What is a visionary?

When I was first asked this question in my CIE L1 course(A wonderful course offered by my university on entrepreneurship) it made me think. My immediate first thought was: Steve Jobs. But it didn’t answer the question of what a visionary person really is. This post is meant to be a reflection on this question.

I’ve asked various people on their thoughts regarding this, along with the answers I listened to in class, most people tend to use words like “future”, “ideas”, “innovation”. But that didn’t really make sense to me. Anyone can be an ideas man, innovation may well be part of being a visionary, but a video I watched by Mark Manson on youtube defined what a visionary is to me at least in the most concise manner possible.

A correct Contrarian.

This is a pretty good and concise way to look at it in my opinion. In this day and age we have a lot of contrarians, now I don’t mean the normal kind of contrarian here I mean someone that thinks “No this is not how the world is going to move forward” and are correct about it. These are the people who have incredibly, incredibly different opinions on how the future would look like, and are correct about it.

Being a contrarian is pretty easy. Being a correct one however, is not(in the broad context of the future that is).

It takes a lot for a person to be told by everyone that they’re wrong about whatever idea they have but for them to stick to their guns even if people keep telling them they are wrong or will fail in whatever “crazy” venture they’re undertaking. It can get hard to be told by most people about it.

For a visionary to be successful, they’ve got to also as explained by Mark that they have to execute on it massively. They’re quite literally disagreeing with almost everyone and putting their neck out this way and also quite literally putting their money where their mouth is.

A “visionary” in my opinion isn’t just an ideas man, or an “innovator” those adjectives are just a small piece of the puzzle. Also important to note is that these “visionaries” don’t do it all by themselves. Often times they have a huge supporting cast thats equally every bit important as the visionary. But pop culture generally tends to fixate on the myth of the eccentric visionary.