Tricking The Giant: Setting The Vision
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As children, stories made us believe that after conquering your goal, you get to live happily ever after. They didn’t make it clear that after a journey of tricking giants, we’ll have to remember the vision that we started out with. After reaching the top of the glass mountain, Bill Steirle and Tom continues the story of the drummer and what he has to do in order to reach the ever after. This episode covers the necessity of setting the vision and not straying from it. Talking about the real-life scenarios of when leaders experienced having the vision and the effects of ignoring it, Bill and Tom also discuss strategies on how this mindset can be used to help solve modern problems.
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Watch the episode here
We are trying to get our hero off of the Glass Mountain and we talked last time about setting the vision as one big part of that. Help us get from where we are here on top of the Glass Mountain and what comes next here.
Politically speaking, getting off the Glass Mountain means is that you’ve got to hold on to a vision and stay after the vision. That’s going to make a big difference. If you get caught in the details, if you get caught in how you’re going to get there, if you’re not building a relationship with the voter, you’re going to get stuck getting off this mountain. You’re going to get stuck on accessing the greater wealth or the greater value because that’s what all wealth represents is value.
Our hero has taken the hag and thrown her into the fire and she burned up. In a mythic tale that doesn’t mean the hag goes away, it means she’s being transformed. We might get another version of her later in the story. Another version of obstacles, just because you defeat the villain, it doesn’t mean that the hero wins. This is one of the major mistakes that our movie and storytelling deal with. They leave the hero or heroine at the end with no problems at all, live happily ever after in this relationship. Now that you’ve got pass this big thing, smooth sailing for the rest of your life.
Tom, have you had smooth sailing ever since you’ve had your wedding? Have you had smooth sailing ever since you made an agreement with a client or a contact? The answer is no, there’s a whole new set of obstacles that come up. Now we have our drummer who talks to his new girlfriend/relationship person that he came to rescue and she says, “Let’s get off this mountain.” They decide that they’re going to go to the village where his parents are, where he grew up, they’re going to follow his family name.
They’re not following her family name. She’s not going back to her parents. She’s going back to his parents. Why? Because he has to claim his family name or his family identity.
The Democrats have to do that and regrettably the Republicans do too. They need to come up and they need to return to their family name, the values that got them there. It’s where it goes, you can’t talk about the other side being bad. The other side is in the wreckage, there are fire and flames, the Republican Party is in flames. What they say next is they can’t believe that this party is going to stand for this because they’ve burned the fringes of what they stood for, conservative values, lowering the debt. Meanwhile, what they did was tax benefits for the rich, exploding the debt. That’s what they did.
Their entire identity has been turned upside down and twisted by Donald Trump, who captured the attention of enough people to elect him in the office and they didn’t want it. They were in disbelief this was happening.
You’ve got to hold on to a vision. Staying after the vision is going to make a big difference.
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They had no ability to deal with a person that was an advanced marketing and selling person. When I call him advanced, I don’t mean that he’s good at it, I mean that he is great at messaging ambiguity. When you message ambiguity, the believer who’s already bought in, because they felt good about you in the past, and they’ve seen your name recognition everywhere, you must be successful. Meanwhile, we’re discovering how in debt his Doral property is. We’re discovering how the place in Ireland has been losing money. We’re discovering the numbers of his ability to execute and that people are dumping the properties. People are dumping stock prices. They know that many of the stockholders are dumping fossil fuel, $10 million or something like that. They say, “This is the end of this guy’s road.” With the end of this guy’s road, it’s the end of this kind of stock.
This kind of stock is not stable. They know the fluctuation; they don’t want to deal with the fluctuation being up and down. They were good with it being up there. They’re out, so what if they’re losing a couple of little bit of bumps between here and the things. They’ll get back in, they can wait, they’ll get back in if he gets re-elected because it’ll be stable for four more years. The pollution will stay for four more years. Getting off the Glass Mountain, our hero and heroine have got to take a dramatic change, imagine themselves in this new place. The woman for her part, she turns the gold ring and heads in the direction with him. They automatically appear on the outside of his village. From the Glass Mountain towards the vision they want to go to. Now they’re there, she looks at him and he’s got the bag of precious metals and gems that the hag has been collecting all these years.
He’s gotten the investment he needs to pay for the rest of his campaign. Now he’s got to work on relationships. Now he’s got to build the relationship and here’s what the woman says, “Go see your mom and dad by yourself. I’ll wait here. I’ll stay in a hut outside the outskirts of the village. When you go see your mom and dad remember this small detail. Only kiss them on one cheek, you do not kiss them on both cheeks. If you kiss them on both cheeks, you will forget all about me and you will forget all about this adventure.” There’s a problem here.
