I don’t know how many of you remember the movie “Cocktail” with Tom Cruise. It was about two bartenders who wanted to get rich by opening a bar in Bermuda. A brilliant plan, right? Well, that was back in 1982 when the US was on a Wall Street high and Tom Cruise hadn’t jumped on any couches yet. I guess we were all a lot more optimistic back then so the premise wasn’t all that hard to buy. In any case, that movie marked two firsts for me: my first The Beach Boys song and my first exposure to the entrepreneurial spirit.
There’s a scene in the movie where Tom Cruise and Elisabeth Shue are lounging around a 5-star resort talking about how they are surrounded by “million-dollar” ideas. Someone had to come up with toothpicks, and the plastic thing they used to wrap the toothpicks, and someone had to think up shoelaces and those plastic things at the end of them. And someone owned the trucks and that planes that got all of those ideas all the way to Bermuda. All of those people, in theory at least, were millionaire entrepreneurs: an idea, execution, profit. So is that all it takes? A brilliant idea?
When talking to real life entrepreneurs the word “vision” trumps the word “idea” almost 10 to 1. To most people these words are synonymous and interchangeable. To me they have a strict hierarchy because an idea serves a vision.
A vision is aspirational; it’s a starting point for something greater. By definition, a vision is conducive to action. An idea, at its core, is a solution to a problem.
In the movie example, the Tom Cruise character has the vision of what he wants this bar to be: he wants to build a place where people go to have fun and enjoy life with a simple cocktail. He wants to do what he loves and finance a life that he enjoys. This vision is what propelled him to go after his dream.
On the other hand we have the Idea Man, the business partner played by Bryan Brown, whose entire contribution to the plot is having the idea to open a bar in Bermuda. He had the idea, Tom Cruise carried the vision.
Although this is admittedly a simplistic view of things, it did help me understand the difference between the two. What separates vision and ideas? What separates the dreamer from the entrepreneur?
The answer is: very little. Entrepreneurs not only need a ripe idea to bring to life, they need to know what the endgame is going to look like. The ability to visualize and articulate an end result and bring people around it is what takes a vision from seed to success.
I don’t know how many of you remember the movie “Cocktail” with Tom Cruise. It was about two bartenders who wanted to get rich by opening a bar in Bermuda. A brilliant plan, right? Well, that was back in 1982 when the US was on a Wall Street high and Tom Cruise hadn’t jumped on any couches yet. I guess we were all a lot more optimistic back then so the premise wasn’t all that hard to buy. In any case, that movie marked two firsts for me: my first The Beach Boys song and my first exposure to the entrepreneurial spirit.
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