What do I want to do with my life?

Posted on September 27th, 2005 by Sacha Chua

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.

More posts about: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/3019

On This Day...

2012: Answering questions about the Quantified Self — James Hennessey sent in these questions, and I decided to blog my answers instead of keeping them in e-mail. =) What [...]
2011: From the feeds: entrepreneurship, teaching, biking, riding — Tim Ferris writes about how to estimate your market size using Google and Facebook so that you can [...]
2010: Systematically eliminating choices — I confess: I sometimes feel overwhelmed when researching choices. I find it really helpful to write options down and [...]
2009: Riding on my bicycle — - Friday - I rode the subway instead of bicycling to work. It took me the same amount of time, which [...]
2008: The Orange Chair » Social networking and innovation in a large company — This is more of a work-day topic, but you might be interested in it anyway. Here’s an excerpt from my [...]
2007: Rediscovered words — I haven’t read my own ShortStories in a while. I hardly recognize myself. I don’t remember writing some things or what [...]
2006: The dawn of a new Moleskine — I’ve reached the last page on my well-loved Moleskine notebook and must retire it to my archives. This is the little [...]
2006: Momblogging — My mom would rather that I don’t directly link to her blog, which is a pity because you won’t get to [...]
2006: VPN! — Hooray! Finally! Network access from my laptop Just Works! This means I can work on my research from my regular computer [...]
2006: Backlog: Software Freedom Day — Goodness, I have *such* a blogging backlog. Here’s a story about Software Freedom Day last 2006.09.16 that helped me learn a [...]
2006: My mom’s blogging! — And she writes better than I do… <laugh> She’s totally awesome! I’m looking forward to reading more stories from her. I should [...]
2006: Step out of your comfort zone — Didith Rodrigo: Disturb Us, O Lord However you want to refer to whatever makes you try to be greater than yourself, [...]
2005: Lentil lunacy — I will never underestimate lentils again. They give me a warm and fuzzy feeling of being quite full. A bit too [...]
2005: Lapping up lentils — The past few days have been repeats of previous CookOrDie successes, so I figured today I’d cook something in the true [...]
2004: A LAZY AFTERNOON — The carabao grunted to a halt unceremoniously. I felt Maria wake up. Steadying her, I jumped off the broad back and [...]
2003: ff and C/C++ programming — Emacs — These functions look interesting for C and C++ programming: - ff-find-the-other-file - ff-find-related-file
2003: Okay, I think it’s time for me to rest. — I’m typing slowly _and_ I’m thinking slowly, which is never a good combination. =) I do _not_ want to add bugs [...]
2003: “Revenge of the Coders” — There is a movement among programmers away from sluggish, feature-heavy IDEs and toward flexible code editors as enterprises focus intensely on productivity. [...]
2003: ARGHHH. — There are few things quite as annoying as realizing that you are reinventing the wheel halfway through the process. Argh argh argh [...]
2003: ACM — Nov 5, 6, 7
2003: Class day yesterday — Incidentally, I had an excellent class day yesterday – group work. CS21AFirst03#Exercises.TwistedText for more details.

sacha chua living an awesome life