Do you dread going to work? Do you feel lazy to wake up each morning and if you were given a choice, you prefer to continue to sleep on your comfortable bed?
That’s the sign you lack having a purpose-driven mission.
Extraordinary people don’t dread going to work. To them, their work is their play. They love what they do, and they are passionate about it. They can’t wait to go to work.
And the reason is simple – they are driven by a bigger vision and they have a mission so exciting that they can’t help but constantly think about.
If you want to achieve outstanding success in what you do, whether it is in your career or business, you need to get your vision and mission right.
You need to have a purpose driven mission, or some people call it an exciting vision to pursue.
John Sculley was the CEO of Pepsi Co. when Steve Jobs approached him and tried to recruit him. Jobs was known to the world for being a legendary visionary, and he was someone who believed that what he was doing in Apple was incredibly important to the world.
And this led Jobs to approach Sculley. And you know what Jobs told Sculley to get him on board?
Jobs asked Sculley, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
That’s the demonstration of the power of having a purpose-driven mission.
Jobs looked at his work as an exciting mission to change the world, to bring great innovation to the society, and to revolution the tech industry.
He has an exciting mission that inspired him to work day and night, to personally reply to emails to customers at midnight, and to push his team to achieve the extraordinary.
In this article on Medium, I shared the story of how Tiger Woods trained in the rain for hours at night because it doesn’t rain often in California. It is Tigers’ desire and commitment to become the best golfer in the world that pushed him to train and become better than every other golfer.
Steve Jobs and Tiger Woods have an exciting vision and they are fueled by a purpose-driven mission.
That’s what makes them extraordinary. And that’s how they become successful in their industry.
What about you? Do you have a purpose driven mission? Do you have an exciting vision that you can’t help but push yourself to achieve?
If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.
Steve Jobs
And in this article, I’m going to share with you how you can create your purpose driven mission so that you will never run out of motivation and dreaded to go to work.
Most people are not motivated, and they lack the desire and determination for success because they don’t have a meaningful vision. They lack a mission that is so exciting that they don’t have to push themselves for it, their mission pulls them.
1. Make Your Mission Big and Bold
When it comes to creating a purpose driven mission, you need to make it big and bold.
For instance, think about SpaceX. It is a crazy dream from Elon Musk. I mean, when most people start a company, they will never have the thought of starting a space travel company that builds rockets.
Elon Musk is a very inspirational figure. If you were to ask him why he started SpaceX, he will tell you that he wants to save humanity. Musk once said that there is a one-in-forty-thousand chance that an asteroid is going to hit the earth and we could be the next dinosaurs.
And because of that, he wanted to bring humans to Mars and colonize the Red Planet. It is going to be like a backup plan.
In his great book, The Buddha and the Badass, Vishen wrote:
“Elon doesn’t speak dryly about sending payloads to space. He talks about his company ten years out into the future. And he speaks as if it’s happening right now.
He creates a vision so inspiring you can’t help but be swept up by it. His purpose and his why are so clear that people flock to him. Even if the end point of the vision is still a decade or more away.”
This is why you want to dream big and bold. Big dreams inspire.
You don’t want to play it small because your playing doesn’t serve the world.
Plus, when your dream is big and bold, you are more motivated to take action and to achieve it.
Think about it. Are you more motivated to wake up early just so you can earn an extra $10? Or are you more motivated to wake up early because you have a flight to catch to visit the Bahamas and enjoy your vacation there with the people you love?
The point is that when you embark on an exciting mission, the mission pulls you. You don’t have to motivate yourself and push yourself to do it.
Therefore, make your dreams and your goals so big that they drive you instead of you feeling dreaded to achieve them.
Action Step:
Here’s what you can do to think big and bold – 10X your success.
- If you are running a business, imagine your business as being 10 times more successful or even 100 times more successful. How will it look like?
- If you are a blogger, imagine how your blog will be like if it is 10X more successful.
- If you are a writer, imagine how your life is going to be and how your work will be if you are 10X more successful.
