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Angela Connor
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Drive, vision and execution
It’s great to be driven. Drive is a quality I seek in others. It may be because I’m very driven myself and thrive on the energy that develops when I come across someone similar, or maybe it’s due to my bias for action. Seeing it in someone else draws me to them. I’ve even tried to infuse it in others for whom it wasn’t necessarily innate, but that I knew could become a game-changer for them. I had to learn the hard way that you can’t teach drive, and you can’t want things more for someone than they want it themselves.
Vision is a gift. I decided to quite a job once shortly after realizing that the leader of the organization had zero vision for where my group was headed and couldn’t even give me the tiniest inkling of a plan on how we’d move forward. I don’t work for people who don’t have vision. I just don’t see the point.
Execution is where a lot of people fail miserably. And that’s because doing stuff is hard. And doing all the things you say you’ll do is even harder. I’ll take that a step further and say that executing on promises – moving from theory to practice, and turning words into action requires a certain mindset. You must be willing to take risks, stand up to challenges, embrace obstacles and put yourself out there. In many cases, you have to be willing to do it first, or zig when everyone else is zagging.
Drive, vision and execution are a powerful trio. If you want to start getting more things done, work towards bigger goals and follow through by any means necessary, even when things feel impossible, understand that one fuels the other, and you need all three.