I recently moved to a new company. Changing companies is often a hard choice, with repercussions that will inevitably have lifetime consequences. Looking back to the process that led me to move, I observed I was driven mainly by instinct. And this was true for every other decision I took regarding my career up to that point.
While instincts can be extremely useful in decision making, I felt somewhat uneasy with my apparent lack of intentionality. Not understanding my path entirely could easily lead to me wasting time on something that doesn't fulfill me entirely, and I'm not sure what opportunity costs I've paid so far. So I decided to prepare myself to be more intentional from now on.
Inspired by the book "Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" by Greg McKeown, I decided a reasonable way to start being more intentional would be to write my own mission statement. Now, I've participated in multiple "craft our mission" processes before, and I hated all of them. They all ended up with a group of people wordsmithing sentences full of platitudes. But thought that by doing it for yourself, you remove most of the variables that make mission crafting not work for teams and companies.
My goal at the end was to have a sentence that I could, just by looking at it, answer questions like: "Should I take this project or not?" "Should I join this team or not?" "Should I learn this technology or not?" "Should I join this company or not?"
For a couple of weeks, I meditated on the subject, taking notes of questions, ideas, and insights. I then let those ideas sit a bit before putting them together on a cogent sentence that reflected my beliefs in an informative way. The sentence is the following:
"Write beautiful, long-lasting, essential software that works efficiently and directly influences human lives, making it better and more sustainable."
It is a sentence with some loaded and subjective terms. For example, the concept of beautiful software will vary drastically from one person to the other. But it works for a personal mission statement. From my own perspective, I know precisely what beautiful software means. And it is a great starting point for a conversation with others.
More importantly, in the process of crafting this mission statement, some beliefs I have emerged clearly, and are embedded in the sentence in a way I'll keep being reminded of them every time I look at it.
Of course, my ideas about software and my goals as a person that crafts them will still change. But the process of making those ideas and goals concrete brought up a good deal of self-understanding, which I hope will help me focus more from now on.
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