As he goes and greets his parents, he’s so excited and so delighted to see them, that without thinking about it, he takes his mom and he kisses his mom on both cheeks. He takes his dad and he kisses his dad on both cheeks and they said, “Son, where have you been? It’s so great that you’ve been back.” “I don’t know. I have this bag.” “My son has come back as a wealthy man.” He needs to marry somebody of his stature. Somebody is in the wealth class and so they find a bride for him. He’s in a daze, he forgot all about her, she’s out at the edge. They start preparing for this wedding. You see how the story completely turns, no one thought that this is part of the story. I’m like, “How the hell did he forget about this thing?”
He had all this experience.
Welcome to the Democratic Party, they forget their values, they forget to keep stalking vision. They get stuck in, “This person wants a plan. This person needs to understand.” As soon as Elizabeth Warren did her plans and started laying her plans up, she already established her credibility or smartness. Get off the damn plan and get back to the vision. “Stop it. I have a plan for that. Thank you. You have a plan for this, yourself for that, I have a plan for this.” What the hag does is, “What’s your next plan? How are you going to deal with this complex issue?” They put another force in front of her, “What are you going to do about homelessness? What are you going to do about this? What do you do about education?”
It gets to the point where inevitably she is not going to be able to articulate a plan for everything that makes sense to people. They’re going to keep trying and trying until they find one that trips her up.
The hag is going to look for a mistake, something that you cannot do. It’s too complex because you don’t have a team built there, the vision is not completely clear. It’s like trying to change the school system for God’s sake. It’s the same school system, they were using the same system from the industrial age. What the hell are we doing? It’s a factory-based model. Put people in chairs, give them a stream of information. It’s to prepare people to work in factories, that’s what our instructional system is built for. People don’t work in factories anymore. We need team building, collaborative, creative, emotionally-tolerant human beings that can deal with a little bit of, “This is my idea.” They got to be able to deal with saddle conversations. They got to be dealt with, “We got to chop this project down.” They got to deal with stuff like that, you just do.
Now that he forgot all about it, the parents find him a bride. They’re preparing for a wedding. They prepare a wedding chamber and they prepare three days of parties before the wedding. The woman at the outside of the outskirts knows something’s wrong because he didn’t come back. She goes to find him. She goes into the village and she knows that if she goes up to see him that won’t work. If she sees him face-to-face, no, he has to wake up first because if he sees her, he’ll not believe the vision. He’ll think that she’s a ghost, she was unreal before, she’s still unreal now.
He has to wake up to his own vision, he has to wake up to why did he come there? He has to wake that up. This is what she does, they’re throwing party number one, she goes into her bag and she has these three magic acorns. There’s a different dress inside each acorn. She opens up the first acorn and inside this acorn has a dress that shines like the sun it’s made out of gold. She puts the dress on and she goes to the bachelorette party with this dress. The bride sees this dress and she says, “I will give anything for that dress.” The woman goes, “This thing? You’d give anything?” She goes, “Yeah.” She says, “This is what I want. I want to sit outside the wedding chambers.”
The wedding chamber being where they get married?
No, the wedding chamber where they’re consummating.
A honeymoon suite, I want to make sure we’re going to be clear on that. That’s a strange request.
It is a strange request, but she wants to sit outside. When the bride promises that for the dress and the exchanges made and the deals made, the bride thinks to herself, “If this woman is going to sit outside, let me deal with him.” She starts feeding him wine and liquor. The wedding party is in this entire hotel too. The bachelor party happens the way it does, the bachelorette party have this, this is a fund’s thing.
Now all of a sudden, they are in bed together, the bride soon-to-be, they haven’t got married because they’re doing it opposite in this story. The woman is sitting outside the door and she starts singing, but because the bride fed the groom a bunch of alcohol, he doesn’t hear the singing. The singing is, “Drummer, drummer wake up. Drummer, drummer remember where we’ve been, remember the forest of giants. Remember the Glass Mountain, remember. Wake up.” He couldn’t he was drunk. The rest of the people sleeping heard the song, but the bride had already got him so drunk he couldn’t hear the song.
A pretty smart bride, so far.
