Stars and stepping stones

By Jeff Sandefer

What is a Star?	“Look around you. Take a fresh, hard, and uncompromising look at life as you see it. Ask this question, ‘What needs to be done?’ When you have an answer, and it may take some time to get it, then go and do what needs to be done. Do it better than anyone else does it and the world will beat down your door for your help. Then you will not need ‘a good job’; and you will have more than a career. You will have a mission.” The teacher was noted scientist and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller. The student was J. Zink.
Finding Your Own Star	Life is a journey, not a destination. But this does not mean that life should be an aimless journey. The most successful and fulfilled entrepreneurs are always advancing toward a vision that gives meaning to their lives. It is this relentless pursuit where persistence transforms ideals into a lifelong mission. Picking your own star involves understanding what is important to you in life, and what is likely to remain important. Your star should reflect your vision of the future. Given your deeply held beliefs, how should the world change? What part can you play in changing it? Do you feel a calling to do something important? The most successful and fulfilled entrepreneurs are always advancing toward a vision that gives meaning to their life. One way to think about “stars” is to consider the different roles you may play. Any person’s life can be divided into a number of areas. You can be a good spouse or a good parent (two entirely different things); active in your church, community or college; involved in local, state or national politics; wrapped up in a hobby or a sport; start a business or work your way up to vice president of a Fortune 500 company. The problem with being mortal is that it is virtually impossible to do more than two or three of these well at the same time. Visualize yourself at age seventy (or one hundred if you are an optimist). The setting can be an awards dinner, or if your tastes are slightly more morbid, your own funeral. Which role from your life do you want the speaker to mention first? Second? Third? What do you want them to say? How do you feel about the areas that have been left out? In this exercise are the sparks of a calling.
If you “Just Don’t Know”	Beginning with the end in mind is about examining why life is worth living and being true to your own values and dreams. Question, examine assumptions, reflect, and question again. Once you have your own questions, seek out people who are in their seventies and eighties. Ask them what they cherish most about their lives, what seemed important at the time, and what was truly important after a lifetime of reflection. Ask them about their greatest joys and their greatest regrets. In their victories, failures and memories you will find perspective for your own journey.
Dismissing Utopian Dreams	We all “want it all” but reality doesn’t work that way Choosing an end is not about limits, it is about setting priorities that allow you to accomplish as much as possible. It is about choosing how to spend your last minute in the day or your last dollar or your last bit of energy. It is better to acknowledge conflicts now and think through principled resolutions than to take stopgap measures later.
Backing Up to the Present	Once you have broad goals to accomplish by the end of your life, it is time to examine the foundations you must build at each stage to reach those goals. It also is time to set steppingstones to judge your progress and values to guide the way. The best way to do this is to back up, decade by decade, stopping at each stage to see what investments are necessary to reach the next plateau. As you regress toward the present, the steppingstones and goals should become more specific and concrete. As you back up in time, consider the long-term values that will guide you toward your vision. These are usually the same values that helped establish the vision.
From Seventy To Fifty	Some people are quick to label material desires as tawdry, holding that money is sordid and that you should consider only the “higher” virtues in life. This is nonsense.
From Fifty to Thirty	Now back up from age fifty to age thirty. Start with your most important areas. Where must you be at thirty to attain your vision at fifty? The lifestyle and trade-offs you make during this period will set the pattern for the rest of your life.
From Thirty to Today	Given your vision, the priorities you have outlined and the steppingstones you have Some people are quick to label material desires as tawdry, holding that money is sordid and that you should consider only the “higher” virtues in life. This is nonsense. 5 set, what concrete actions can you take today to reach the next steppingstone? How will your next job provide the foundation for the next leap? How will it affect the other priority areas you have set? Where are the difficult trade-offs you must make? If there are not any, you haven’t been realistic.
Reality Checks	Is the vision that you have chosen consistent? Is it a fantasy or within the realm of reality? Is the timing realistic or is time driving the decision? Internal consistency is important. If your main goals are to be a good parent, be involved in your local community and be an international consultant—you have a problem. It is impossible to be in two places at once and unlikely that you can travel internationally and have enough time at home to be a good parent and be active in your community. Check the consistency of your vision and adjust accordingly. Another reality check involves your capabilities versus the real world. Visions are not dreams; they are a reality that you hope to create. If you are five feet tall, slow and have no vertical leap, it is unlikely that your vision of becoming an NBA superstar will be realized. Set your end vision broadly and by all means reach for the stars, but don’t set a vision that is by definition self-defeating. Has time been considered or is it forcing the decision?
Changes in Course	Your steppingstones are not a rigid plan. Instead, they are a way of dealing with reality. Even with all the careful preparations and millions of calculations prior to an Apollo mission, NASA still had to make hundreds of mid-course corrections during a journey to the moon. Your life is much more complicated than a space mission. As long as you don’t lose sight of your vision and values, you can make course corrections as you gain knowledge. Steppingstones allow you to develop a vision of your life, to test that theory against reality, to consider the knowledge you have gathered, and then refine your world view and life plan for another test. Often the world will just throw you a curve. Again, steppingstones are not a rigid plan; they are intended to provide a direction so you can concentrate your energies on moving forward. If the world changes, you may need to reorient the individual steppingstones. The path will change slightly as reality blows you off course, but the general direction will not. A quest worth making will always raise questions, and your star should be constantly examined in an honest way.
The Romance and Curse of an Entrepreneurial Mission	The mission of the entrepreneur is for very few. The responsibility of crafting a vision that others can cling to, and piloting that vision through the turbulence and chaos of the markets is not for everyone.
The Ultimate Horror	The ultimate horror is not death. The ultimate horror is to wake up at age fifty-five or sixty and realize that you have wasted your life; either that time has slipped past while your dreams waited, or that you never had any dreams at all. The great constraint on human life is time. Almost anything can be accomplished given enough 8 time—but we are never given enough. At fifty-five or sixty often it is too late to start over. There are not enough hours in the day, or days in the year. Stars and steppingstones are a way to avoid the horror of a meaningless life.

Summary:

Stars and steppingstones are about finding a purpose in your life: understanding what is fundamentally important, setting lifelong goals, arranging steppingstones to reach those goals, and making course corrections when reality intervenes. Above all, stars and steppingstones are about choice in a free society. They are about having the chance to determine how to spend your life and how you can change the world; how you must be responsible for your choices, enjoy the fruits, suffer the consequences and adapt to reality, no matter how unpredictable it may be. Choice is a luxury that few in history have enjoyed, a luxury too precious to be squandered for lack of imagination, initiative or courage.