothing to contribute to their lives in any way. This also applied to people who have success dumped into their laps by either being born into a successful family, or marrying into one. People like that often develop a hoity-toity attitude which just completely sours my grapes. Thus, the true measure of success, in my opinion, is summarized by the first point.
   
2. The "finite" vs. the "infinite"
   
   Invariably, when trying to build yourself up, someone along the way will try to keep you down, either literally, or by verbal criticism. It's therefore important to never allow the finite to influence the possibilities of what you can do.
   
   For example, a violin has 4 strings and is 12" long. This is finite. However, for several hundreds of years, composers have been using the violin to create an infinite number of combinations of music, and are still doing so today.

Just think what you can do when your vision isn't hampered by the bounds of reality...