Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
I recently read "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love" by Cal Newport [1].
The book is divided in different "rules". Rule #4 states that having a "mission" is important to having a meaningful and happy life, which, I understand and can agree with. Chapter 12 uses Padris Sabeti, a "Professor @harvard @broadinstitute using computational genomics to understand & impact infectious disease." [2], as an example. The chapter tells her story and concludes with her having a clear mission "to use new technology to fight old diseases".
I try from time to time to take a few steps back and review my own career and the path it's taking. Having my own mission statement seems to fit into this review process quite nicely. Currently, my most accurate mission would be something the lines "(using new technology) to help people build what they themselves can't build".
I find this an interesting topic and simply wanted to know if any of you was willing to share their own "mission" :)
Thanks in advance for your precious time! =)
- [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13525945-so-good-they-can-t-ignore-you
- [2] https://twitter.com/pardissabeti
// edit: formatting
101 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadBut seriously ... if I had to have one, it’d be to get over myself eventually and abandon cleverness in favour of wisdom worth a damn in the biggest of pictures.
I was lucky enough to be born during the internet age in the 90s. Because the internet already existed I was able to teach myself skills and find work that allowed me to be anywhere as long as I had an internet connection.
With the internet, you can choose who to serve and you can do it from anywhere.
I see money as a way to reward people who you like and use it against people who you dislike.
This is what I work for today.
You'd be surprised what we can do as a species if everybody could understand this huge corpus of information we already have.
My conclusion was: I don't know and don't have a specific mission. The closest I have to a mission is a set of positive (may probably not conscious) principles in life that I'm sticking to. Examples:
- always be improving - learn, learn, learn - work hard - presented with negative or ambiguous choices, choose the best available one (don't screw up everything because of frustration)
I'd also be curious to hear opinions on these:
- Is it "necessary" to have a specific higher mission? Can't I just stick to the set of positive principles? - Do I have to actively be looking for a mission? Or I wait and let it happen?
IMHO, a mission helps focusing on things which really matter to get where you want to be in a couple of weeks, months, years,... And by that, I do not mean that one gets there faster by having a mission, but rather gets there at all.
Yes, things happen if you wait. But in my experience, not the things you want. Or, if things you want happen just by waiting, it was by coincidence, mostly? I think living by a set of positive principles is really important! I like to complement my principles with a mission, while still staying humble and open minded (i.e. having a clear focus but not blocking new and different insights, thoughts, ideas..). I hope that makes sense.
Any chance you also read "Principles" by Ray Dalio?
You can still help people in need, just do what you can do.
Charity begins at home.
I think that sometimes a sense of contentment and meaning can be worth a lot of money. Assuming that the basics of life are taken care of, of course.
This drew me to work on React, Jest, React Native, Nuclide (Facebook IDE), create-react-app, prettier... I feel like it’s better than a few years ago but there’s still so much more to do.
(1)https://www.outsystems.com/blog/introducing-sapphire-hospita...
What likely set them apart is the building blocks they provide. If you are a consulting company and building apps for businesses, you are likely doing the same thing over and over and over again for every business. Once you build an hospital management system for three hospitals, the fourth one isn't going to look that different. There are tens of thousands (more?) hospitals in the world which all need such a system.
So the likely next step is to invest in good building blocks that are needed: I want a dashboard with last week patient intake. All of this logic is put inside of a component ready to be dragged & dropped / included in your project and it saves you weeks rather than trying to rebuild it for the nth time.
But in any case, code is difficult: it requires deep attention, good memory - both short and long term(and long term memory doesn't work so well if you don't exercise the knowledge repeatedly ),good learning capabilities, and good abstractions capabilities.
Visual systems are fundamentally easier. So if they can scale well to the required level of complexity and offer similar or better levels of productivity , they may become the 'easy' route.
-- quote by someone famous (some say its Gandhi, but am not sure)
--- Lather, rinse, repeat.
Two books make note of this: Ecclesiastes would call a mission mere striving after wind and Becker's Denial of Death that would call mission a an immortality project doomed to irrelevance.
As others here have noted - Ecclesiastes would agree that enjoying the immediate pleasures of food, work, mirth while in the company of friends and family is a gift.
But Cal is also correct, that without a mission you wander aimlessly. That's what makes it hard - I know it doesn't matter and yet it does matter greatly to those around me who need me to be a strong, good, and competent person.
My only bit of small advice: perhaps a mission something that gives you the ability and desire to help other people could give you a direction that has enough meaning to make it worthwhile.
You can still make the world around you a better place and make your life worthwhile for the greater good. Work hard and do your job well. Be a good friend to others, and a good partner. Have children and raise them well. Donate to the less fortunate and improve your community. They aren't going to erect monuments to you for that, but if you do those things, which are certainly in your power, you will be seen as a bright light and example to others in your circle, and you will make the world a better place.
Our lives today are the accumulation of billions of sand-castles built by others before us.
It may be very hard to discern how one's life will ripple out through time in the vast future, but many small ripples undeniably combine together into something much larger.
I recommend watching Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" [0] for a very interesting variant on the theme of "your mission in life & work".
[0] https://vimeo.com/36579366
I have very little time for glib self-improvement or self-coaching. I’m starting to wonder what purpose all of this could possibly serve (”none at all”, comes my self-reply).
Italy, to the best of my understanding, is still a collection of unruly tribes most of which function under the "I'll take my crook over their crook" mentality, deeply suspicious and corrupt, all united by a thin layer of quasi-democratic practice (theater).
