Discovering Your Mission in Life

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Please find a place to read this blog where you can be alone and uninterrupted. Empty your mind now except what you are about to read.

“[Imagine] you are going to the funeral of a loved one. Picture yourself driving to the funeral parlor or chapel, parking the car, and getting out. As you walk inside the building, you notice the flowers, the soft organ music. You see the faces of friends and family you pass along the way. You feel the shared sorry of losing, the joy of having known, that radiates from the hearts of the people there. As you walk down to the front of the room and look inside the casket, you suddenly come face to face with yourself. This is your funeral, three years from today. All these people have come to honor you, to express feelings of love and appreciation for your life. As you take a seat and wait for the services to begin, you look at the program in your hand. There are to be four speakers. The first is from your family, immediate and also extended – children brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents who have come from all over the country to attend. The second speaker is one of your friends, someone who can give a sense of what you were as a person. The third speaker is from your work or profession. And the fourth is from your church or some community organization where you’ve been involved in service. Now think deeply. What would you like each of these speakers to say about you and your life?...What character would you like them se to have seen in you? What contributions, what achievements would you want them to remember? Look carefully at the people around you. What difference would you like to have made in their lives?”

Before you read further, I would like to invite you to visualize yourself and take a few minutes to jot down your impressions.

This excerpt from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People shows the importance of beginning with the end in mind. As you engaged yourself in this visualization exercise you touched for a moment on some of your deep, fundamental values. This picture of the end will serve as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined. By keeping this end clearly in mind, you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day does not violate the criteria you have defined supremely important, and that each day of your life contributes to a meaningful way to the vision you have of your life as a whole. So many people often get caught with the “activity trap” where they invest all their energy and resources into working harder and climbing the corporate ladder of success only to discover they are climbing against the wrong wall. People strive for achievements and victories that are empty and devoid of meaning.

When we ensure that we have a coherent worldview and picture of the future we are able to manage ourselves each day to what really matters most. Covey says “if the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster. We may be very busy, we may be very efficient, but we will also be truly effective only when we begin with the end in mind.”

So, in order to begin with the end in mind, it is important to unearth some of your underlying, fundamental value system. This can’t be done overnight. I hope to provide an intentional approach to help you increase your self-awareness by realigning your paradigms to bring them in harmony with correct principles.

Victor Hugo once said that there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has finally come, you may call it a credo, a philosophy, you may call it a purpose statement it's not as important as to what you call it, no it's how you define your definition. That mission and vision statement is more powerful more significant, more influential, than the baggage of the past, or even the accumulated noise of the present.

Now, review some of the key impressions and words that you wrote down earlier on in the visualization exercise. Now, let me guide you in formulating this into a personal mission statement. An effective technique in discovering your mission is to first identify your roles and goals. Covey says “we have each number of different roles in our lives – different areas or capacities in which we have responsibility. I may, for example, have a role as an individual, a husband, a father, a teacher, a church member, and a businessman. And each of these roles is important. One of the major problems that arise when people work to become more effective in life is that they don’t think broadly enough. They lose the sense of proportion, the balance, the natural ecology necessary to effective living. They may get consumed by work and neglect personal health. In the name of professional success, they may neglect the most relationships in their lives. You may find that your mission statement will be much more balanced, much easier to work with, if you break it down into the specific roles areas of your life and the goals you want to accomplish in each area. Look at your professional role. You might be a salesperson, or a manager, or a product developer. What are you about in that area? What are the values that should guide you? Think of your personal roles – husband, wife, father, mother, neighbor and friend. What are you about in those roles? What’s important to you?”

Writing your mission in terms of the important roles in your life gives you balance and harmony. It keeps each role clearly before you. You can review your roles frequently to make sure that you don’t get totally absorbed by one role to the exclusion of others that are equally or even more important in your life.

Below, you’ll see an example of my personal mission statement. I would encourage you take some time alone as we approach the end of 2011 to seriously think about what success means to you based on creating your core values.  

Mission:

My mission in life is to give the utmost glory to Lord Jesus Christ by maximizing my God-given talents, gifts, and potential for the transformation of people and organizations.

To fulfill this I will:

I put Christ at the centerpiece: I strive to apply the Christian principles in all my endeavors and ensure all major decisions are discerned through my deeply held core values, mission, and vision.

I continuously learn and grow: I devote my time, talents, and resources to transform organizations and cultivate untapped potential within people.

I generate value and service: What I do creates extraordinary value and service for people and organizations in building “vanguard companies.”

I inspire: Through actions and words, I epitomize the Christian businessman who openly practices the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

These roles take priority in achieving my mission:

Son/ Brother – I provide support to my family in every facet by being there.  

Boyfriend – I cultivate a long-term relationship with my girlfriend through cultivation of character and practicing of holy life

Christian – I nurture the virtues of the Christian, manifest it in action, and spread the good news.  

Change agent – I am a catalyst for developing high performance culture, team, and enterprise.

Leader – I serve the needs of others through inspiring others and mentorship.

