Roman Malanke

Since my first reading of “The 7 Habits” I’ve been possessed by the idea of creating my own personal mission statement. You know, that self-defined concise written expression of the purpose of one’s existence.  And as it is obviously not the most trivial thing to do, I decided to approach it slowly and carefully.

First, I did a lot of reading on spiritual and personal development topics. In particular, following the chain of references by my favorite authors I discovered the works of Mahatma Gandhi and Dalai Lama which impressed me very deep and actually changed the way I see things in the world. Then, little by little I started acquiring yet non-verbal feeling of what I definitely must reflect in my mission statement. The next step of choosing the right words was probably the most challenging one. To break it down I set up a couple of simple lists and over the course of several weeks had been accumulating items there. Among others, for example, I had the following lists:

• Qualities I want to possess throughout my life (e.g. calmness, integrity, kindness, etc.)
• Areas of life I want to focus on (e.g. family, friends, communities, work, etc.)
• What I want to do to myself (e.g. grow as a person, grow professionally, learn new skills, etc.)
• What I want to do to others (e.g. inspire, serve, make happy, etc.)

Once the lists were ready I began to squeeze the juice out of them, omitting synonyms and blurred expressions,  trying to leave only the essentials so that each word that was left had the most meaning in it.

The last step was to come up with core values based on the lists and wrap some binding words around them. As I wanted my mission statement to be one sentence long, easy to read, understand and follow this last step was quite a tricky one.

So without further ado here is what I’ve come up with:

“My mission is to bring happiness to people around me by adhering to my values of responsibility, proactiveness and open-mindedness, while constantly inspiring friends, family and community with my self-discipline and personal growth.”

In the process of working on the mission statement I have also developed what I call a personal tagline as a byproduct. In Twitter terms it would be called “one line bio”, I guess. Anyways now I am using this tagline in my profiles in different social networks. Here is how it goes:

“Open-minded and self-disciplined bloke enjoying life of simplicity and order.”

I should say that spending time to create a mission statement brought a good degree of satisfaction and inspiration to immediately start with some new big undertakings. However it also makes me curious about how durable this mission statement will be, as I know for sure that a person’s perception of life changes significantly over time. It’s quite possible that I will want to change it in the future, we’ll see. Then this post will be a sort of time capsule. But for now I will guide my actions and decisions according to my current personal mission statement.

And what about you my friends, do you have your mission statements written already? Or maybe you are planning to write one?