Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It…

Infinity Bites 5

“Heal the world, make it a better place…” As I clicked the publish button on my last Infinity Bite, I realised I’d managed to thread my way through an entire article on Purpose & Meaning without ever mentioning my own or even whether I’d found them or not.

Rather than rewrite the piece with moi as the main attraction – good grief, pity us – I thought I’d tackle a closely related topic and reveal my own approach at the same time.

I’m talking about the idea of having A Mission in life and how it can boost our dedication and drive 10-fold.

Wish To The Wash

While many well-meaning people’s missions sound worthy and admirable, such as fighting for women’s rights or just “healing the world” (thanks, Michael), in reality, they are unfocused, incoherent and ultimately wishy-washy. The problem with having vague goals and objectives is that any random path will get you there. In other words, nowhere.

So, having finally found a worthwhile purpose and meaning, a great next step is to form a crystal clear mission around it. But I’m getting ahead of myself; I was going to tell you about my own P&M, wasn’t I? Now, let’s see…

Dust Devil Delirium

I’ve always enjoyed creating things, be they artistic with colours and shapes, or literary with words and forms, or even imaginary with cloud dragons and dust devils. I noticed a number of payoffs from these activities.

First of all, they were fun. Time seemed to fade away, and I was generally quite pleased with the results.

Secondly, it seemed natural to show or give these newly hatched happenings to others who seemed perfectly happy to accept them, exhibiting signs of great pleasure to boot. Which was nice.

Finally, in some cases, this act of spontaneous sharing would encourage others to create their own new things, which they would then share back to me. Which was even better and would inspire me some more.

The Creativity Spiral

I enjoyed this never-ending spiral of creativity and good vibes so much that I eventually realised that this would be A Very Good Thing To Do for the rest of my days. Unless something else came along, but for now…

So there we are – I’ve found My Purpose: to create and share as much as possible in order to give pleasure and stimulate exciting ideas in others too. I will specialise in encouraging and enabling those bursting with ideas to explode outwards and upwards, sending the creative spiral twisting and twirling to dizzy rainbow heights!

From Purpose & Meaning To Mission

If my shiny new purpose is to create and share stuff and encourage others to do so as well, then what about the meaning – why bother doing that at all? Well, I’ve come to a conclusion, lacking anything that makes better sense or which gives deeper satisfaction: creating cool things on a regular basis is a wonderful way to lead a worthwhile, enriching and generous life.

In simpler terms, I believe that creating makes people happy. From what I can see, we are inherently creative beings – we have all come from the ultimate creative act, after all: the creation of a new life.

My purpose here is to create fine fun stuff and get others to do so too. The reason for doing that – The Meaning behind these seemingly nonsensical acts – is to make a few folks smile. And that’s good enough for me.

Now let’s wrap it all up in a funky mission statement, and I suggest you do something similar if you fancy it, and see how it feels. You never know, you might like it. I do.

My Mission, Which I Chose to Accept…

“My lifelong mission is to spread understanding and encourage connectedness worldwide through creating and sharing powerful words and images and getting others to do the same.”

Very few people actually have an explicit mission statement for themselves, and while I’m not claiming it makes you a better person or anything, mine does seem to focus my efforts impressively.

Now that I have this sort of gold standard for my daily actions, I can always ask myself if what I’m doing right now is, y’know, leading as directly as possible to deeper connections and closer relationships around the planet. And if not, why not? Without a personalised litmus test to keep us on track, we do tend to wander and dissipate our impact, if we had any in the first place.

What’s Your Mission?

Our missions will be different, yours and mine, and that’s perfectly normal. Having the same mission, if it’s not something vague and wishy-washy (like healing the world, for example; sorry Michael), would be highly unlikely.

Maybe you want to bring literacy to remote African villages. Or introduce the uniqueness of golf to the masses. Or show a million people how to set up a home business based on recycling everyday household items. The possibilities are endless.

Many powerful missions are quite a bit bigger than anything their originator could do alone. And that’s great! We don’t live in a vacuum; we’re social beings; love makes the world go round, and all that. And it’s true.

Fun Fun Fun

With a truly admirable mission, it doesn’t really matter if you get there; the main thing is to be having fun moving in the right direction, doing good things, all the time.

Why having fun? Because if you’re not, you’ll get fed up or bored and stop. Enjoying what we are doing is one of the keys to getting stuff done, and getting stuff done happens to be one of the most fun things of all!

You’ll notice that for a mission to mean much, it has to be fundamentally about helping others. This makes it far more powerful too. If your main mission in life is to make ten million dollars, you might get there, but it’ll be a soulless struggle and could be a lot lonelier than you thought on top of the pile.

But I Want To Heal The World!

You might be secretly thinking, “Yes, but I want to heal the world!” We all do. The thing is, the world’s a big and complex place, and while we can change worlds, the most effective way of doing that is to start with those closest to us.

Each person we know lives in a world of their own making, and we can certainly help them to make their worlds better places to inhabit, and that’s already huge!

If those we touch then pass on some of our good vibes to people they know, a ripple effect will occur. Who knows how far it will travel and how many people it will reach?

World Domination, Here We Come

That’s why this humble article might make someone do something nice in Sydney or one of my Paris pics could conjure up a smile in Calcutta. A painting or pastry or scrap metal sculpture of yours could raise eyebrows in Minnesota and one of your poems or songs might even cause a major upheaval in… Paris! What do you know?!

You don’t, which is why we should always be striving to bring about unexpected happy events that we can’t even imagine in advance. They will happen, whether we expect them or not. That’s just the way creativity and this weird and wacky world works.

When All’s Said And Done

We all want to enjoy our lives, but everything seems so complicated and difficult. One way of getting clarity is to choose something you really like doing, and to do it a lot. How hard can that be? The more you focus on it, the better you get. This makes us like it even more! We’ll get good feedback and more people will get to know us and our work (or play if you prefer), making us more and more successful and satisfied with our lot.

I’ve coined the term plurk, for when we don’t really see too much difference between play and work, and my aim is to be plurking most of the time.

Having a mission, however humble, to make a difference while you’re here will also make a considerable difference to your life. I’m not guaranteeing that you’ll actually heal the world, but at least you’ll help to make it a better place,

“For you and for me and the entire human race…”

GET COACHED BY SAB!

Sab has been exploring the creative human experience in Paris for over 25 years. He writes words, makes pictures and encourages connectedness every day. He thinks that being creative on a regular basis is a wonderful way to lead a worthwhile, enriching and generous life. He’d love to help you make the most of your infinite potential too, creatively and authentically…

Let’s EXPLODE your CREATIVITY ! Get in touch…

And join my Creativity Clan NOW!