Mission: Possible

I think the single most irritating buzz word these days, is the word, “passion”.

Follow your passion and everything will work out. Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. Ugh. If you have a single practical bone in your body, you’ll be groaning even louder than I am right now.

While the concept of doing the work you’re passionate about is absolutely valid and one that I avidly agree with, it’s hardly the whole picture, and without additional context, instruction and detail, it’s a little like explaining a space launch by saying, just hop in the rocket, and go to the moon. No big deal.

If you’re contemplating “going for it”, it’s obvious that you first have to think about your life circumstances, and the talents and skills that you possess. You have to consider obligations, your current life path and the resources you have to draw upon. All of this and more, makes up where you are today, ground zero.

When someone tells you to follow your passion, they’re trying to help you think about where you’d like to be tomorrow, assuming that’s not where you are today. Most people would say that the position they find themselves in today, is not the one they’d like to occupy tomorrow, or five, ten or fifteen years from now. They’re trying to help you think of what you’ll need to be happy, and what position in life you’d like to occupy, down the road. So, the oversimplified advice is to follow your passion.  

What’s missing, is a practical means for making that journey. It might be a short road or a long one. How big are your dreams? Do you know what you need to learn to begin following them? What sacrifices will you need to make along the way? All we are shown in this world of social media and reality TV are polished, varnished views of the finished or staged product, and even the journey is glamorized and sanitized for your viewing pleasure. This means that when we pick the goal we want to chase, through a desire to copy this vision of success or that one, the result is that we really don’t know what we’re signing up for.

So instead of following a passion, I prefer to think about it as a setting out on a mission.

Think about a space mission for example. It takes years of preparation and planning for the launch and the voyage. Astronauts are some of the most highly trained humans on the planet. They spend years preparing themselves before they even think of setting foot in a rocket. There are teams of brilliant scientists that pour their genius into every detail of the spacecraft, meticulously creating plans, and calculating the approach, trajectory and repercussions of each action, knowing there will be a reaction as well. I deeply admire the level of detail and planning involved in missions like these, and I think it gives us a wonderful template on which to plan our own missions. It’s pretty obvious why there’s so much planning and training involved in missions like these; its a matter of life and death.

Think about your life mission as a trip into outer space.

We have limited time on this earth. We only have so many resources, and only so many opportunities, like launch windows, to accomplish certain goals. For example, you only get a certain number of years in which to attend and graduate high school, after that you’re taking alternative measures to get equivalents, or if your life gets too busy, and full or other responsibility that was your opportunity which is now gone. You might not be planning something as potentially dangerous as a space launch, but I would contend that the stakes are the same. This is your life we’re talking about. You only get this one shot at it. There’s no winding back the clock and doing it over again. So it’s incredibly important to plan your missions, and carry them out with precision.

Think about the missions you’ve completed, and the missions you want to take on. Have you had your children? Are they grown and out of the house? If they are, that’s a mission success. If you’re looking for your partner in life, that’s a mission. If you’re following a career path, that’s yet another mission.

In order for a mission in to space, the moon, or Mars for that matter to be successful, the goal has to be very, very clearly defined at the outset. Are you trying to make partner at your firm? Or are you trying to make enough money at a job, that gives you enough free time in the evenings to work on launching your start up? Only if you know what you’re aiming to accomplish, will you know how to plan and approach. If you want to find that perfect partner, you need to invest the time finding that someone. If you want a big family, you need to plan for the right living situation, income and support to make it all work.

The real magic in attaining your goals, is knowing what the preparation work is. The countdown is televised, but the hundreds and thousands of man hours spent calculating, researching, training and testing are not. Without all that pre-work, nothing happens. We all want to jump to the end, the glamourous part where we’re at the top of our field, driving a luxury car and living in the beautiful home, but that fa?ade will fall apart quickly if it wasn’t built carefully.

When you’re deciding what your mission is, what it is you want to accomplish in life, and the destination that you want to reach, it’s important to begin with the pre-work. What do you need to do, to build that rocket? What will it take to plan your mission?

I have a couple of simple exercises to help determine what your mission is:

1.     List your strengths and your weaknesses. Ask friends and family to help after you’ve taken a first pass. It’s interesting to see what they agree and disagree with, and what they see that you don’t. Make sure to remove all sensitivity, you’re not being attacked, you’re just gathering information to help you build your spaceship after all. They’re just helping you figure out what ground zero is.

2.     List your skills and talents. While you might not enjoy the job you’re in today, and you can’t wait to set out on your life mission, remember the things you know how to do that are special, rare or required a lot of training to hone. There’s almost no skill that isn’t somewhat transferable, and what ever it is that you’ve learned how to do, or gained a degree in, you had to like it enough to complete it, and it is a part of you now. Use it.

3.     List things that the world needs, using items from your first two lists. The last but biggest trap in the “follow your passion” cliché, is that in no where does that talk about the needs of others. The free market is a voting system of sorts. People will pay for things that they feel are valuable. If you’re trying to make your passion make you money, you need to make sure that you create value for others as you do.

These exercises aren’t designed to keep you in a box of only your own skills and experiences. These are starting points.

In the 1950’s, every sane person would have reasonably told you, that putting a person on the moon were the dreams of a raving lunatic. Less than 20 years later, that was a mission accomplished. Now, not even 50 years after that incredible milestone in the growth of humanity, we’re working on putting people on Mars. There is no reason, that you can’t design the mission to your dream life. That’s why I call it mission possible. The only thing that would have make it impossible, is if it was one lone engineer trying to do it all by himself.

This is your mission, if you choose to accept it.