Not every productive person is visionary, though all can aspire to be. To be visionary is to see not what is already good, but what would be good if it existed. Not what people value now, but what they would value were it available.
Legendary Automobile Executive Bob Lutz, in arguing why customers aren’t always right, explained that they “are at best a rearview mirror, offering perspective on products that already exist. They can’t supply you with ideas for tomorrow’s breakthrough. For those, you or somebody on your team has got to be a right-brained visionary.”
Armed with the courage of their convictions, visionaries seek to create what they imagine, usually with great difficulty and at great financial risk. Using an ability infrequently acknowledged, they are confident in their eventual success according to the level of their skill at empathy.
Empathy is the choice and ability to imagine life from someone else’s perspective, to experience in imagination what others are in fact experiencing. It seeks not agreement or disagreement but understanding. Starting from that understanding, the empathic visionary imagines products and services that might someday meet what currently is an unmet need.
Of course, imagining actual products and services requires great knowledge of what is possible and achievable ― sometimes highly technical and sophisticated knowledge ― but that knowledge would be useless without insights into what people genuinely will want. Think of the iPhone or of Uber.
Such insights don’t come easily. In fact, they might require visionaries ― the true empaths among us.
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