In Chapter 9 of 17 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, leadership philosopher Bijoy Goswami answers "How Are You Becoming Better at Selling a Vision?" He shares the importance of distilling a vision into something simple so it can be more easily evangelized and speaks from experience on how to make it happen. Bijoy Goswami is a writer, teacher, and community leader based in Austin, Texas. He develops learning models, including MRE, youPlusU, and Bootstrap, to help others live more meaningfully. Previously, he co-founded Aviri Software after working at Trilogy Software. Goswami graduated from Stanford University, where he studied Computer Science, Economics, and History.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: How are you becoming better at selling a vision?
Bijoy Goswami: I think that part of it is that that vision has to be distilled, you know, so like if you ask someone, okay, what’s your vision and they kinda go off and they go, oh, it’s like 25 things. It’s like, no that’s not a vision, that’s too broad and it becomes very hard to evangelize a vision because people are, they go well, is it that, is it this, is it motherhood and apple pie and everything else, right?
So, I think part of it is, I feel like it’s like what Michael Angelo said about David. He said, you know, the rock was there; David was in there I had to keep cutting and get all the excess rock. So, ironically I think it’s a process of finding out that one thing like what are you about and yes, you're about 500 things and we can all be, but part of this thing about being locked in who we are is we’re positional, right? There’s a position that we get to take in the world. We can’t take all positions.
So, taking away the positions that are not you or that are not at your core is to me the real process. So, that’s what I've—I feel like I've been doing is articulating lots different positions, right. Oh, MRE, you know maybe later evangelist, Bootstrapping that’s all about different aspects but those aren’t actually they’re all pieces of the puzzle.