The second night there was another party. This time she opened up the second acorn and there it was, the dress that shimmered like the moon, it was made of silver. It’s as mysterious as ever. She shows up at the bachelorette party with all of the girls and the bride and their friend and they’re all having a great time. The bride looks and she goes, “That dress is absolutely beautiful. I’ll give anything for that second dress.” “I want another night in front of the door.” “Is that what you want? I’ll make the change.” Sure enough she does that. The song sings, “Lover, lover drummer, drummer please wake up. Remember the giant, remember where you’ve been. Remember the hag, remember the fish, remember the pond. Remember where you’ve been and what it took to get here. Remember the vision.”
Did Obama ever forget the vision of hope? He was a year in and some of the bumper stickers that came out after he was a year in. How’s that hopey, changey thing going now? It wasn’t going well because they were stuck in a fight over changes to the Medicare system. The Republicans were stalling and voting and keeping away any vote on the new healthcare system that the people wanted. It’s not like the Republicans or the Democrats are doing a very good job.
Although they were coming to the table with a wall proposal with, “This is the amount that we’re willing to pay and this is prudent and these are the things that we can go for. These are the things we can sell to our constituents.” Donald Trump goes, “No, I want the whole wall.” He’s making the same mistake and he keeps trying to feed his base alcohol. That’s what’s happening. He’s trying to get his base to go to sleep and say, “The Commander-in-Chief is in charge here.” The rallies are like that. He’s getting them drunk on the anticipation and the badness of the other. It’s hard to watch, but it’s what we’re all listening to because we’re captive to these two parties in bed with each. It’s hard.
She sings all night and it doesn’t make a difference. Wakes up the next day, because he’s been drinking again, she’s been feeding him, she puts little stuff in there or whatever to knock him out. That’s what a counter-message does, that’s what an anticipatory message does, it causes the base to go to sleep. One of the things that happen next is when about midday, before they get ready for their third night at partying. The wedding’s going to be on the fourth day. His friends have been listening to singing for two nights.
They’ve been listening to the story of what he’s done and where he’s been. They say to him, “Tonight when you go to bed you better wake up. There’s somebody singing outside your door. There’s something happening out there. We heard this thing, ‘Wake up. Wake up to yourself. Wake up to who you are.’”
From this part of the year on, the Democrats are, “This is who we are. This is what we’re standing for. We’re not standing for that, we’re standing for this,” we’re standing for this in such a way we’re not going to be nice about it. We’re standing for this. That’s a little bit about the setup. We are standing for this. Did Hillary Clinton do a great job of standing for Stronger Together? No, she did not sell that message and she did not create that vision of Stronger Together.
It was a very hard message to sell because I don’t like that other person over there but still you’ve got to sell compassion and empathy for the other person over there. We’re interested in their values to get the 10% over so you have enough votes to keep the other side out. She didn’t sell it hard enough so she didn’t get the 10% over and they didn’t believe her. They were filled with doubt and skepticism because Donald Trump stoked doubt and skepticism about her health, capabilities, and strengths. She’s a seasoned veteran and he took her out with sizzle and she had a steak.
Why is Joe Biden struggling? The same thing, he’s trying to be nice, he’s head on the holes now. He’s losing ground a little bit. We don’t believe that he could take on that other guy. We need somebody with more fire. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren is looking better. Kamala Harris looked better, but she’s lost her way a bit. She’s trying to rationalize with people from an attorney’s standpoint. They don’t want her in there. If she gets in there, she’ll prosecute the crap out of him. That’s what she knows how to do. They don’t want her in.
There’ll be a place for her and she will get to prosecute them but they don’t want her in. She’ll start going because that’s what her attorney’s mind will do. Some people are going like, “We’re not sure if we want her in because she has an edge. We like the edge, but we’re not sure if we want the edge in charge to pick all the scabs so that the wounds can heal.” We’re not sure if we want that, because she will. What winds up happening is the friends get to the drummer and the drummer decides, “I’m going to listen to my friends, I’m not going to drink so much tonight. In fact, I’m going to skip the wine altogether.” One of his friends told him, “Why don’t you skip the wine altogether because there’s something important happening while you’re asleep.” Sure enough, the third night, the woman comes in with a brand new dress. This dress is sparkling like stars, it’s the most beautiful dress ever, it lights up the bachelorette party.
'Make America Great Again' is “Make America How We Felt in the 1950s,” how our parents felt when they had pride about America.
