STEP I
ENVISION
The first step in the EDIT process is Envision, and it begins with looking back at where you have been and assessing where you are in your journey now. This step gives you a realistic context to begin creating your unique vision. It also helps you consider and answer questions such as these:
• What brought you here?
• Who helped you arrive at this point?
• Were you just lucky, or did you have specific skills that helped you push forward?
Before you dream, apply critical thinking to what is or isn’t working in your career so you can be strategic about your objective. Critical thinking includes conceptualizing, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information you gathered from observation, experience, reflecting, reading. That evaluation serves then as a guide to what you believe and what you will do. In Chapter 1, I challenge you to embark boldly on your journey as a winner—because that’s exactly what you are. You have superpowers that others don’t have. You have connections that others don’t have. You are unique in how you think, how you relate to others, and in how you will win. I mentioned in the Introduction that most products and services continually improve in order to remain viable and relevant. Continuous improvement is how companies win, and that’s how you will win. In companies all around the world, the leaders who look at improving and ensuring relevance of products and services that are used in the market are called product managers. They understand the strengths and weaknesses of the product as it is perceived or used by the customers. They look to ensure customers have a great customer experience with that product or service. They know how other similar competitive products are advancing in the market or are gaining the most market share and price. They know when their product is becoming obsolete, and they work with stakeholders, such as R&D and operations, to design and manufacture new versions of the product or even a brand-new product that leapfrogs other competitive products.
With EDIT, you will look at yourself as a product of sorts—a product that has features as well as strengths and weaknesses, that has value in the market, that has “coopetition” (those peers that cooperate with you to help the company win, but may also be your competition for a promotion), and that has a set of customers who have come to rely on you. You are a product that has a market that is continually experiencing you—whether that market is your boss, your team, your business partners, or your family.
What is experiencing you like? You know how much your compensation is, or your market value, and if you don’t stay relevant and continue to reinvent yourself, you as a product could become obsolete and discontinued and your value diminished, as a product would. To help ensure you remain relevant as a product, you will engage in this EDIT as a product manager to define who you will be as a new version of your product. I’ll call you product manager from time to time, starting in Chapter 1. As product manager, you will not only manage the strategy or vision of your personal transformation; you will also manage it as an EDIT project that you will execute and own—you will be creating plans, calling the plays on your new product transformation project, setting due dates, gathering resources, measuring the status of your plans, and iterating on them. You will not be a bystander but rather an active participant and manager. You are and will always be empowered to drive outcomes that will get you closer to your purpose and your objectives.
In Chapter 2, you will learn how to use a metric I call the Five Fs—faith, family, fitness, finances, and furthering career—to ensure that you have thought through the impact of your objective on your key areas of life. This way, you will not make the mistake of attaining an objective that fulfills one area but undermines the others.
Finally, in Chapter 3, I’ll show you how to commit to yourself to meet your newly identified objective, even if or when it gets challenging. You may have been stopped by other people’s limitations or viewpoints, but this chapter will inspire and equip you to create and stand in new possibilities of your own.