Occasionally I get labelled as a visionary: We have been able to build a camp with new buildings and the systems and the processes that have made it successful. I have been reading a book, Start With Why, by Simon Sinek…. and I have discovered I am not really the visionary that others have thought me to be. I am the HOW-type of person and not the WHY-type of person.
This was great insight for me.
If you really are the person who casts the original vision for your camp, you have figured out you need a HOW-type of person to put all the pieces together for your vision. I recently visited a camp in Arkansas that had the original visionary person in the 1970’s, but the visionary never found the HOW-type of guy to carry out his vision. His vision still remains on paper, carefully laid out in words and pictures, but not ever executed.
From Simon Sinek’s book, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
“WHY-types are the visionaries, the ones with the overactive imaginations. They tend to be optimists who believe that all the things they imagine can actually be accomplished. HOW-types live more in the here and now. They are the realists and have a clearer sense of all things practical. WHY-types are focused on the things most people can’t see, like the future. HOW-types are focused on things most people can see and tend to be better at building structures and processes and getting things done. One is not better than the other, they are just different ways people naturally see and experience the world. Bill Gates is a WHY-type. So were the Wright brothers. And Steve Jobs. And Herb Kelleher. But they didn’t do it alone. They couldn’t. They needed those who knew HOW.”
“If it hadn’t been for my big brother, I’d have been in jail several times for checks bouncing,” said Walt Disney, only half joking, to a Los Angeles audience in 1957. “I never knew what was in the bank. He kept me on the straight and narrow.” Walt Disney was a WHY-TYPE, a dreamer whose dream came true thanks to the help of his more sensible older brother Roy, a HOW-type.
Great ideas are just that: an idea. HOW-type of people can make them a reality. Got a great program idea that you can’t get off the ground? – find a How-type gal to make it happen.
Peter Drucker wrote: “Vision without execution is delusion!”
beallyoucouldbe 
Great insight and interesting read! Keep being the “how” guy…there are plenty of dreamers out there.
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