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Everyone is stunned by this dress and the bride says, “I need that dress too.” She goes, “I’d like another night outside the honeymoon chambers.” The bride tried to get her groom to drink and meanwhile he had to be sneaky, he dumped the wine out. They kept bringing it back and she kept putting stuff in and he had to figure out how not to drink because she was trying to get him to go back to sleep. This is what Trump’s base got to do is they got to wake up. What we’ve got to do is a message, “There’s a better vision for America. The better vision for America is this over here, not the vision that we’ve been following. The vision is going to include strong wall security in our Southern border.” The vision’s going to include the anticipation of being able to feed your family, the anticipation of valued work, the anticipation of Americans don’t want to get retrained as much, we’re struggling a little bit there.
Our older population is struggling a little bit because their habit pattern is they want their parents in America. They want the America of the ‘50s. Quite frankly, I want my parents in America. The cost of living allowed my mom and dad to raise eight kids. I could never get through eight kids right now, best I could do is three. It’s hard because the cost of living prevents population growth, which is not a terrible thing but it’s not a great thing if somebody wants to live into the vision of life. Some people don’t want to live into a vision of life like that.
She starts singing outside the door, “Drummer, drummer remember where we’ve been. Remember how we first met, remember the quest that you went on. Remember the forest of giants. Remember how to get to the Glass Mountain, remember the hag. Remember how you got food and rest when you needed it. Remember your vision, remember what you came here for, remember that.” He hears the singing on the inside, he wakes up, it took him a little bit, wakes up 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, he goes like, “There is something going on outside. Yes, I am remembering.” When he opens the door and he sees her sitting there singing, lamenting, crying for him to wake up. We’re in that same space as Americans. We’re trying to cry for the inclusiveness that we’ve been standing for the last couple of hundred years. We’re trying to wake up to that. The difficulty in waking up to that is you’ve got to recognize that you’ve been asleep, that you got taken a bit. There are some people that don’t want to wake up to that, they want the ‘50s version of America, post-World War II, where we were great back then. Make America great again is make America like how we felt in the 1950s, how my parents felt and they had pride in America.
They wanted to swallow a bitter pill, they need to have some sugar to help it go down or something.
Yeah and the sugar is not very helpful because it’s making them obese. That’s a whole other problem. It’s like they don’t want to. Bill Maher did a wonderful thing about Americans that don’t want to take accountability and responsibility for their health and diet. It’s causing their health issues, their diabetes. They want the doctors in the medical system to fix it. That’s problematic. There’s got to be some accountability on the individual level. Some people don’t want accountability. They think, “He can fix this for me because this is the problem and the solution the way I see it, it’s the bad Democrats that are doing and getting in the way of that.”
Meanwhile, if we do want a healthy country that everyone’s taking care of it, we need more comprehensive education and health messages. Regrettably, regulations on toxic food, we can’t make it available for people to eat crap that’s going to cost us millions and billions of dollars in the future. We can have that available for them, it can’t be available. We, the adult people in this country, need to protect the child adults in this thing from costing us money and costing our nation in the future. If there was toxic gas spread across America that was an attack from a foreign nation, there’d be a military effort to stop that toxic gas. There’s toxic food being provided in every grocery store that’s taking us out. It’s a hard message to sell and it’s a hard truth to get at but it’s the truth. Our diet and health are not good.
Some cities and states have tried to regulate it. Even New York City tried to regulate the size of sodas so you don’t drink so much sugar. You’re right though, when it’s a toxic gas it gets more attention. Look at what’s happening with the eCigarettes or the vaping in this country about how so many people have gotten ill from inhaling substances they don’t even know everything that’s in it. Now they’re discovering, “It’s not safer than cigarette smoking like it was sold as.” That’s seen as an immediate health risk by the CDC and they’re going after it. You inhale it, you’re breathing it and looks like smoke. It’s getting more attention than food.
You’re not going to look at chemical three, five and seven, it was passed and it’s called grandfathering, “This was in there in the past, we don’t have to retest it.” It’s like, “We’ve got multiple new chemicals now that are interacting with that chemical.” Our brain doesn’t want to believe that we’re a biological being that’s going to die. It doesn’t want to believe that our brain can’t overcome a toxic chemical when taken in, except for certain toxic chemicals and that’s got to be sold and promoted in a brand-new way.
These are beliefs that change over time. There were ads in the ‘50s that smoking was good for you.
That kind of saturation marketing, there is a gentle shifting but as you and I’ve talked on previous things about the designated driver. The designated driver went from zero, an unknown concept, to a fully-embraced concept. Somewhere between 5 to 10 years, over 88% knew the concept, they knew what it was and knew they had to apply it. Because someone’s going to die over this possibility.
