Your Vision,Teddy Roosevelt, and the Panama Canal
“Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
Rome wasn’t built in a day. The Panama Canal wasn’t either. It took 33 years, and Teddy Roosevelt to make it happen – and against all odds, I might add.
The Panama Canal, like everything else, started with a vision. Something that not only filled a need, but would change the way people viewed their worlds, how they lived in it and how they conducted business. It made lives better. If that vision rings a familiar bell to you, it should. You share that vision too, albeit on a smaller scale.
Let me give you the back story. Before the Panama Canal was completed 100 years ago, it took cargo ships an average of 67 days to transport goods between New York to California, because they had to navigate around Cape Horn to reach their destination. Imagine how long it took European vessels to transport their own goods to our west coast or the west coast of South America.
Having a waterway that would link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had been a vision of great minds and extraordinary talents, going back to the 1500’s. The French took a stab at it in 1881, but it was a disaster from the get-go. Over 22,000 lives were lost due to construction accidents, malaria and yellow fever. After 18 years of mismanagement, misappropriation of funds, financial disasters and political corruption, it went bankrupt and wasted away for another 6 years before it went on the market $109,000,000.
It took Teddy Roosevelt’s fierce determination and tens of millions in additional dollars paid to countries, railroads, engineers and laborers, to get it off the ground. He fought battles here at home and in Central America to get it to work. His teams literally moved mountains, and personally, he risked his own political legacy because he believed in the validity of his vision. It turned into a public relations nightmare, but when he succeeded in completing it 10 years later, the world, and its economy were forever changed for the better. He was a hero.
In today’s world, when we look at highly successful people, they do seem to dream bigger than the rest of us. But reality scales. Our vision can be a big or small. It’s our choice. It’s our vision, and it’s our belief, passion and commitment to it that ultimately makes it happen. We don’t have to shoot for the moon, if all we need is a star. We just need to aim high enough to stretch ourselves, learn and let the process guide us.
What motivated the success of the Panama Canal was Roosevelt’s ability to determine and implement the proper steps to bring the vision to life. Those steps are as valid today as they were 100 years ago.
How do we know? A vision is viable if it taps into common human needs and serves a larger purpose. In other words, it’s not about you. It’s about whose needs you’re serving. Whether it’s a government, business, organization, or just plain people, you get buy in when you demonstrate that you can:
- Make them more money
- Save them more time
- Make their lives easier. They can stop wasting time and money on things they don’t want or can’t to do themselves
- Help them feel better about themselves
To that end, Teddy’s sales pitch was in the bag. The Panama Canal hit the nail on the head in all categories.
But as a strategic leader, he knew something else, that would insure his success. Always start with the end in mind. Then, go back to square one and work your way up, using lessons learned from the past and proactively build from there. In Teddy’s case, square one, was taking care of the mosquito issue that took the lives of most of the casualties of the French’s first attempt at construction.
Realistically, our dreams aren’t as lofty, but they don’t have to be. They just need to be big enough to stretch our capacity for growth, and strategic enough to foster the amount of growth we want to assume. Sometimes we’re reluctant to verbalize them because once we do, we’re committed, and it’s hard to take that first step. The deal is, though, unless we begin, they’ll always remain impossible dreams. Our little secret goes no where no where unless we take action. Only then can we turn vision into reality.
What are you waiting for?
”If you think something is impossible, don’t disturb the person doing it.”
– Albert Einstein