2012 New Year's Resolutions

Around the end of the year, our family has a tradition that we uphold to: year-end family meeting/service. It started when I was in my young adolescence where my dad would initiate a family meeting with mom, sister, and I. He would open up the meeting with a word of prayer and praises. He would then choose a passage from the Scripture and share our thoughts around the message. With this leading service, the main topic of our discussion shifts to how each one of us spent the past 365 days. Usually, we would spend some time to gather our thoughts before this meeting, but nonetheless, we start to talk about key events and accomplishments as well as failures we encountered in life. This discussion led into what we expect to accomplish for the following year. In all of this, we never lose the context of how Jesus Christ is at the centerpiece. When I was younger and lacking maturity, this time with our family wasn't exciting and simply boring. However, after living apart with my family for over a decade now, I learned how important family has become in every facet of life. I now very much look forward to these type of family events.

As I mature every year, I find myself amazed how my perspectives and thought processes changed. Just last year in 2011, as I review my New Year's Resolutions, it is self-evident of how highly ambitious and focused I was particularly around building my professional career. Many goals were supplementing my goal to become a successful professional.

After a year or so, I have seen the things that worked and didn't work. Thankfully, I have a stronger grasp of who I am, my natural inclinations, tendencies, strengths, talents, and weaknesses, and core values which have enabled me to constantly reinvent myself. Prior to 2011, my extensive and proactive involvement in my business school has shaped my goals, underlying assumptions around work, and values to a certain extent. However, these goals and assumptions were tested in the 'reality' and I was compelled to make necessary changes to adapt. I have thus expanded my perspective into a more holistic viewpoint of how I view life. With that, I have made significant revisions on the framework of how I develop my New Year's Resolutions for 2012.

Below, my 2012 New Year's Resolutions are categorized in six dimensions in life: emotional, intellectual, professional, physical, spiritual, and social. Thus, instead of focusing on one dimension, I applied a more holistic approach to goal-setting for the new year. Also, with respect to wording, I have used past tense in order to help me visualize the changes that I already have done from a end first perspective in mind.   Thank you for reading.



In Reflection of 2011

In ten days the year of 2011 will become history – like any other year. Before I close this year, I decided to spend this time as a post mortem to pen some of my thoughts on how the year went.  Unlike any other year, the first thought that cropped in my mind was how uncharacteristically and incredibly fast the year has passed by. It sort of felt like I have been transported from a time machine in which I skipped several months throughout the year.

Now, this got me started thinking more about this fundamental notion on ‘progress.’ In many respects, 2011 have represented a monumental year for me. First, it is the year I turned 25. Granted, it boggles my mind when I come to the realization that I have roughly lived one third of my life. I suppose when you look through this 30,000 foot level, life seems way too short. Rick Warren is right when he says that life on earth “a parenthesis of eternity.” The prospect of dying has not been a major concern of mine thus far, but I am beginning to seriously understand the utmost importance of living a purpose-driven life always thinking the end in mind. With this big picture on the back of my mind, I felt on one hand that I have achieved nothing significant; on the other hand, I have been always striving for something

Another key factor differentiating in 2011 is the fact that it marks my first journey into post-school life where academic theories are not safeguarded from the ivory tower, but where real-world application trumps it all. My initial disillusionment with work has disoriented and discouraged me, but as everyone does, I was compelled to either quickly adjust or opt out. Idealistic expectations nurtured from school were eclipsed by how things actually work in real life. Most important, I have witnessed the power of surroundings and its impact into my very own life. However, I know with utmost certainty that all of these realizations and lessons will prepare, hone, and shape me for the better.

The respective changing circumstances in 2011 thus have been inherently poised to become a year of progress. But not so much, I initially thought. Why, you may ask..? As I really probe into the underlying reason for this lack of progress, it originated from my unquenchable yearning for knowledge. Progress, in my perspective, was measured by how much books I read and tangible achievements from work and certifications etc. Thus far, this was how I narrowly defined “progress” and in all these time, I have strived to achieve excellence in this. However, with this definition, I will confess that 2011 was devoid of much progress. In fact, I probably regressed instead of making a progression in life.

The breakthrough moment, the light-bulb moment came to me with the emergence of a special relationship. I am indebted to the special lady in so many ways. My narrow focus in life was radically exposed to something larger than career. I am not dismissing the importance of career by any means, but life was designed by God to become more holistic than just career. With this special relationship, this served as an opportunity to divulge my true self and understand people in a very intimate manner. 2011 was a time of cultivating my character as a more loving, generous, caring, and authentic person. Thus, my core values were tested and reinforced through the development of this relationship.

My one-dimensional notion of progress has been dispelled by this breakthrough experience in my life. With this narrow definition, I certainly did not read 30 books for the year, how many times I read the WSJ on a daily basis, but I believe the time spent elsewhere in building relationships honed my character as a holistic, balanced person.

As 2012 emerges, I must regain balance how I perceive progress. On one hand I cannot afford to not develop myself professionally through readings and learning, but at the same time, I must expand my horizons into something more than quenching my professional ambition. This healthy balance comes from when my relationship in Jesus Christ takes precedence over all worldly things. As the year-end approached, I felt this was where I felt I could have done a better job. Instilling a strong sense of discipline in how I manage life is a task that needs to be mastered throughout 2012 and beyond. 


The balance between the two are critical. The following is the highlights of my 2011: