Vision

The Long and Short-Term Risks of Not Articulating Your Vision

Not having a clear set of goals is a proven way to ensure you’ll never meet them. That’s why articulating your vision is a critical first step toward success—to give yourself something to aspire to besides some general idea of “making it.”

Don’t settle for some half-baked idea of where you want to be in your career. Be specific about your goals, and the steps you need to take to reach them. If you don’t, be ready to deal with challenges now and in the future.

In the short-term, failing to articulate your vision can make it difficult to even get started. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or you’re working in a more traditional setting, if you don’t set goals for yourself, you’re not likely to move forward. Success is rarely handed to those who don’t aspire to it.

Having an unclear vision can also make it difficult to stay motivated and passionate about your work. Maintaining a clear set of goals can keep us going through tough times, and give us energy when we want to give up. That’s because, even when you’re in a rough patch, you know you’re working toward something. A well-defined vision can keep you moving forward, while a vague, half-formed vision may leave you feeling lost and powerless.

And in the longer term? You may just find yourself pulled in a lot of different directions as you try to figure out how to reach your general idea of success. Maybe you know that, generally speaking, you want to be wealthy. That’s your goal. But for some reason, it’s not happening. So you try something new for a bit, and that doesn’t work, so you try something different, and you never fully commit to what you should really be doing to achieve success. You never put your head down and put in the real work that’s needed to reach your goals. This is a common result of not articulating your vision.

Eventually, you may even give up entirely. You may decide that, based on your record of failure, success just isn’t in the cards for you. And that’s the saddest result of failing to articulate your vision—especially because it’s something that can be avoided with a bit of self-reflection and goal-setting.

Don’t underestimate the power of having a clear vision for your future, and sticking to your goals. You owe it to yourself.