Be Delusional (At Least When You’re Setting Goals).
I am serious. Ditch reality.
There’s a place for it. But only after you get clear on your big, unrealistic dream.
I know you think I’ve lost it. But here’s the scoop.
There was nothing realistic about a 17-year-old prep school graduate with no money walking away from her family home and putting herself through college. But she did. I did.
There was nothing realistic when that young woman told her family she was going to figure out how to have a career where she made a difference for people. I still remember sitting in my mother’s living room with her mentor, both of them desperate to help me land my first real professional position, and me telling them I wanted to make life better for people.
Yeah, yeah. Who pays for that?
Well, there are nonprofits that do it.
And how are you going to make a living?
I didn’t know.
So, they sent me on a spectacularly horrible interview at a local department store. This, despite the fact that I had already been running one of the most successful Estée Lauder counters in the country as its youngest counter manager. At the interview, the store manager sat in his glass-walled office doing paperwork for a full hour while I watched, apparently to test my patience. I made the second round. But by the time an offer was on the table, I had already gotten a job at a local nonprofit.
Being realistic would have probably kept me in a marriage I needed to leave twenty years ago. Being realistic would have meant I wouldn’t be writing this blog — after all, I’m a math geek, not a writer. Being realistic would have meant never creating an annual women’s conference that ran for more than a decade, leading a political action committee, building a business, creating and selling my art, or countless other things I have had the privilege to do.
So, I encourage you, as my friend Michelle Coyle puts it, to be delusional. At least when you’re setting your goals. You can use reality to figure out how to get there. But first, you have to be unrealistic.
One of the things I do at the beginning of strategic planning and VIP sessions is ask everyone in the room to raise their hands over their head. Everyone does. Then I say: raise them a little bit more. And every single person who already has their hands up, can go a little higher.
That gap? That’s where the excitement is. That’s where success lives. That slightly unrealistic, reach-just-a-little-further gap is where the magic is.
So please — this week — do not be realistic.
Have a great week,
Julie
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