Stained Glass Goals
Many of us have big dreams: salespeople want to crush their quota. A manager wants to be a VP. Entrepreneurs work to bring new ideas to the masses. Grand visions come from small, persistent, filthy habits.
Filthy? Yes, it's dirty work. Anyone you admire gets dirty every day. Like stained glass windows, big dreams are made from thousands of tiny pieces.
Toto Wolf exemplifies this idea as CEO of eight-time Formula One racing champion Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team. At a recent goal-setting summit, he spoke for 20 seconds about winning the championship and 29:40 about the little things that make it happen: spending hours with colleagues to uncover what makes them tick; looking at new data in TIBCO Spotfire; sorting through feedback from hundreds of simulations each week.
Toto embraces the sharp shards of failure: "The days we lose are the worst days for our competition--that's when we learn the most."
His advice is to pursue your mission piece by piece. Eventually, that beautiful stained glass picture will come to be.
