The Power of Mission

To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question, What should I do with my life? Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world—a crucial factor in loving what you do. People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work. Staying up late to save your corporate litigation client a few extra million dollars can be draining, but staying up late to help cure an ancient disease can leave you more energized than when you started—perhaps even providing the extra enthusiasm needed to start a lab volleyball team or tour with a rock band.

I was drawn to Pardis Sabeti because her career is driven by a mission and she’s reaped happiness in return. After meeting her, I went searching for other people who leveraged this trait to create work they love. This search led me to a young archaeologist whose mission to popularize his field led to his own television series on the Discovery Channel, and to a bored programmer who systematically studied marketing to devise a mission that injected excitement back into his working life. In all three cases, I tried to decode exactly how these individuals found and then successfully deployed their missions. In short, I wanted an answer to an important question: How do you make mission a reality in your working life?

The answers I found are complicated. To better understand this complexity, let’s put the topic back into the broader context of the book. In the preceding rules, I have argued that “follow your passion” is bad advice, as most people aren’t born with pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered. If your goal is to love what you do, you must first build up “career capital” by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the traits that define great work. As I’ll explain, mission is one of these desirable traits, and like any such desirable trait, it too requires that you first build career capital—a mission launched without this expertise is likely doomed to sputter and die.

But capital alone is not enough to make a mission a reality. Plenty of people are good at what they do but haven’t reoriented their career in a compelling direction. Accordingly, I will go on to explore a pair of advanced tactics that also play an important role in making the leap from a good idea for a mission to actually making that mission a reality. In the chapters ahead, you’ll learn the value of systematically experimenting with different proto-missions to seek out a direction worth pursuing. You’ll also learn the necessity of deploying a marketing mindset in the search for your focus. In other words, missions are a powerful trait to introduce into your working life, but they’re also fickle, requiring careful coaxing to make them a reality.

This subtlety probably explains why so many people lack an organizing focus to their careers, even though such focus is widely admired: Missions are hard. By this point in my quest, however, I had become comfortable with “hard,” and I hope that if you’ve made it this far in the book, you have gained this comfort as well. Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.