I realized a long time ago that I have a real skill for seeing what’s over the horizon. I once drew a stick figure standing on top of a hill who can see all the things on the other side, but he’s talking to people who are still at the bottom. The mistake is thinking my job is to tell them about everything on the other side. It isn’t. My job is to help them get to the top of the hill.
When you lead with the full vision, how this all scales, what it becomes in three years, it just sounds overwhelming, optimistic, a little delusional. The useful version is narrow: here’s the next checkpoint and here’s how we hit it. The bigger picture is real and worth building toward, but the discipline is in the dosage of what you actually communicate.
You’ll always be thinking and building ahead of what’s appropriate to share. That’s the work, wrestling with it, testing it, sometimes hitting nothing. The skill isn’t having the far-off view. It’s knowing how much of it to hand someone at a time.
How much of what you can see should you actually say out loud?