It is very hard to think clearly about problems, and it is for this reason — and this reason alone — that people so industriously focus on solutions.

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Muddling: trying to answer unasked questions or resolve undefined problems.

Muddling is the great vice of large organizations who have tons of resources to waste. Big groups of people get together and decide what to do without clarifying why something needs to be done.

People act like the sense that a problem exists and needs solving. Everyone kinds of agrees something needs to be done. Good enough!: what is that something, so we can get to work doing it? Let’s ideate on what to do, and make a plan!

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When I hear someone generalize about “ideas”, assessing the value of ideas versus things, or groups, or actions, or plans, etc., I immediately know that person has an impoverished sense of ideas.

For such people, ideas are just anticipations of things that can be made, groups that can be formed, actions that can be performed, plans that can be executed, etc. Ideas are mere mental images of entities that can be brought into other kinds of existence.

Yet, people like this call themselves “idea people” — and have no idea how wrong they are.

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What is true of “idea people” is doubly true of visionaries.

The world is stuffed with “visionaries” who imagine things, actions, plans, organizations, goals (and other stuff you can picture in your mind) — who then mentally sketch out what they imagine, so that others can picture it in their minds, too. The whole group sees the same image, now.

That’s what a visionary does, right? This is, at best, half right.

But what else could a visionary be?

Are you unable to envision anything beyond that? There it is: that beyond that you cannot envision until the moment you finally glimpse it — that beyond is the visionary’s element.