- Compiled and written by Entrepreneurial Business School -

Work passion is more than just doing what you can and like.  It’s about having a dream. Successful intrapreneurs tend to have a big dream. The first question to be asked in this regard is: “Who am I and who will I be one day”?

Developing a carefully reasoned answer to this question pushes one to consider what one’s choices and decisions should be and to develop a clearer picture of where you need to be headed over the next 5 to 10 years. The answer to this question begins with the process of carving out a meaningful direction for your life and establishing a strong self-identity.

This picture of what one seeks to do and to become is commonly termed one’s vision and mission.  A vision and mission statement establishes one’s future course and outlines who you are, what you do, and where you’re headed.

If you have establish what your mission and vision is you’ll have to convert this statement of individual meaning, purpose and direction into specific performance targets. It is therefore necessary to set clear goals and objectives: something one’s progress can be measured by.

Action plans serve to operationalise the objectives you have set for yourself.  These plans deal with clear time frames that have more impact on one’s day-to-day activities.

Lastly you also need guidelines to control your behaviour.  In striving towards your vision and mission, not anything is acceptable.  These guidelines that control your behaviour are called values.

Learning to do what you love

The fundamental lesson that all the great achievers teach us is this: Do what you love to do. That’s simple enough. However, sometimes people just don’t believe they could possibly be paid for doing what they love. At other times, they have forgotten what it is they love.  Perhaps the most important thing that prevents people from getting in touch with their mission is this: They just don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to go from their day-to-day goals, values and interests to that one unified direction of excitement and fulfilment – their mission.  It is possible, however, to use a step-by-step series of exercises to assist you in determining your passion in life, and what you were born to achieve in your lifetime.

When most people think about their lives, they tend to acknowledge that actually they have lived their lives in a survival mode.  As we all know, there is a huge difference between merely surviving and fully living.

Maybe being motivated to survive is something you’ve always done. When you think back on your life, there probably have been times when you had to discover a very strong sense of motivation for yourself in order to survive.  Now you can redirect the energy of your survival instinct so that you can use it for going beyond surviving to living – to living the life that you choose (your vision and mission).

To find an exquisite example of passion for life, we need to look no further than Susan Butcher, who raced in the most gruelling and difficult race in the world – the Iditarod Dog Sled Race. The Iditarod race stretches eleven hundred miles across the barren, cold wilderness of Alaska. It lasts ten or more days, and it’s an amazing accomplishment to finish it at all. Susan Butcher has won this race four times.

How did Susan Butcher decide that she was going to be an excellent performer in this field?  In 1975, she was living on the East Coast of the United States.  She was twenty years old, and she didn’t know what to do with her life.  She asked herself, “How can I create a life that includes the two things that I love: wilderness and animals?”  Her answer was to discover her personal passion.  She said, “ I just always loved dogs and all animals, and when my first dog died, I just wanted to replace him.  I ended up buying a husky, and he was six weeks old.”  I thought “wouldn’t it be wonderful to teach him how to pull a sled?”  So I did it as a hobby.  Then four months later, I bought my second husky, and then two months after that, I moved in with a woman who had fifty huskies, and then I started mushing in earnest.

So she decided on dog-sled racing. She kept moving west and north. She ended up in Alaska and built a log cabin to live in. She didn’t have any security in going there and following her dream, but she did it anyway. Now she is the foremost achiever on the planet in her sport – a sport that, up to this time, had been dominated by men.

In the case of Susan Butcher, it is easy to understand the difference between a mission and a goal. Here’s how she describes it:

“A lot of people would look at my life and think it’s a lot of hard work. But for me, it’s a labour of love.”

That’s how you know when you are living your unfolding mission – when pursuing your goals is a labour of love. And it comes from finding your life’s passions.  It is important however, to realise the step-by-step process involved in reaching one’s dreams.  You don’t start with your dream; you live towards it, step-by-step, doing what you love to do.

Another person of achievement, who found and follows his passions in life, is movie director, Steven Spielberg.  More people have seen Steven Spielberg’s movies than those of any other director. He started making movies when he was a child, a mere eight years old. He decided that his mission in life was to be a storyteller through the medium of film. He is constantly creating, because to him, making movies is like playing. This is how Spielberg describes his work:

“In my films I celebrate the imagination as a tool of great creations…. I dream for a living.  Once a month, the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make. Sometimes I think I’ve got ball bearings for brains; these ideas are slipping and sliding across each other all the time. My problem is that my imagination (vision) won’t turn off. I wake up so excited that I can’t eat breakfast. I’ve never run out of energy.”

