"We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are."
- Max De Pree

I often come across quotes that are to the point and rather obvious in their meaning. I also read quotes that frankly don't make much sense to me at all. Then there are the ones that seem to have a straight-forward message, but if I dig a little deeper, I realize that there are certain questions I must answer before I can truly determine the meaning. The quote above seems to be the latter of the three, where we first need to identify "what we need to be" before we can see "what we are" and what we need to do to get there.

In my business, we've always felt that in order to achieve what we were after, we needed to be setup as a large corporate type company. From the early days when we incorporated, we saw a vision that had infinite possibilities. We saw large companies that we wanted to be like and set ourselves up similar to how they were set up. We may have been small back then, but we knew what we were, and what we needed to become. Fast forward more than 12 years later and we're certainly much bigger than we were in the beginning. With 20 employees and a continually growing customer-base, there's no doubt we're still headed in the direction of the larger corporations, but we sure do still have a long way to go! Although we still believe in our strategy to grow and scale, looking back may teach us that we've found ourselves at times acting bigger than we were, and ultimately making certain initiatives much harder on ourselves than we needed to. So although knowing "what we need to be" is critical, we also need to understand "what we are" before we can map out the appropriate steps to proceed.

In our personal lives, the makeup seems to be much different. Many times human beings just let life happen to them, only looking back to regret much of what they haven't accomplished. There are some people in life that may seem "blessed," and it appears great things always come to them, but rarely to us. For any of us, life is what you make of it. There are certainly strokes of good luck, and bad, certain things that may come easier to one over another, or sometimes entire phases that just plain seem unfair. At the end of the day, it's how you perceive things in life, how you respond to fortune and misfortune, and how hard you're willing to work to make things happen. One of the keys to being able to have the right outlook on life is to determine "what you need to become." By doing that, not only will you see "what you are," but you will also have a clearer vision of what you need to do to become that person. I've structured most of my life, like we did our business, by trying to emulate those that I admired, the people I wanted to be like, and the life I wanted to live. So far I feel pretty fortunate to have what I have, so I feel the strategy has certainly worked for me and can work for you.

It's not easy to achieve something that you don't realize you're after. Figure out what you are, and what you feel you need to become, then take the necessary steps to make sure you don't remain the same