What do I want to do with my life?

| plans

What it is that you do? What is your core expertise?

That made me stop and think.

Effective mission statements aren't born in a vacuum. Rather, they are
recognized in what's already happening.

I needed to figure out what I stood for.

I started with a bunch of index cards. I wrote keywords and phrases
that appealed to me. Random stuff I'd been thinking about.

Not in order: Passion. Ideas. Public speaking. Coding. Writing.
Networking. News (cool tech, etc). Productivity.

One of the cards didn't quite fit in. Even as I wrote it down, I
thought to myself, “I should write this down, but I'm not really that
passionate about it.”

Realization #1: Even if my background is in computer science and I've
been programming for as long as I can remember, programming itself
doesn't make me happy unless I'm making an actual person's life
better. I can't work with an abstract idea of a user. I need people
with quirks and idiosyncrasies who'll be addicted to my software. I
don't care about coding itself. I care about what I can do with it,
and that was already part of “Productivity”. I put the “coding” card
aside.

Now I had a set of cards, all related to each other. I needed to
find out how they were related to each other.

One word jumped out at me: passion. Realization #2: Passion makes
everything else make sense. Everything fell into place around that.

I reviewed my cards, trying to see if I could classify them. My first
list was speaking with passion, helping people find passion, and
helping people pursue their passions.

When I tried to fit my cards into those categories, I realized that
everything I wrote down applied to all of them, and that speaking with
passion was part of both helping people find their passions and
helping people pursue them. Realization #3: Everything I wrote down is
part of both aspects of passion.

I wrote the table and posted it on
http://sacha.free.net.ph/rolemodels/ .

So here's my brief mission statement, what I _do_:

I help people find their passions and pursue those passions effectively.

This is not something I came up with, but something I just recognized.
I need to reflect on the relationship between my skills and my mission
statement so that I'll know what I need to focus on. I also need to
show how what I'm currently doing is connected to my mission.

You can comment with Disqus or you can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.