“… Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it.” – Habakkuk 2:2
A few years ago, I began to realize that if I must move from the level of mediocrity to excellence in my life, there are few things I must not compromise. One of such few things is the habit of constant reading. I began to develop a crazy culture of reading and this led me to begin to build a personal library unconsciously. This realization that a reader is a leader made me to begin to spend about 25% of my monthly income on books of various subjects ranging from leadership, management, biographies, history, motivation to religion. As I read these books, my worldview began to expand, I began to also get exposed to new levels of knowledge I would otherwise not get from my small circle. As time went by, my environment began to look small for me to operate – I became restless and my purpose became clearer and people thought I was getting mad when I started practicing at my new level of knowledge which they could not relate to.
The brief experience I shared above came into being because I came in contact with a host of written materials. Many of the people I read their books live thousands of miles across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean.
I was never in contact with them and may never meet some of them in person. As a matter of fact, some of them are dead yet what they wrote spoke to me and changed my life. There is power in the written material.
Many people have a picture of what they want to do in the future but have not yet developed the discipline of writing down what that picture in their mind consists. A Chinese proverb says “the faintest pen is sharper than the brightest brain”. The item that is written down except deliberately destroyed or erased has the potential to speak to someone thousands of years after the writer has ceased to exist on planet earth.
Anytime you write down what you have in mind, it takes a life of its own and it has more power and potential of becoming a reality. Even Divinity writes down His thoughts. Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai so God can write the 10 Commandments on the tablets of stone for the children of Israel. The Bible records that these Commandments on the tablets of stone were written down by God Himself. If you cannot develop a culture of writing down things, you will not go far in realizing whatever vision it is you have.
In the quote we have at the head of this chapter, God asked his prophet, Habakkuk to write down the vision he had even so that those who will pursue the vision can have a road-map. Once writen, a direction is established and a focus is in view. If you can capture your vision in a written format, the vision is half achieved. How do you pursue what you cannot constantly see? What you have written is a living testimony of the dream in your heart.
In Africa, writing is always seen as a boring activity. It is the reason why development has been slow in coming to our clime. We have the tendency to operate without clues. No road-maps, no guide or governance – just clueless, disorganized lifestyle. No tangible and reasonable success whether at the personal or corporate levels can be achieved that way. Write down your vision!
I challenged my Wednesday class in Church recently to develop individual 10 year plans for themselves and begin to work towards it. Very few people have an idea of how their lives will end. It is always because they have no blueprint. Like I mentioned earlier, we abdicate that responsibility to God and expect things to be dropped on our laps. Forget it, nothing will fall from the sky that way. You have to create a platform for such occurrences. Write down your plan! It gives you focus and reduces stress.
With a written plan for a year, for instance, you can say for certain what you need to get done in January; what’s on the card for February and what you should be doing in June. With such a blueprint, you can have a daily “to-do-list” for how to work towards your monthly goals which should work you up to achieving the annual projections. Without a plan, you will be rudderless, like a ship without a sailing plan and a pilot without a compass or a flying route – you will be lost in the race of life.
Can you imagine entering a shopping mall without a shopping list? Whatever you see becomes interesting to buy. Why? You did not establish a focus before you ventured into the mall.
In our vision orientation practice, if you do not have plans in your life, other people’s plans will influence and dictate how your life will be run. Written plans make you proactive about running your life – people without plans react to life. They act only when circumstances trigger them to act. That is a very frustrating way to live.
