Mission Statement
January 1, 2018
Mission Statement
Why develop a mission statement?
I call my junior year in college the juggling year. During that year, I held a senior leadership position in a Christian fellowship of 80 people. I was leading 15 undergraduates to write robotic software for a competition. I was an active undergraduate researcher working on a journal paper. I was a full time student. How did I make it all fit? How did I possibly deal with all the challenges, the issues that were pounding upon me? The answer is I couldn’t. I was not able to find harmony between all those responsiblities. I was exhausted and lacked conviction to continue to challenge myself.
It was through some reading over that summer, I stumbled upon the idea of writing a personal mission statement. It made total sense to me. I often spend a significant time and energy planning for a camping trip. I’d do thorough research, develop an itinerary, and reserve camp sites. When I work on projects, I’d develop milestone schedules, budgets, and resource plans until every detail of the project is crystal clear. It became ludicrous to me that I did not have a destination in mind for my life. Nor did I have a strategy to get there. Nor did I have a system in place to know when I’ve hit critical milestones or fallen off course. I decided to write a personal mission statement to guide me. Over the past few years, this statement has been helpful in deciding how to spend my time and resources.
How to develop a mission statement?
Now writing a personal mission statment at first sounded easy, but it turned out to be quite a difficult task. It required arduous self-reflection. I wrote many drafts only to throw them away. After a summer(2019) of pondering and revision, I now have a version that I am quite happy with and I hope that it will stand the test of time.
Of course, a personal mission statement is exactly that: personal. My gifts and passions are different from yours. My bent is not your bent. Consider mine as a template that might be helpful in crafting your own. Don’t worry about changing your mission statement. Engineers change their blueprints constantly for better designs. My most recent revision was just a few months ago when I decided to leave graduate school and work in industry.
My personal mission statement
I encourage you to read my faith journey as an undergraduate. It gives some context to my mission statement.
Mission: If you were going to have your epitaph written tomorrow, what would you want it to say? Thats a good place to start.
I will be a Christian family man and engineer. I will useevery resource God provides me to carry out his work on earth as set forth below.
Values: The things I will stand for, my values I will be recognized for. I will:
- Work hard in all that I do. (Col. 3:23)
- Give my best effort in every task. (1 Thess. 4:1)
- Enthusiastically approach new challenges and all else I do. (2 Cor. 9:2)
- Be open, honest, and generous (2 Cor 9:11).
- Be careful with words and action (James 1:26).
- Seek the counsel of others frequently and thoughtfully. (Prov. 15:22)
- Never be satisfied with the status quo. I will be an agent of change. (Rom. 15:20)
- Seek to improve and grow those around and beneath me in work and all other areas. (1 Thess. 5:14)
- Not seek my own glory, I will seek to honor God and have praise be given to those around me. (Rom. 15:5-6)
- Never take things too seriously but have a great time in everything, continually enjoying God’s blessings. (James 4:13-15)
Goals: These I will keep to myself for now. I encourage you to have measurable goals that you can regularly measure your progress against. It could be number of books you read per year. It could be number of places you want to explore. It could be the number of lives you touched. It could be writing a book.