So Steven Spielberg can be an example to us all of what can happen when you do what you love to do.

Ted Turner is another example of a person who is passionately living a mission. He is the founder of the Goodwill Games, founder of CNN, TNT, and Headline News, and creator of an incredible cable-television empire. In fact, he brought cable television news not only to the United States, but also to the world. He was declared by “Time” magazine as the “Man of the Year” in 1991 for his achievements.

How did he start his mission? After he found out that his father Ed had initiated plans to sell his business, Ted stood up to him at age twenty-four. In this verbal battle, he “threw back all of Ed Turner’s own arguments against quitting in life.” Soon after their argument, his father killed himself with a pistol.  From that moment on Ted “sped forth on a quest from which he would never look back….”

His father’s death prompted him to re-examine his deepest values. Up until then, Turner says, his father’s idea of success had permeated his thinking. “He was the one, really, that I had expected to be the judge of whether I was successful or not….”. This re-examination of what was important created some major shifts in his criteria for success. He said, “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it was that he did wrong. He put too much emphasis on material success. I can tell you, it’s fool’s gold….”

Our deepest tragedies can become a springboard for the next phase of our life. In this case the torturous pain of death motivated him to re-examine his deepest values and principles, and, in fact, to develop some new ones.

Another person who deeply examined his values and principles was a coach, John Wooden.  His UCLA basketball team amassed the greatest winning streak (88 games) in any major sport.  He is the only person enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and coach. During his 27 years at UCLA, his teams never had a losing season.  In his last 12 years they won 10 NCAA championships, including seven in a row. No team in college basketball has even come close to repeating these achievements.

His relentless dedication is legendary. He still has records of every minute of every practice of his twenty-seven years at UCLA. He never talked about winning. “To me success isn’t outscoring someone, it’s the peace of mind that comes from self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best. That’s something each individual must determine for himself.”

By combining his athletic skills, his father’s creed of principles to live by, and a love of people, he became the most admired coach in the world. How did he formulate his mission? This is the creed given to him by his father, which made up a key part of living his mission:

1.  Be yourself (live in harmony with who you really are).

2.  Make each day your masterpiece.

3.  Help others.

4.  Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible.

5.  Make friendship a fine art.

6.  Build a shelter against a rainy day.

7.  Pray for guidance, count and give thanks for your blessings every day.

Besides living his creed, what motivated him to choose his mission as a coach? In his own words he said:

“As a matter of fact, I’m frequently asked why I chose coaching as a career and then stayed with it.  Amos Alonzo Stagg, who coached football at Chicago when I used to make my annual “walk to Chicago,” best sums up my feelings on the subject. Stagg, who worked with youth and coached well into his nineties, when asked why he had coached, once said, ”It was because of a promise I made to God.  I feel that my love for young people is the main reason I have stayed in coaching and have refused positions that would have been far more lucrative.”

He wasn’t following someone else’s values. He looked deeply into himself. He made the values and principles he was taught, and those he had formulated, into his own.

In modern life, it is difficult to be yourself, because life tends to push and condition people to function in rigid moulds.  But you can do the same thing that Susan Butcher, Steven Spielberg, Ted Turner and John Wooden did. You can discover your deeply- held values, principles and dreams and embrace them. The following set of exercises will show you how.

PLEASE REMEMBER: Finding your destiny and building your dream is a process, which takes time and effort!

You are probably familiar with the story of the person who opened a chrysalis in an effort to help the “struggling” butterfly to become free.   However, he was amazed to find that the butterfly was unable to fly as a result of his “assistance”.  You see, the butterfly needed the difficult process to be able to master his valuable ability to fly.  Nature apparently knows how to put a price on its most valuable possessions.

Writing and visualising your own vision, mission and values are similar to the process described above.  The following steps can guide you through the process.  Some steps can be dealt with quickly, others will take longer, even months, but each journey starts with a first step.  So get started!

