What is the difference between an entrepreneur and a visionary?
I remember very well from when I was a child my dad telling me that no matter what happened, never stop trying, even when it seemed very difficult. He said that the moment you stop trying you have already lost, because even if it doesn’t turn out as you expected or at all, that leaves you with a teaching and experience that will help you in the future.
Now, when I evaluate whether I am going to do something or not and I think about what my dad said, I add at the end the words: “what do you have to lose?” This way, unless you think that when you fail the world is literally going to end, you will be able to do more things than you thought you were capable of. And since you tried and achieved a result, then you do something else and obtain another result, and so when you least expect it, those accumulated achievements can lead you to achieve something very important.
The horizon that a visionary entrepreneur creates
There is a quote from Tony Robbins – author, speaker and entrepreneur – that I really like and it says:
“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.”
That is to say, the horizon of goals and objectives that we generally set is short-term, we do not want to see further and we limit ourselves in what we believe we can do, whether our goal is to achieve a greater number of sales in the semester, start a business in less than a year or get a salary increase in a few months. But what we don’t realize is that, if we set a really big long-term goal and plan the steps we have to take to advance along the path until we achieve it, we can achieve wonders.
John F. Kennedy, former president of the United States, did not underestimate what his country’s space program could achieve when in one of his memorable speeches at Rice University during 1962 he said the following: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade. and do the rest, not because they are easy goals, but because they are difficult, because that challenge will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and abilities.” Needless to say, thanks to this goal, in 1969 man set foot on the Moon.
Visionary like Steve Jobs
So, just as there are now companies that think big like Tesla, which is revolutionizing the automotive industry, Singularity University that wants to exponentiate technological changes through education and Google, which redefined the way we search for and access information, Entrepreneurs now have to think that what they can achieve in one or two decades can completely change the industry they started in or even more.
So, if you want to become a visionary like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Henry Ford, you have to think about what you want to achieve in the long term and from there plan what you will have to do this year. But of course, to do all this, you first have to try.