Do you believe that people have mission’s for their lives? When I look up the definition of mission, the definition I intend is “a strongly felt aim, ambition, or calling.” In this sense, mission seems to be a combination of our natural abilities (your “calling”) and our goals (our “ambitions”, which is a “strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work”).
In other words, a mission is like a life goal. Most of the time, it isn’t something that is going to be accomplished over the weekend; our life mission isn’t to build that raised bed garden that our partner wanted. But you know what, if you’re in a really crappy place in your life, and all the world is stacked against you, and you’ve been knocked down, maybe that is exactly the mission you need. Maybe your mission should be something you can achieve right now. And once you achieve it, feel good about achieving it, and then move onto the next mission. Keep knocking them out.
In this sense, everyone should have a mission. Everyone should define the life goals that they are working towards. It’s too damn easy to go day by day, wake up, go to work, come home, turn on a game, and go to bed, just to repeat the cycle again. You look up, and a month has gone by. A year has gone by. Nothing has changed in your life. You’re stuck repeating the same cycle day after day. How do you break that cycle? You stop doing the same thing that you’ve been doing day after day. Obviously that’s not working! You need a mission.
What is your life goal going to be? If you don’t know, then just set a small goal. Set the biggest goal that you can clearly visualize, but if all you can visualize is a week or a month from now, set that goal. Sometimes the goals are easy to visualize: I have this infant child in my arms. Holy f… I need to prepare this little person for adulthood. I know they’re going to turn 18 one day. I can visualize that day. From that point, I can work backwards and make a plan. What do I need to teach them? What values do I want to instill? What does being “on track” mean? But keep in mind, that child gets a say in the whole process, and they will disrupt your plans. You wanted them to be a football kid, but they’re a D&D kid.
If you know what your goal is, then the effort and pain and discomfort and struggle to attain that goal becomes worth it. In Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, he was fond of quoting Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Your goal in life – your mission – doesn’t have to be something great or grand, but it has to be very important to you. It has to be something that you believe in the core of your being is worth achieving.
It’s likely that you will have more than one goal or mission for your life at a time. It’s very rare that we can dedicate 100% of our being to one thing. Most of us have different domains in our life: our work, our friends, our family, our physical health, our diet, our mental health, spiritual, etc. Any one of the domains in our life may call upon us to pursue a mission. It’s always our choice to answer that call, and when we answer the call, that is when we find our why. We take responsibility for accomplishing the mission, and at least as it relates to that mission, we have a sense of purpose.
But I don’t believe that someone’s mission is the same thing as their purpose for life. Purpose is defined as “the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.” To me, mission is more transient. Your mission for a while may be to raise your kids or to complete some scientific research, but once that is complete, the mission is achieved. Purpose is a state of being. Mission is a direction for action. Meaning & purpose are more analogous to me. Meaning is the implied or explicit significance.
Missions are just the goals that our smaller goals are working towards, and each person can set whatever goal that they desire. I think these goals do give us a sense of purpose. It is best if we can find the belief for the mission from within ourselves. If our goals aren’t born out of internal motivations but are instead impressed upon us by external influences, then we become susceptible to have our sense of purpose shaken. For example, if you’re a member of a culture that expects you to achieve a high status job and your parents are pushing you to become a doctor, but you don’t want to become a doctor, then it becomes harder to recognize what your motivation is for going to school. If you realize that your motivation isn’t authentic to yourself, then the goal of being a doctor can lose its importance. If that happens, then you’ll also lose that sense of purpose that the goal provided to you. One way to help avoid this is to also spend time understanding your meaning, which is like your purpose in life. When your big goals align with your meaning, you’re being authentic to yourself.
When you are accepting your life mission, don’t concern yourself with constraints. Even if factors such as gender, nationality, wealth, or status are against you, you should realize that anyone who ever achieved anything always has one or more factors against you. Conditions will NEVER be perfect. If you believe that this mission is worth pursuing, then it’s probably worth pursuing now. There will always be a reason to say no, to turn down your mission. You have to believe in yourself, “I can do this.”
And when times get hard, when you start to doubt, ask yourself: “What if I could? What if I could accomplish this mission? Imagine how I would feel if I pushed through this and succeeded. Imagine how much crow those doubters would have to eat. What if I could?”