They started applying it, which affected alcohol drinking consumption partly. What it did was change the belief regarding this substance might be fun but it needs to be protected. You need to protect your friends and family members when they’re drinking like this, not to put them behind the wheel.
Let’s get back to finishing this story because this is where it gets interesting. When the drummer sees the woman sitting there and crying and singing, he reaches down pulls her up, they hug each other. He remembers the entire vision of himself, what he went through. It’s remembering what we didn’t and what we’ve done in civil rights and that we’re going to do it again with the current racism that we’re dealing with. Whatever candidate captures that message, “We were like this. We have this problem, but we’re going to do it again the way we did it with civil rights in the past.” Notice I am not picking on anybody, I’m going after the vision of racism. I’m not going to pick on, trying to suppress David Duke. I’m not going to go after and look at what happened at Charlottesville anymore. No, go ahead. I’m not going back there.
You don’t have to accuse the President of being a racist, you don’t have to engage in that debate. You say, “I’m going to solve this problem. I’m going to set this vision.” The implication is and maybe that the President does not set that vision therefore it’s a racist.
I’m not interested in whether or not the President is a racist or not. He might be one of those individuals that still believe that separation is important for Americans and I don’t believe that. Inclusion is important to Americans because that’s what we have, where our better path forward is inclusion. Inclusion is a tough word to sell, I probably wouldn’t pick that word to sell. I would not pick collaboration. I would not play cooperation even though those two are important words. I’d pick hectic in a second. This is what being in a relationship with your neighbor looks like. You may not like all the things your neighbor says but you can work with them.
Who’s that candidate? I’m voting there, not the one that keeps calling my guy a racist. Stop it candidates. Stop calling him a racist. Now he’s there, so we could get to closure here because this is important. Now they wake up, the wedding party wakes up at the same time. Everybody’s in the hallway saying, “He woke up and heard his story.” Down the hall his parents are coming and he says to his parents, “This is my bride, she’s not my bride.” This is my bride for tomorrow. She is a garment bride. She looks good on the outside, all she wants to do is look good on the outside. Isn’t that Trump? We married the garment bride. That’s what America did with their vote; they married the garment bride. They didn’t marry the real America, to the vision.
They married a facade.
They did the celebration the next day. They had the bigger party that they needed to have. The two of them were reunited. The vision and the journey need to be reunited. The vision, this is what it looks like. The journey is what it took to get here. You don’t go back and say, “Here’s what the founders.” Who knows what the founders did. They set a vision over there and they set a guideline for what the journey is going to look like.
They said, “We’re not going to deal with slavery.” The founders didn’t deal with slavery because they own them. It’s too complex of an issue. It’s too much stuck in our economy. “We need slavery to build this economy,” they didn’t say it that way. They didn’t do it. It was slavery but low paid wages. Isn’t that what we’re going for foreign nations to do? We’re taking advantage of low paid wages in other countries. Aren’t we using a form of slavery in a different country?
We are.
Let’s pay attention to the journey. Let’s pay attention to the vision and not talk about that truth. Why not talk about that truth?
Because we feel junkie talking about that truth. We need to manage the vision of America not getting hijacked by a garment bride.
Tom this has been a heck of an episode.
It has been a heck of a journey of several episodes going through. I appreciate the real message about setting the vision and that’s the big real picture and message here. Everybody can argue facts and it’s a cliché but I’m going to say it anyway. It’s something that I learned over and over in business, you can get to a point when you’re arguing the facts and cliché is that the Titanic is sinking and you’re rearranging the deck chairs on the surface to be in the right line and it doesn’t matter. You can rearrange those deck chairs all day long, all night long and that ship is still going down at the end of the day.
The vision needs to be re-cultivated and recaptured by one of the candidates. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie have a better shot at the vision because they have a certain amount of strength going like this. Elizabeth gets stuck in detail and trying to explain the vision and she’s got to stop that and to try to teach the vision, she’s definitely got to stop that. She’s a professor here, she has a vision and it’s much more creative.
That’s problematic. You have other people that seem to be very good at setting vision like Pete Buttigieg, not getting enough traction yet and can he get enough traction. Will he get there? I don’t know.
He’s becoming interesting instead of compelling. He’s an interesting candidate but he’s not a compelling candidate and he struggled there. Tom, there’ll be more to come on this one. I’m looking forward to our next one where we’re going to be able to set truth on the right keel of perception and perspective. We need to set the keel so the course of vision can catch the wind that it needs to.
That wraps up the whole Glass Mountain story mythical tale. Thank you so much, Bill. I appreciate it. We look forward to another great episode next time.
Thanks.
