Identify Your Vision

"The vision that you glorify in your mind, the ideal that you enthrone in your heart - this you will build your life by; this you will become." - As a Man Thinketh, James Allen.

Whether you liked his politics or not, much can be learned from the life of former President Clinton. Grolier's New Book of Knowledge reports that as a teenager "Clinton thought of becoming a doctor or a reporter or even a musician. But after a fateful meeting with President John F. Kennedy, while still in high school, he made up his mind to enter politics." At that moment a vision was born that he would hold on to - for the next 30 years, until he himself was elected President at the age of 46.

Jay Leno, who succeeded the venerable Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show, first envisioned that he would be the host when he was just 22 years old and unknown and unproven as a comedian, much less as a host of a show of such regard. For twenty years he enthroned in his heart an ideal that most people would have thought "foolish", "outlandish" and "impossible".

Thoreau told us that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." No doubt it's because the masses are without a vision for their lives.

What is your vision for your future, your ideal life? Is it written down? Do you review it and think about it often? Have you "enthroned" it in your heart? Is your life organized around goals and objectives that will ensure your vision is reached?

Wallace D. Wattles wrote, "There is no labour from which most people shrink as they do from that of sustained and consecutive thought; it is the hardest work in the world." And yet it is the "sustained and consecutive thought" about our vision that is the first and primary labour of achievement.

Thoreau also wrote one of my most favourite passages of all time. And it gives you the best reason there is to stop what you're doing today and identify the vision for your life. "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

And that's worth thinking about.

- Vic Johnson


-- Posted from my iPhone