The key is to create the success picture you want in your head so big and that it inspires you to take action.
Don’t be afraid to dream. And don’t dream base on your current situation. You have to believe that everything you want is possible and you can have it.
When you have a purpose driven mission, you will become unstoppable.
2. Make Your Mission to Help and Serve
Let me ask you, when was the last time you helped someone? Regardless of whether you helped an old lady cross the road or you hold the lift door for someone, how does that make you feel?
Do you feel good? You feel great, don’t you?
That’s the power of helping and serving someone.
And you want your mission to be of great help to the people, the community, the society, and even the world.
Just like Elon Musk started Tesla with the aim to solve the environmental issue of vehicles using fossil fuels. Elon aims to revolutionize the automobile industry by creating electric-powered vehicles to reduce carbon emission.
That’s a great cause. And that’s a great mission. No wonder he has inspired many great people and engineers to want to work for him.
Here’s another story about how Steve Jobs motivated his team to make Mac faster for the sake of humanity and to save lives. You can find the story in his inspirational autobiography, Steve Jobs.
One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs the most was the time that it took to boot when the Mac was first powered on. It could take a couple of minutes, or even more, to test memory, initialize the operating system, and load the Finder. One afternoon, Steve came up with an original way to motivate us to make it faster.
Larry Kenyon was the engineer working on the disk driver and file system. Steve came into his cubicle and started to exhort him. “The Macintosh boots too slowly. You’ve got to make it faster!”
Larry started to explain about some of the places where he thought that he could improve things, but Steve wasn’t interested. He continued, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day.”
“Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and that’s 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?”
You see, when you embark on a mission to save lives and to make the world a better place to live, you will be inspired by what you do.
In an experiment conducted by Adam Grant and his team, he studied paid employees at a university’s call center who were asked to cold call for a fundraising campaign.
The work is grimed as employees don’t get high pay and they have to face rejections for asking for the donations. So, the turnover rate is high and the morale is low.
So, Grant and his team arranged a group of employees to meet with the students who received scholarships from the fundraising campaign. The employees got to ask the students about their lives and studies for just 5 minutes.
The following month, that little 5 minutes interaction with the recipients of the scholarships made a huge difference. The group of employees spent twice as much time on the phone and brought in more money from their fundraising call, from $185.95 to $503.22 per week. And that’s about 271% improved in performance.
You see, when you know what you do is helping and serving people, you become more motivated to work harder.
Like the group of callers in Grant’s study, when they know their work is helping students to get scholarships, their performance increased.
I’m a blogger in the personal development industry. Whenever I receive emails from readers around the world telling me how my content has inspired them and helped them to do better in lives, I feel good.
This is why you want to make your mission to serve and to help.
When your mission is bigger than just about you, you become inspired because what you do is touching other people’s lives.
Action Step:
Make your mission to help and serve others. Think about how your work and business can transform other people’s lives.
When you make your mission not just about you, but about others, your life will never be the same again.
In one of my articles, Why Having a Vision is Important, I shared a story of a fish slicer named Sherpa about his work…
“… Sherpa who was born in a village in the eastern Himalayas, where he lived in a wooden shack. At the age of fifteen, he started to work, carrying bags of provisions to Mount Everest’s base camps and accompanying foreigners on treks across the mountains.
When asked Sherpa was asked about the importance of his work, he said that whether working in the restaurant or helping people summit the tallest people on the planet were not really different, both jobs involved helping people.”
It doesn’t matter if you are a fish slicer like Sherpa who works in a remote location high on the altitude, when you look at your work as a way to help people, you will be inspired to do better.
Conclusion
Highly successful people are always driven by a meaningful purpose. They are crystal clear with what they want, and they do it.
As a result, they are driven by their vision and mission. They know they are set out to change the world and touch lives. That’s why their mission is meaningful, and their vision is empowering.
If you want to always be inspired and live an extraordinary life, make your mission and vision exciting and meaningful.
Comments 4