Italy’s been brought down not by socialism but by incomplete, inchoate, puerile mismanagement rooted in a misunderstanding in what capitalism actually is.
I also hope that in a few years, once I have satiated my appetite for career and startups and money, I will have the willingness to go back and try to apply what I have learned - although I don't believe in doing so through the political system, but rather as an entrepreneur.
This could be a much longer discussion, of course. And I'm also sure that other people from other countries feel similarly (e.g. Greeks, Portuguese, Pakistani, etc).
But, I fought in the muck for 10 years before deciding it was time to leave.
Well. What to say. I still miss Italy to this day.
I feel sad for Italians, they are some of the best people I know.
For the Americans reading, young Italians have not been dispirited by socialism, but by rampant crony capitalism.
Making life a bit easier for my family.
Making life a bit easier for my co-workers.
Making life a bit easier for my friends.
Making life a bit easier for the strangers at the grocery store.
Making an impact on the environment where I can.
Just leave the world a little better than you found it.
“Empower engineers and technical leaders with the tools and mindsets to perform at their highest levels, so that they create the meaningful impact they’re capable of.”
That mission started with me writing and self-publishing The Effective Engineer three years ago. And then recently I co-founded a company Co Leadership (coleadership.com) to focus on leadership development full-time.
Q. 1. What is the chief end of man? A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
http://www.reformed.org/documents/WSC.html
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8 ESV)
[1] Which incidentally, I don't think is possible to conclusively prove nor disprove. Like most things in life, you look at the evidence and make your decision.
I don't think there's enough awareness the state can be achieved through specific practice. People like Osho, J Krishnamurti, Eckharte Tolle... they all seemed to have it just spontaneously happen and then try to retrofit techniques they think will probably work. Their approaches seem biased towards people who can already do what they're talking about ("just be aware"), instead of being more systematic processes that circumvent the mind.
The people who inspire me the most are the householders, living in the world who still managed to attain this greatest of prizes. They're the people who inspire me, and something I aspire to be. I think it's a valuable backstory that makes the teaching more approachable and easier to relate to if it's clear you don't need to give up this world to attain true happiness.
Having this mission puts the corporate world and paid work really into perspective as something that supports my life, but doesn't define it. That helps me keep it at a slight distance and allows me to take more risks - which incidentally have paid off.
It seems that you don't actually want to become enlightened as much as you just simply want to be helpful to other people and teach them a valuable skill.
I personally think that enlightenment and teaching others about it are quite different things that maybe don't have in common as much as one thinks they have.
As I see it, you might reach a state of mind you are very content with, and it makes you see the world "as it is" and because of it, you don't need to teach anybody anything, since it's already "as it is" and "as it should be". So, maybe it's just enough to be aware of it.
For me teaching is predicated on having seen far enough to actually be a useful guide. Having said that there may be things I could teach before then, but I'd have to have experienced something major to convince me I was on the right track and the time was right.
Also, regarding the "just enough to be aware" it probably would be enough, but I wouldn't have been able to have reached my goal without the thousands who've gone before, so it'd be paying back that debt. There's just some part of me that knows it's important for me to do that.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5-LfK2i2J4
I wrote about what I believe the "Purpose of Life" is on my blog, though I haven't publicized it very much yet:
https://goose.us/thoughts/the-purpose-of-life/
(TL;DR - the purpose of life is to maximize the area under the complexity curve for our enclosing system. I use Sean Carroll's The Big Picture and some MinutePhysics/Earth videos to help make the point.)
Right now I'm learning more about complex systems while practicing writing and speaking in order to refine the message for wider consumption. I would love to engage with anyone on the topic who is willing.
Can you put this in laymans terms?
Basically the idea is that life is a process which maximizes complexity as entropy increases, by its very nature... if you consider the whole universe, there are no structures we have observed that are as complex as the structures we observe in living organisms.
The complexity of the biosphere would dwarf the complexity of the rest of our entire solar system... as in, the information required to describe the entire solar system and how it proceeds from state to state, including the storms or Jupiter and Saturn, would be trivial compared to attempts to model all the life on our planet, including the mental states of each of the 7 billion humans and the interconnected relationships of all the other bacteria, plant, fungi, etc.
This maximization occurs as life seeks to continue replicating and adapts to each other and any environment that it possibly can, even the harshest on our planet. The most advanced organisms on the planet are those which have the most complex nervous systems and thus the most complex behavior, including us (again, the complexity of the human mind most likely dwarfs the complexity of most other organisms... proven simply by being able to occupy states that allow it to understand and communicate the complexity of other organisms).
So, my thesis is that the purpose of life is to maximizes complexity, but not as an absolute, since complexity creates fragility and issues with diminishing returns on energy input. This is why I say that it the purpose is to maximize the area under the complexity curve, rather than simply maximize absolute complexity. See this graph - https://goose.us/media/complexity_entropy_graph_filled-920px...
Not sure if that was a good or not, but I appreciate any feedback on the attempt!
The best metaphor I could come up with, given my potentially erroneous understanding of your thesis is thus:
The purpose of life is a dance competition, the more novel the performance the better.
The beautiful mating dances of exotic jungle birds comes to mind:
https://youtu.be/W7QZnwKqopo
The purpose of life as a whole is to spread this complexity to all parts of the Universe that can support it, so as to raise the overall complexity of the system.
Another way to think about it is that life lengthens the path that energy needs to flow through in order to reach equilibrium (maximum entropy).