Dreamers vs. Visionaries
Something to ponder today:
In his welcome speech at Nonprofit Boot Camp, Darian Rodriguez Heyman - Executive Director of the Craigslist Foundation - talked about the difference between dreamers and visionaries.
According to Darian, there are dreamers everywhere. We all know them: they’re the people who see the big picture. They know exactly where they are, where they’re going, and what it will look like when they get there - from A to Z. I’d be willing to bet that just about every person at Bootcamp was a dreamer - we all had a picture in our heads of exactly what our dream would look like once we achieved it, down to the tiniest detail.
Visionaries, however, are harder to come by. They’re the people who, in addition to seeing the big picture - the A to Z - they can also see the B to Y: all the little steps in between that will get them to their dream. Visionaries are people who figure out how to make things happen, and then do it - people like Walt Disney, Jim Henson, and Andrew Carnegie (who are my three biggest heroes, by the way). Every one of those men started with nothing but an idea of how they wanted things to be - and then put everything they had into figuring out how to get there.
It’s an interesting way of looking at it, which I had never thought of before - it really does make clear what sets the visionaries (my heroes) apart from the rest of the “big ideas” people. I’ve got the A and Z part down, and I think I’ve even got the B and parts of the C figured out. There’s a long way to go to find that D through Y, but somehow knowing that there are definite steps out there that will lead me to the Z makes it easier to keep working to find them.
