4 Common Challenges to Having a Grand Vision and Simple Solutions to Success

Discipline. Sacrifice. Intelligence. Grit. Work ethic. Creativity. Luck. These are the attributes that most people associate with success. And they’re all important. But a person can display all these traits and still not reach the highest levels of achievement. That’s because this list omits the most important ingredient: a grand vision—an idea of a beautiful future to strive toward.  

The immense promise of a grand vision accentuates every other ingredient of success. It gives shape to creativity and focuses new ideas and innovations toward a common goal. It lends meaning to the discipline and sacrifice and it is the fire that fuels the fourteen-hour workdays needed to create your own luck. Every great business starts with the founder’s grand vision. The most famous example might be Apple, which was powered by Steve Jobs’s belief that computers would revolutionize how people think, communicate, and work.

There’s no point getting into the steps if you don’t know what success looks like to you. My grand vision was to create the Starbucks of dentistry: a scalable, standardized retail healthcare brand. A national brand that provides such repeatable results that going to the dentist feels almost as comfortable as grabbing a venti Pike Place roast. This was a tall task that lent grandiosity to my vision. After all, it’s become a tired trope that people dread dentist visits. As much as this irks us in the field, it’s not hard to see where it comes from. We poke needles into gums. We drill into teeth. We excavate diseased nerves. We pull out teeth. No matter how much we all work to keep our patients calm and happy, there will always be a certain level of fear involved in a dentist visit. A lot of people go to the dentist feeling confused and vulnerable, and this is compounded when they are subjected to pain that might seem needless and arbitrary.

I wanted my practice to be completely dedicated to satisfying customer needs. To create a dental office so inviting, people felt almost as comfortable as they do in their own homes. It would be standardized so that every location looked the same, smelled the same, and people would never hear a drill. A practice where people trust their dentists completely because we always deliver the best work (backed by money-back guarantees) with the greatest possible convenience.

Regardless of what your grand vision is, you can expect certain experiences that will challenge you along the way. Here are a few common ones that most successful entrepreneurs (including me) have encountered and some suggestions as to how to deal with them.

YOU WILL FAIL. A LOT 

In pursuing a grand vision, you will, inevitably, fail. In fact, to succeed you almost need to seek out failure. By that I don’t mean you should try to fail. I mean that, fundamentally, no matter what you do, when you seek success, you will cultivate failure. People who experience the fewest failures usually hold one stable job their whole life. If that were your idea of success, I doubt you’d be reading this book. So, know this: what determines whether you will succeed isn’t if you fail, but how you respond to the failures you’ll inevitably face. In my experience, there are two keys to effectively responding to failure: don’t give up, and learn from your failures. Don’t Give Up Always keep challenges and failures in perspective. In most cases, what we perceive as a failure is in fact a temporary setback and is more often than not an opportunity to learn and grow. The only terminal failure comes when you let setbacks overwhelm you to the point that you abandon your grand vision. My career path was anything but linear. Nobody’s is. But I remained focused on my primary goal even when I had to take detours. In fact, as it often happens, one of those detours proved to be one of the most important and useful experiences in my career.

LEARN FROM YOUR FAILURES  

I know. It’s so common, it’s a cliché: we learn from our failures. As with many cliches it contains a seed of truth, but it’s also misleading. It implies that learning is a passive experience. A more accurate saying would be that we learn from our failures if we force ourselves to. The only way to learn from a mistake is to own it, to hold yourself accountable and then reflect on how you could have done better. For that reason, in my business, I always hold myself accountable first.

YOU WILL MAKE SACRIFICES  

Growing up, I was hardly exceptional. I was an average student, an average athlete, and a rather average-looking guy. In my opinion, I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly smart or talented. My one major advantage is that I am willing to make huge sacrifices and consistently work harder than anyone else in pursuit of my grand vision. And I maintain that level of dedication. In my experience, for most of us, it usually takes at least ten years of hard work, dedication, and unwavering commitment and sacrifice to be successful at anything.

YOU’LL BEFRIEND FEAR  

Since fear never disappears, especially for people who pursue a grand vision, your best option is to learn to befriend fear. Let it guide you. You feel fear most when you leave your comfort zone and grow. If a new challenge or a new idea makes you anxious, it’s a good sign that it’s at least a seed of something worth doing. Then you can harness the energy that fear creates to achieve new heights. In the end, the best antidote to fear is to make up your mind that the chance at greatness outweighs the One of the most fearinducing steps you have to make comes early. Eventually, to keep growing you will need to stop working in the business and start working on the business. guaranteed good—not to mention its impact on the lives of your team members that join you for this journey. It won’t make the fear go away, but it will make it all worthwhile.

Written by Dr. Sulman Ahmed.
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