Here are 5 Big Ideas + 5 journal questions + 5 tips to help you figure out your mission in life.
Video by Optimize
Key Takeaways
How to Figure Out Your Mission
1. Purpose Vs. Mission
The basic idea is there is a difference between your purpose and your mission.
- We all have the same purpose, which is to connect to our highest selves. We’ve got to plug into something bigger than ourselves.
- If you’re not plugged into something bigger than yourself, than none of the other stuff matters. Your mission is irrelevant if you’re not living your purpose.
- You’ve got to first connect to the highest within yourself. Plug in, then you can most fully shine and express your unique self most fully in service to your family and the world via your specific mission
- We’ve got to start with our purpose.
2. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic
- As you create your mission, don’t focus on the extrinsic stuff.
- Most people get lost. They’re seduced by our culture, which says it’s all about fame, wealth and hotness. It’s not. If you’re going after that predominantly, you will not feel fulfilled.
- Scientists say these people who are going after extrinsic goals are less psychologically stable than people going after intrinsic goals—which include relationships, growth, and making a contribution.
- Make sure as you figure out your mission, you’re focusing on what’s going to serve these intrinsic goals.
3. Signature Strengths
Virtues, classic philosophers ideas on how to achieve happiness. They say we need to live with virtue. Modern day science agrees. We need to live with virtue and they’re helping us figure out how we can put our virtues into action via signature strengths.
- If we want to figure out our mission, we’ve got to figure out how we put our virtues into action.
- Scientists identified six primary virtues that they’ve been broken out into 24 sub virtues.
- The six primary virtues are: wisdom, courage, love, justice, temperance, spirituality, and they break those out into twenty four distinct virtues what they call signature strengths.
- Take the time to understand your signature strengths. Check out authentic happiness.com or just Google signature strengths virtues in action and take the test discover your strengths.
- Create a calling description where rather than a job description, you write out how are you going to use your signature strengths often, which is the cornerstone of positive psychology and the science of happiness and flourishing is you use these strengths often in service to something bigger than yourself, giving yourself to the world.
4. Job Vs. Career Vs. Calling
As we create our mission, we move from having a job, where we’re just worried about making money > to having a career, where we’re worried about climbing the corporate ladder, impressing people and getting names after our initials stuff like that > to having a real calling.
- A calling is all about taking these strengths and giving them, using them in service to the world.
- Create a calling description where you take these strengths and and put them into a calling description.
5. What you love, what you can be great at and what the world needs.
Jim Collins in Good to Great tells us what makes great businesses great is they identify their Hedgehog concept, the thing that they focus on well. That works for individuals as well as it does for businesses.
With this concept there are three circles and you want to find the nexus point of these three circles.
1. What do you love to do? It’s an important question. What are you passionate about?
2. What can you be great at? There’s some things that we love that we’re never really going to be great at, but what can you be really, really great at? Perhaps even the best in the world.
3. What does the world need? you could say what is the world willing to pay for?
5 Journal Questions
1. What is is that you, and only you can do?
2. How can you use your greatest gifts, in greatest service to the world?
3. If you had all the time, and all the money in the world, what would you do?
4. What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
5. What are you most proud of? What will you be most proud of?
5 Tips
1. Be willing to experiment. “All life is an experiment. The more experiments, the better.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. Be willing to make mistakes. A mistake is just like a mis take, it’s not a big deal. “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” -Winston Churchill
3. Follow your bliss and your grunt. Work diligently, patiently, and persistently.
4. Want to stress yourself out? Be impatient and make it all about you.
5. Remember your purpose. Ultimately way more important than your mission.