Rich Horwath - Strategy For You: Building a Bridge to the Life You Want

Recall yesterday,
think today,
envision tomorrow.

O ne Saturday morning a couple of years ago, my five-year-old son, Luke, bounded down the stairs for breakfast, shouting, Dad, are you ready for the greatest day of your life?

Stunned by the enormity of the question, I enthusiastically replied, Yes! and he proceeded to outline exactly what that day would look like: making chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, creating a new Thomas the Train track layout, hitting golf balls in the backyard, grilling cheese sandwiches for lunch, playing trucks in the sandbox, swinging on the swing set, watching Cars, grilling hot dogs for dinner, and to cap it all off, toasting marshmallows on the bonfire. Indeed, it would arguably be the greatest day of his young life.

We made our way through that beautiful spring day, cleaning pancake batter off the cabinets, searching for golf balls in the woods, burning the first of the grilled cheese sandwiches, and swinging higher and higher into the cloudless blue sky. Later that night, as we told ghost stories around the crackling bonfire, licking gooey marshmallows off our fingertips, Luke said, We did it.

Did what? I asked.

Had the greatest day of our lives, he replied. And we had.

Whether its in your work or your personal life, the opportunity to envision and create your greatest days is within your reach. You can begin the journey by asking yourself two questions:

What would be the greatest day of my life?

How would I get there?

Hiking through the woods, you come across a stream. Its only a few feet deep and fewer than ten feet across. With several hours of hiking ahead, youd like to continue on with dry feet. Fifty yards to the right, you notice a log resting across the stream, several feet above the water. You walk over and place your right foot on the log to test its steadiness. It appears sound, so you step onto the log with both feet and carefully walk across. Hopping off, you look back with a feeling of accomplishment before hiking on.

While it wasnt a death-defying actafter all, you didnt daringly cross a shaky structure hundreds of feet above roaring white rapidsyou did manage to get from where you were to where you wanted to go. And for thousands of years, bridges have helped people do just that. Natural or man-made, a bridge is a structure that spans and provides passage over a gap or barrier, such as a river or roadway. A bridge can be simple, like a basic wooden beam, or it can be complex, like a double-decked bridge. It can be short (e.g., a small covered bridge) or long (such as the record-setting Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, spanning 12,828 feet). It can be old and unstable, or it can be a breathtaking work of art.

In its simplest form, strategy is a bridge for getting from where you are today to where you want to go. Whether in business or in your personal life, strategy is how you plan to get from your current position to your desired goals. A bridge provides passage over a gapsomething thats missing. For many of us, there are gaps in our livesthings that are missing, things that wed like to have more of, such as more time with family and friends, more purposeful work, a healthier lifestyle, and greater spirituality. Strategy can help us fill those gaps.

A bridge also spans barriers. Think about the barriers you face, the obstacles and adversitya difficult coworker, making your financial numbers at work, weakening relationships with your kids, high cholesterol, and so forth. Strategy can help us span and overcome these obstacles.

Depending on their design, most bridges have the following forces distributed throughout their structure: compression (pushing force), tension (pulling force), torsion (twisting of an object), and bending (turning in a particular direction). A poorly designed bridge crumbles under these forces. A well-designed bridge intelligently blends these forces with one another to actually increase its strength and stability.

Like a bridge, a sound strategy for living blends these forces to enable us to withstand adversity and overcome challenges. Without a sound strategy for our lives, we allow all kinds of forces to push, pull, twist, and turn us into mental and emotional pretzels. Our inability to say no pushes us into time-wasting activities; a lack of strategic direction allows us to be pulled down a career path we never wanted; good intentions to volunteer in the community are twisted into negative comments when were not able to meet the time commitments; and were emotionally turned