We Have Seen the Future. And it was green with a hint of neurosis. Part 1 — Being a Visionary

By TRISOFT team

So we were thinking about the future the other day. And the day before that. And this morning. And we will probably think of it tomorrow around noon again. The future is the home of our greatest dreams and our deepest fears as well. Our human condition dictates us to worry and plan for the future. And when you are an enthusiastic entrepreneur, the future is always full of mystery and challenge.

At TRISOFT we are ever optimists. We make plans, we have bold goals and we march towards them step by step. In our day or night dreaming we have seen the future. And it was green… with a hint of neurosis, nonetheless (we discovered the latter is kind of default, if not mandatory nowadays).

And this is how we came up with a series of 5 blog posts ideas for a brighter future. Here they are, we’re taking them one by one.

1. Being a Visionary

2. Being an Optimist

3. Being a Realist

4. Being a Perfectionist

5. Being a Believer

Part 1 — Being a Visionary

There are relatively few people out there that are universally regarded as visionaries. We could mention Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs or Barack Obama among them. What separates them from other significant personalities of past and present times are a bunch of special characteristics, such as: openness, persistence, conviction and imagination.

1. Visionaries are open to novelty

Of all people, visionaries are those constantly looking for more. They want to know it all, find out everything and live things to the fullest. Every new piece of information is interesting to them. They are flexible and always looking for a breakthrough — which they are in fact the most prone to discover, since they say no to virtually nothing.

Also, visionaries aren’t very conventional people. They often deny the authority of others, building their own rules and regulations and act as rebels. Seeking to acquire as much knowledge and information as possible, they don’t mind criticism and judgement too much and sometimes they purposefully defy norms and skip steps. The result is often a creative discovery or maybe sometimes a happy accident. But that’s okay, cause the visionary won’t mind that anyway.

2. Visionaries have the ability to foresee things

No, we don’t mean they can predict the future, although there are both ancient and modern prophets who have done it. In a way, however, visionaries seem to be able to see into the future. But this is based mainly on their superpower to accurately understand the present and create patterns and visions for the future. This way they are able to build models of the future and, with a lot of focus and a little help, make them into reality. So you may as well say that they are practically creating the future.

Visionaries’ power of observation is so piercing that they can often see with their mind’s eye long before others. This is how they understand trends of the world that haven’t yet been spotted by anyone else and they come to create new ideas or products that are completely revolutionary for the entire humanity.

But eventually their ability to foresee into the future has to be combined with a neat execution of things, as successfully carrying out the vision falls too under the characteristics of a true visionary.

3. Visionaries have great imagination

One of the most important traits in a visionary is their strong and vivid imagination. Visionaries are people who have naturally kept almost intact their playful, child-like spirit and they use it and nurture it on every occasion, because this is what sparks the most brilliant of their ideas.

Imagination is second nature to them. Visionaries live by the rules of their inner, fascinating, complex world — full of ideas, futuristic scenarios and challenges. Visionaries spend their lives following dreams and fighting to turn them into reality.

4. Visionaries are practical

However dreamy they might be depicted, visionaries are basically very practical people, as they don’t remain only at the dream level. They always put ideas into practice and very often success follows (sooner or later).

This is not necessarily due to the fact that their ideas are always amazing (’cause they’re not), but more due to their practical structure. They actually have the clarity to understand if their idea stands a chance in the real world. Sometimes, beautiful, amazing visions are almost impossible to carry out in reality, so a true visionary has to modify his plan or struggle really intensely to make it possible. So it is important to add and mention that a smart visionary has always the openness and willingness to take calculated risks.

5. Visionaries are persistent

Drive and persistence are at the core of success for all of us trying to make it on the big scene. For true visionaries though things are even more straightforward. The challenges they take for themselves are ever greater than the average Joe’s and so they need the kind of boost able to sustain oppositions, bad luck, insufficient resources or dead-ends.

Visionaries need unsurmountable persistence in order to accomplish what they believe in. And this is sometimes due to the fact that, in their enthusiasm rush, they underestimate the difficulty in bringing the dream into reality.

But is it true that visionaries have a weak spot?

All magical powers aside, every superhero has a weak spot too, right? Like Achilles had his heel, for instance. So the visionary, who should be a modern superhero, should have his own bad heel. Examples like Howard Hughes who had OCD or Van Gogh, whose mental disorders were long diagnosed up to the point of hilarious bring into discussion a certain sensitivity and peculiarity of the visionary. Something’s gotta give, right?

Conclusion

Which is why, while people who bring the future into the present are indeed universally acclaimed, they are also often regarded as outsiders who live beyond the normal human experience. In our research, it’s actually not up to them, as the great destiny of such people seems to choose them and not the other way around. When asked, almost all of them admitted that they always felt like they were destined to accomplish great things, even though they might not have known exactly how that was going to happen.

For us at TRISOFT, inspiration is really essential to our work. And so are involvement and creativity. We don’t dare to think of ourselves as visionaries, but we do have the strong belief that we have the ability to carry out our dreams and shoot for the stars. Always.

P.S. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the series — Being an Optimist.