How I finally got my mission
December 2, 2007
I’ve been pondering for a while, on how personal my stories here should get and very nearly decided that they shouldn’t be all too personal (I feel so.. exposed ;-) ), but in the end I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t talk about things I find interesting, personal or not.
So that leads me to this (long!) post. Personally, I am not a religious person, I don’t believe in anything really supernatural; an after-life or personal deity. For me that means that I believe I have one life, and that this life is all the more precious because it is the only one I’ll ever have. It also means that I don’t think we have a predefined destiny or goal. In this post I’ll try to explain how I got mine.
This gives full control of a life to the person leading it, and it gives the option to determine your own goal/mission/meaning. A great opportunity, but what should that mission be?
I’ve thought about that for ages, always having some ideas about what I feel is most important in my life, but I never got around to actually writing something like a mission statement. My experience: writing something like that holds something of a Catch-22:
- It feels like a huge task and so it’s hard to actually start writing it;
- When you are writing it, it feels so important (you’re deciding what you want your goals te be after all), that it’s hard to be satisfied and actually stop and finalize it
A few months ago I started working on this, first thinking about what should definitely be in my mission statement, after some thinking I settled on these aspects:
- Something about my philosophy;
- What kind of life I want and don’t want;
- What kind of person I want to be;
- What I want to do (tangible goals);
- What kind of people I want in my life.
Not likely to be a short text huh? So, where to start? Well, I tried to fill in these points.
Philosophy
I see my philosophy as a kind of optimistic secular humanism. I believe in people, I believe that we live in societies and that what we contribute to that society is a great measure of our live. I also believe that if anyone is to judge what we do, it should be the people close to us.
The kind of life I want
This was actually most easily defined by me by saying what I don’t want: I always try to fight a very common lifestyle here in the Netherlands: People wake up, they go to work, go home and sleep on the couch, eat, and sleep in bed. That eat-pee-sleep routine would be horror!
The person I’d like to be (actions and values)
The tricky part, everyone has values and everyone is able to name a few of them, but it gets harder when you try to really prioritize them. Is integrity more important than loyalty? And honesty more important than empathy? It’s almost an impossible task. What I did, being the geek that I am, I put my values in a decision matrix with the values on both rows and column heads. That way every cell is a crossing point between to values, In the cell I wrote the value that I found more important. I then counted the number of times a certain value won and ordered the list accordingly.
It’s quirky; strange and slightly ludricous.. but it worked ;-)
My list of most important values in order of decreasing importance was: Integrity, Meaningful relationships, Legacy, Honesty, Loyalty, Personal development.
Tangible goals
A not too vague list of things I really want to achieve :-)
What kind of people I want in my life
That was easy.
So… that gave me enough to go and write something that at least hopefully sounds somewhat intelligent and not too pretentious :-) The final result… will be in the next post ;-)
(To be continued)
Image by me, on Flickr
Comments
3 Responses to “How I finally got my mission”
Got something to say?
You have got some good values; I believe you can stick to them!
I find it interesting the “atheist” track of mind. Not believing in the supernatural is basically on the same level as truly believing in the supernatural. Both are not based on any facts neither are they scientifically proven to be 100% true.
I have some DVD’s you should watch my friend. You’ll enjoy them.
btw. liked the values bit. ;)
Hey Gabe!
It’s not like I’m fundamentalistic in it :-) I do think there’s lots of stuff we don’t understand. Stuff that we feel is very strange or even spooky, but that doesn’t have to be supernatural. And I believe none of it is supernatural (defined as in: contradicting scientific laws of nature)
It’s like people watching lightning a few hundred years ago, they thought it was supernatural or even magic… now we know better.
It’d be cool to watch the DVDs, the only ones I refuse to watch are “What the bleep..” and “The Secret”… Can’t stand all the fallacies in them ;-)
Cheers and thanks for the comments!