15/08/2024
Insiders,
I heard the following in a presentation a while back. I'm not sure who the speaker was, but it might have been Lester Thurow, the author of "The Zero Sum Society.” Anyway, I found it valuable and thought it worthy of passing on to all of you.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish”: Proverbs 29:18
"Columbus was smart in the sense he knew the world was round. But in MIT terms, Columbus was not terribly swift when it came to mathematics, because Columbus had to make two mathematical calculations to figure out how much water to put on his boats. The first calculation: what’s the diameter of the earth? And when Columbus estimated that, he made it one-third too small. The second question he had to answer was, how far did Marco Polo walk? And when he estimated that answer, he made it one third too big.
Now, if you subtract a number that is one-third too big from a number that is one-third too small, you make what is called a major mathematical error. Columbus estimated that the distance from the Canary Islands to the East Indies was 3900 nautical miles. It’s actually 13,000 miles!
If you look at the amount of water that Columbus put on his ships, before he got halfway there, he and all of his men would have died of thirst, and the name of Columbus would probably never be in the history books.
Now, I suppose one moral you could draw from this story is that it’s more important to be lucky than smart because it just happens that exactly 3,900 nautical miles from the Canaries, one runs into the Americas! The Americas were full of gold, and they made the Spanish Empire for the next 300 years!
But that would be the wrong moral of the story because you’ve got to remember something else.
It took Columbus seven years to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to finance the expedition. It took enormous persistence. And without the enormous persistence, he never would have been in a position to have the enormous good luck. Secondly, and even more importantly, he had the vision of doing it in a different way, or he could not have had the good luck! And so in closing, I wish you intelligence. But more than intelligence, I wish you good luck. And more than good luck, I wish you persistence. And most of all, I wish you a vision for a new world.”
So, don’t underestimate the value of “seeing” the objective. First, create the vision or “picture,” then never take your “eye” off of it when focusing on your strategies and plans.
To close this up…I’m reading “Willie, Waylon, and the Boys” by Brian Fairbanks, and every time I hear this song, what a “vision” I see.https://youtu.be/KxDDNzG1lxM?si=mhybXutN6ERtboZk
Make Every Day Matter and Be One on Not Many!
Provided to YouTube by Universal Music GroupThe Road Goes On Forever · The HighwaymenThe Road Goes On Forever℗ 1995 Capitol Records NashvilleReleased on: 199...
