"Live by your values, pursue your goals to achieve your mission in life" - Frank Contrepois
Values are the filter your action need to go through to be good ones. You have values, coming from education, tradition, family and experience. You might not have a list of them but you have them. Values help you make decisions every day and shape your day and how others see you. Finding the most important values allow you to make YOUR right decisions, the ones that you'll accept and that will not leave any regrets.
Find them, share them, live them.
My values are:
- Trust - to build long term relashionship
- Honesty - I believe in what I say
- Improvement - to evolve, survive and be a better person
- Sharing - as in team work
- Fair - I understand others views
- Open Minded - I believe in the brain and actions as the way to value people
Mission is next. I do not mean a James Bond style mission, I mean a life mission, one or more statements that define your life goal. Following your mission might requires courage, patience, perseverance (all are great values to have), it needs to be valid for a life.
By following your mission you'll have the energy to do, the commitment to succeed and the recognition of others. Having your mission clear help other understand you and your actions. It helps finding the right persons and find a job that align with your ultimate goal.
My mission is: "Live and share a happy and balanced life between family, new achievements and continuous improvements"
The short version is "No WOW is left behind": which explain that for life and work I'll be there for the most important moments not matter what.
Goals, present a shorter timeline toward your mission. A kind of what's next on the road. I recommend choosing goals with a 1 year, 3 years and 5 years horizon and try to align your activities to them. You should have goals for life, work and community (The triple bottom line) and make them hard to reach but in line toward your longer term goals and ultimately your mission.
I share my family goals only with my wife, my work goals with my wife, collegues and some friends, my community goals with everyone.
My community goals are:
- Selling a book presenting a framework of how to maintain a life/work balance
- Receive a prestigious award for my contribution to the world
- Receive more than 1'000'000 positive feedback from my activities
As an example, this blog is due to the need to improve my writing skills to write the book and achieve 1'000'000 positive feedback. Comments on blog count, so don't hesitate
In conclusion, we all have values, we all have a mission and goals, but writing them down and sharing them will expand their reach and will help you live a better live.
NB: Finding values, mission and goals is not easy and take time and mind power, so patience.
Reading related to the post:
GTD and the altitude view
7 Habits to help on the mission creation
Posts