How to get started:

In order to become successful, one needs to know three things about yourself:

v                  The first is a clear picture of what you want to be and to achieve – your dreams – things you would like to achieve and the characteristics you would like to have.  This is your vision of the future.

v                  The second is why you want to achieve all of this – what is the meaning of all this – your life’s purpose – the contribution / difference you want to make in life.  This is your mission in life.

v                  The third is how you want to achieve all of this.  This element contains two different, but narrowly related aspects:

• The first refers to the strategy or action plans you’re going to follow in order to reach your dreams and destiny.
• The second has to do with behavioural guidelines that will control your plans and behaviour – the values or principles according to which you are willing to act.

As a result of the complexity of this process, it’s not a matter of quickly jotting down your personal vision/mission statement.  What follows is a process of steps you can follow in order to help you with the journey.

One of the most effective ways of creating your personal vision and mission is to see to it that you work and think alone and uninterruptedly. Nature provides an ideal environment; utilise it if you can.

The steps you’re going to follow are an expedition deep within yourself.  Try to get in touch with what is really important to you.  The self-examination to which you subject yourself may be at a level that is unfamiliar to you.  However, if you persevere through all the stages, you will really experience how powerful the question, “What do I really want?” is.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

The next couple of steps and exercises are designed in order to take you through a process to arrive at a personal vision, mission and strategy (life plan).  It is very important to keep you focus on the “big picture” and not to get lost within finer details.  If you don’t have “answers” to all the questions, don’t worry about it.  Rather continue with the process.

Step 1:  Discovering your passions in life

Before formulating a personal vision and mission, you first need to think about yourself generally and to make honest notes about the things you really love to do.  The questions that follow will help you with this.  Remember this information is for your eyes only and for no one else’s.

Tap your inner excitement.  Like Steven Spielberg, Susan Butcher, and other great achievers, know your interests.  Or as NLP co-founder John Grinder once asked:  “What do you love to do so much that you’d pay to do it?”

Know your passions, your desires, and your loves.  Only you know what you truly love.  It could be teaching, inventing or hundreds of other delightful possibilities.  You might find hints in a hobby you enjoy.  You might love people or love computers or both.  As you think of those interests, those desires, those loves and those passions, feel your own inner signals of excitement and interest welling up from the depths of your psyche.  Feel them.  Take an inventory of the most fun events in your life.  If you had ten million dollars, what would you pay to do?

Focus on those people and things you really admire.  See and hear your favourite heroes and admired people; the men and women whom you most want to be like, whom you’ve emulated and imitated throughout your life.  These heroes may have similar interests, desires and goals than you do.  Pay attention to them and enjoy them.  See them in the screen of your mind’s eye, in the inner theatre, and feel the excitement you’ve tapped into.

Persist with this exercise.  Keep doing this over and over again until you have a rich collection of images of what you are passionate at doing.  If you cannot answer all the questions, don’t worry about it.  Rather move on with the exercise.

Step 2:  Discovering your Personal Dreams and Ideals

Against this background of things you enjoy, admire and desire, you can now start to formulate your dreams and ideals in life.  The next exercise will assist you with this.

Step 3:  Describing your goals in life

Now that you dreamed about who you would like to be and what you would like to do with your life, it is necessary to summarise it in terms of goals.

NOTE: Are your wings becoming tired of struggling?  Perhaps you should now reward yourself and relax for about 5 minutes before proceeding to the next step.  Don’t take too long – otherwise your muscles will get stiff and cold!

Step 4:  Discovering your Deepest Personal Values (core values)

Personal values are those principles that serve as guidelines to direct and control your behaviour.  It has to do with what is right and wrong and noble.  Values are sets of feelings that let you know what is important to you.  You can look at values from two points of views:

From one point of view, values are those principles (like honesty, fairness, etc) that you are not willing to trespass in perceiving any goal.

On the other side, are values those things in life that are very precious to you like love, dignity, etc.  You are thus willing to go a long way in order to possess these precious things.

Important Note:

You might be wondering how this process will eventually get you to your vision and mission?  You are now busy gathering the ingredients in order to create something of value and not just a hollow statement, which do not really inspire you.

Step 5:  Defining the purpose and meaning of your life

The next thing to do with your values and principles is to integrate them into a big picture of the wholeness of what you want to make of your life.  Let’s go back to Ted Turner.  After he had re-examined his values and principles, he began his mission in earnest.  His newly discovered values and principles led the way to the grand vision of his life’s mission.

Why, for example, did he create the Goodwill Games, which lost eighty million dollars in 1986 and 1990?  “I did it to get the two countries on the playing fields again.  I could just tell the Soviets were looking to be friends,” he said.

