A friend of mine, Don, ran into one of his business heroes having a drink by himself at a bar. The hero was the CEO of a famous investment firm. Don struck up a conversation and they started talking about business. At the time, Don was still early in his entrepreneurial career and, after he finished his fan boy spiel, they got around to talking about his goals and strategies.
Don began to explain the obstacles he anticipated and the CEO interrupted him and said, “You need to use the Fukow method.”
“Phuquow?” Don asked, “Is that Vietnamese?”
“No, it’s American,” the CEO said. Then more slowly he said, “Fuck how.” He waited a beat and then explained, “How doesn’t matter. Making progress is like driving in heavy fog. Most of the time you can’t see beyond your headlights. You make decisions as they present themselves. The important thing is to know where you’re going and persistently drive towards that destination.”
I love this story. It’s not because I agree that how doesn’t matter (it does) or because it speaks to the murkiness of the entrepreneurial struggle.
I love it because it highlights the importance of clarity.
In our thinking about what we want, we also operate in a fog. Ideas are half formed and aims are corrupt. We develop fuzzy goals that are proxies for something more specific. But these goals don’t help us in making good decisions.
In the driving analogy, it’s like we’re going to Miami because it’s a vacation spot and not because we want Cuban food and beaches. And if we stopped to think about it, we would realize that we just wanted to hang out somewhere warm with golfing and should be driving to the much closer Palm Springs.
As a concrete expression of this, last year I attended a presentation by an operations consultant. At the end of the presentation, he boiled down all of his experience into three priority fixes. One of his three fixes was having an organizational chart for the ideal business you want to grow into. Having clarity on what roles you need and who you’ll need to hire is powerful information that improves your decisions. This is much more impactful than just adding bodies when you feel a pinch.
Getting and maintaining clarity requires slowing down and pulling over. Your business doesn’t have a GPS- you need to check the map every once in awhile.
Featured image of Marko Polo meeting Kublai Khan by unknown artist used under public domain.