The Road to Nowhere
By: Daniel Platt
Tags: Business, Vision, Meaning, Motivation, Values

At some point, when you build a business, you end up thinking about your vision. If the conversation comes early on, you have a stronger sense of what you’re trying to achieve.

Catchy intro. I know. If your brain just turned off, turn it back on, no promises but maybe we’ll go someplace interesting together today.

When I worked for others, a corporate vision seemed abstract at best and mostly a bit of a wank. When writing my first business plan I was more naturally drawn to the practical bits; the pitch, the product, viability and challenges… I still like the practical bits but I keep coming back to vision. It has grown on me as I have learned to understand it better.

I was talking to one of my mates about his business recently. They’ve been going a few years and things are happening quickly. He’s deadly serious about it, passionate even, which is strange because he’s funny and cynical to a fault. You can totally care about the work you do for other people, but he never had. He’s enjoying the success but more importantly, watching something come out of his brain and into the world that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. The change in him has been enjoyable to watch.

Even when the work is the same, and it often is, it feels different when you buy into the vision and especially when it’s yours. Vision makes sense of effort. Without a vision you have nothing to walk towards, it’s motion but not progress. You can make money as a means to an end and you can care about that end but, at least in my experience, it is impossible to care about what you actually do without buying into the vision.

It’s an amazing game to play when you think about it, especially for cynics.

To take what you know, and say ‘I see the world this way,’

To think about what you value and say ‘if it were more like this, it would be better,’

And then to find a way to make it happen, even in just a small way or a few people.

The money is always important until you stop chasing your tail. That changes quickly for many people. It stays important but differently, as a measure of impact and influence. It shows you how others value what you do, and how that grows over time through the consistency and quality of your efforts and decisions.

We’re in a good age for enterprise. Bright, talented and connected people around the world are out looking for problems to solve, inefficiencies to fix and value to create for others. Broadly, I think that’s people pursuing meaning, creating it as they go because many do not believe meaning exists objectively — we have to create it ourselves (existential) or say ‘fuck it’ and party (nihilistic). The cool gadgets, content and services are a by-product of choosing meaning.

If we’re out to create meaning, what we value is not so important as thinking about what we value. You can value anything; convenience, time, something fancy like the environment but it doesn’t make you better than me motherfucker, you’re in it for meaning, same as the rest of us. There seems to be a sweet spot — to care about something enough to have the outcomes matter to you but not to care too much. The value itself doesn’t matter, like the gadgets don’t matter, not to meaning anyway, but thinking about it does.

When we think about ‘why’, our values, we are deciding to be deliberate. We are stating that we matter, if only just to ourselves. Our choices, our time, what we do with our days and our years matters. To me it feels very close to the point of freedom, education, opportunity… it is exercising these things in the way we live our life.