When asked why he lives his life the way he does, he responded:  “I just wanted to see if we could do it – like Christopher Columbus.  When you do something that’s never been done before, sail on uncharted waters and don’t know where you’re going, you’re not sure what you’re going to find when you get there, but at least you’re going somewhere.”

But he also continued:  “We have a responsibility, because television news is so powerful, not to only make a lot of money, but to have an influence in our communities.  Our community … is not just the local market or even our country, but the world in which we live…

Why don’t we aim, during the next ten years to have peace on earth, and in the Year 2000, turn the time back to zero, and let it be B.P. and A.P. – Before Peace and After Peace?  That could be the greatest honour we could bestow upon our generation.  So, if we do that, then people will be here two thousand years from now.”  Can you see the sense of mission (making a difference / contribution to the world through what we do) in these statements?

Typical of the mission of a great achiever, he has a huge, nearly unachievable dream as a motivating vision.  And he wants it that way.  He believes that people should set goals they can never reach.  “I’m not going to rest until all the world’s problems have been solved.  Homelessness, AIDS.  I’m in great shape.  I mean, the problems will survive me – no question about it.”

While his mission is a very large one, it is also unfolding.  He has gathered the resources in order to help it to succeed.  He put on the Goodwill Games to create a sense of communication and camaraderie among millions of people watching television during the years between the Olympics.  He provides a worldwide communication network through cable television.  Ted Turner’s mission is motivated by a grand vision of possibilities.  That’s one of the things that give him excitement in life.

No account of achievement in the world today is complete without a description of Buckminster Fuller.  The inventor of the geodesic dome, the namesake of the remarkable, newly discovered family of molecules, buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs for short), the creator of the Dymaxion map, the Dymaxion car, and numerous other innovations, he is known all over the world as one of the premier thinkers and visionary inventors of the twentieth century.

By 1968, the number of original published items relating to Fuller’s world had grown to over 2 100 per year!

How did Buckminster Fuller achieve so much in his life?  It started with his mission, which he discovered on one lonely night.  After the death of his four-year-old daughter, Alexandra, from illness, his double expulsion from Harvard, losing his company, financial ruin, and the birth of a second child, he found himself in a suicidal depression.  Buckminster Fuller stood at the edge of a dark future.

Literally gazing into the darkness of Lake Michigan on a lonely night in 1927, he had come to a crisis.  “Why am I an utter failure?” he asked himself.  Either he would jump, or think; or he chose to think.  He began forming his mission in life.  After an intensive reasoning process, he concluded that he alone didn’t have the right to determine his worth in the universe and that it was necessary to surrender his fate to the ultimate wisdom of God.  In this riveting account, he explains his discovery:

“I have faith in the integrity of the anticipatory intellectual wisdom, which we call “God.” … Do I know best or does God know best whether I may be of any value to the integrity of the universe?”  The answer was:  “You don’t know and no man knows, but the faith you have just established out of experience imposes recognition of the a priori wisdom of the fact of your being.”  Apparently addressing myself, I said:  “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you.  The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to the highest advantage of others.  You and all men are here for the sake of other men.”

While living this mission, his professional identity grew.  He called himself “a comprehensive anticipatory design-science explorer.”  As you can see from this account, he went through the first few steps in this mission-discovery process and developed a grand vision of his purpose in life and his identity as a person.

Another Story of a Magnificent Mission:

Mary Jane Sheppard died on December 18, 1992.  She was not world-famous, nor did she invent any paradigm-shifting technology or build any business organisations.  And yet, she lived a magnificent mission.  The mission Mary Jane Sheppard lived was as important as any lived by those more famous – raising a healthy, loving family.  As wife of husband Harry Sheppard and mother to their four children in San Mateo, California, she was the light of love to their growing family and friends.

Yet Mary Jane’s family was not limited to their immediate children and grandchildren.  She made it a habit to “adopt” her children’s friends and others she encountered.  She radiated loving feelings.  Her warmth and interest in others attracted friends like a magnet.  While her husband, Harry, referred to her as a saint, her son, Charlie, describes her as a great mentor for helping him find compassion in his life.

In the kitchen they still openly display a series of cords hanging along one wall.  On the cords are hundreds of painted cloth pins.  Each pin lists a person who stayed there for the night, along with the date.  Mary Jane’s extended family became a community of people she had brought together.

