Ten simple rules to aid in achieving a vision

In a career that now spans 40 years, I have had, on several occasions, opportunities to turn loose ideas into a unified vision and the resources to implement that vision. What do I mean by a vision? A vision, at least in my mind, is the ability to see something important to the future, perhaps before others do. Fulfilling that vision does not have to change the whole world (although that would be nice) but only to impact others in a positive way. Consider what I perceive has been my own visioning to provide some context. My visioning began in the 1990s when, seeing what computation was bringing to the life sciences through work on the human genome project, I was lucky enough to be able to envision and establish a bioinformatics laboratory before the idea became mainstream. In the early 2000s, it was a collective vision for what an exemplar data resource, namely, the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) Protein Data Bank (PDB), should achieve. Around 2005, it was something dear to this readership, a vision for a new journal, PLOS Computational Biology, for which I was cofounder and Founding Editor-in-Chief for 7 years. Around 2007, it was forming a company, SciVee.tv, to envision how digital media other than print could be used to communicate science. Around 2014, as the first Associate Director for Data Science (ADDS) for the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), the vision was how big data could catalyze change in life sciences research. Finally, now in 2019, the vision is how one of the first academic Schools of Data Science should be established and run. These either were, or are, great opportunities to lay out a vision and act upon that blueprint. Not all were successful (PLOS Computational Biology was), but all were learnt from. So, what did I learn? Here is at least part of my life’s lesson, in that now familiar and comfortable Ten Simple Rules format. In this article, the rules are generic and can be considered beyond our own discipline.