Jim Conlow, a member of Mary Jane’s community, wrote a poem about her.  It’s called “The Maker”.  A section of it describes her this way:

A Maker is the greatest of Sorcerers or Saints

Life of love magic and connection

Making baked bread and gardens

Making children and children’s children

Weaving the tapestry of compassion

Early in her life she followed all the steps of the mission-discovery process.  She knew her primary passions – connecting emotionally with people.  She discovered her deep values – love and compassion.  She merged these passions and values into a grand vision of living a magnificent life of service to others.  She picked a richly detailed, specific direction or “cause” for her efforts – her community of friends and family.  She deeply examined herself to align her life completely with her mission.  Whatever internal obstacles to living her mission were set aside, she jumped over, or, best of all, converted it into resources.  She developed a unified commitment, both within herself and with others that guided her every day.  Her legacy, in the form of her village of friends and family, unfolded before her.

As cancer ended her life at the age of sixty-eight, through all of the pain, her love for others shone through and graced all of those who honoured her presence in their lives.  In the final moments of her life, she told her son, Charlie, “I’ve done everything I came here to do.”  This is perhaps the ultimate reward for discovering your mission.

v      How do we know when we are living our dream in life?   No one outside of us can tell us.  It is something each one of us can only discover and know for ourselves.

v      How will we know we are making a difference in life?   Only others can tell.

v      What would you like other people to say about you at your funeral one day?

Step 6:  Identifying your Key Life Roles

In order to live a meaningful life that will make a difference to the world, you necessarily find yourself interacting with other people.  These relationships entitle you to certain roles (areas of responsibility) you have to fulfil in order to make a contribution to life around you.  Examples of roles can be:  Father, spouse, neighbour, friend, colleague, leader-manager, sportsman, chairman of club, developer of people, businessman, member of school committee, entrepreneur/intrapreneur, etc.

In order to make your mission alive, you have to take responsibility in different areas of life (roles) and let your mission “flow” through it.  During the next exercise you will get a chance to identify your life roles and your ideals and goals for each.  Remember that these roles will change over time and that you will have to repeat this exercise from time to time as you move through different phases of your life.

Step 7:  Writing your Personal Vision and Mission Statement

You will now take the giant step and write down a preliminary personal vision and mission statement.  Preliminary because you may still work on it for months before it really says what you want it to say.  Actually you will find that this is a never-ending process and that you have to revisit it on a regular base for two reasons:

v      First, to check if your life is running according to your vision and mission.

v      Second, to make some necessary changes in your vision, mission, values and life roles.

Remember! Such a statement has four basic elements.

v      The first is what you would like to achieve that will give you a sense of greatness (your challenge).

v      The second is what difference or contribution you would like to make to life.

v      The third element comprises the values and principles on which your “being and doing” are based.

v      The fourth element is how your dreams and contribution will crystallise in your life roles – your dreams and goals for each.

Very important!

v      Do not write to impress anybody.

v      Make contact with your inner self.

v      Avoid a potpourri of “to do” list.

v      Use the information in steps 1 to 5 to guide you.

v      Good luck!  You have nearly struggled out of the chrysalis and just imagine the freedom you will enjoy!

Step 8:  Evaluating your Vision and Mission Statement

Now that you’ve spent a lot of time dreaming about your life and it’s purpose, it is also necessary to become realistic and evaluate the “correctness” and importance of what you just wrote.  Remember, it’s not what a vision is, but what it does – that is what is important.  Your personal vision and mission must create direction and inner motivation.  If not, it’s not a real vision or mission statement yet!

Step 9: Keeping Your Vision and Mission Alive

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams”

- Eleanor Rooseveld

You have defined the ideal you in your vision & mission statement.  You have therefore already visited your future.

What you have to do now is to programme yourself with this picture by spending a few minutes on meditation regularly and visualise the ideal you.  Close your eyes see yourself as if you have realised your whole mission.  See yourself in detail talking to your spouse, handling your children, solving problems, leading and managing, etc.  See the fully realised details of your purpose and mission.

You also have to make a date with yourself to repeat this procedure every year, e.g. on your birthday, so that you can make some changes if necessary.

Note: Make some effort with this exercise in order to keep your vision and mission alive!  Otherwise you will simply find that your dreams slowly flow through your hands unfulfilled and that you end up in frustration as you are gulped up by the meaningless rat race of life!

Remember! The difference between having a fulfilled life versus a meaningless rat race lies in the choices you make in life!