Meaningful Mission
What makes a mission meaningful?
For a mission to be meaningful it must first be personal to you. It has to resonate with you individually. It can’t be a mission someone else wants you to tackle. It can’t be imposed on you against your will or something you fall into by accident.
Key Questions: Ask yourself What do I really want?
It calls upon the deeper parts of our souls and moves us to attempt something greater than ourselves.
Like a Heroic quest, a mission has a singular focus or purpose, as well as a call that compels you to push through resistance to complete it.
Many people spend their lives running from problems. But pursuing a Meaningful Mission from your sweet spot means you actively seek out a problem to solve. Rather than running from the challenge and letting it define you, you courageously run toward it – and redefine the world as you do.
You find your Meaningful Mission when you find a problem that needs to be solved in the world.
On one hot summer day, I was on the 405 highway in traffic. I had just moved to Los Angeles a few months before and wasn’t feeling at home yet. I had sold my previous business to my business partner for seven figures.
I kept moving forward, believing something would materialize, but I was frustrated with so much of my life. I mean, here I was, young and healthy. I had made what most people would think was a good deal of money, but I felt empty. My relationships felt off too. As a result of the lack of purpose, I felt my physical health beginning to slip and my emotional health along with it. I felt like my life was breaking down.
So as I sat in the car that day with the radio going in and out in the background, I asked myself: Why am I not feeling good inside? What am I feeling unfulfilled? Why do I not feel satisfied when I’ve been so driven for the last several years? I’d been goal-oriented and gotten things done, but I don’t feel fulfilled inside. Why?
I knew I loved interviewing people, asking questions, and learning, but I had no idea how to make a living doing that. Then it hit me: I’m stuck, and I’m literally surrounded by all these other people who are stuck. They’re obviously frustrated based on their honking and yelling – and not just about the traffic. Their frustration is deeper, like mine, with life in general. Then I realized there must be millions, if not billions of people, just like them and just like me. What if I could get in front of them and help them and help myself in the process while making a living doing it?
The wheels started turning, unfortunately not on the highway, but in my mind. At the time, I had heard about podcasts, but they really weren’t anywhere near as popular as they are today. You had to explain what a podcast was to most people when it came up in conversations, and it seldom came up. The handful of people I knew who were into podcasting weren’t really making money at it yet. But I began to wonder if I could do it. After all, I was already interviewing all kinds of people, but just for my own benefit and learning. What if I could do what I love, record these interviews, and share them with the world to help others?
Out of the place of keen awareness of my own brokenness in life, I told James I wished school had taught me the things I really needed to know. Instead, I had alway felt slow and stupid and just not good enough in school. But I wish there had been a school where I could have felt empowered – a school that taught me how to overcome fear, failure, and insecurities: how to manage my finances: how to enjoy fulfilling relationships: how to maintain my emotional health: or even how to eat nutritiously and be physically healthy.
All those things felt like they were breaking down in my life at that time, and I just wished there was a school about these meaningful things, not just about accomplishing goals and being successful. I just want to live a great life.
If only there were a school that taught about how to do this… a School of Greatness.
Lewis Howe’s Meaningful Mission: To serve 100 million lives weekly by helping them improve the quality of their lives and overcome the things that hold them back.
Discover your Meaningful Mission.
Ask yourself questions like these, and truly listen to what your heart tells you:
- What did you enjoy doing with your free time?
- What dreams did you have of what you might love to do in life?
- What lights you up? Inspires you? Energizes you?
- When do you find yourself losing track of time because you are so absorbed in an activity and can’t wait to get back to it and do it again?
- What would you love to do even if you didn’t get paid to do it?
- Fast-forward to our golden years. What might you wish you had done more of?
Now take a moment to compare your lists.
- What common themes do you see in your answers?
- What would get repeated? What activities keep getting mentioned?
Premeditatio Malorum
A big part of success is visualization if you can’t see it happening it won’t happen. If you don’t see yourself making a shot, if you don’t see yourself standing on the metal stand, if you don’t see yourself successful. You won’t be successful. If you don’t believe in yourself it won’t happen.
The stoic would pair positive thinking with negative: Do you have a backup plan when things go wrong do you have a backup plan.
Seneca say that the only thing inexcusable the thing for a leader to say “oh I didn’t think that would happen”
“You have to think it could happen and you have to have a plan for what you’re going to do if that happens.”
The Doubt Diagram Fear #1: Failure
Failure is a funny thing.
Without failure, we can’t move forward.
Without failure, we’d never try anything new. Without failure, we’d never discover a better way.
Without failure, we’d never get any better, stronger, or tougher.
Failure isn’t something to be shunned, overlooked, or wasted.
Failure is a critical part of the fabric of life.
Lewis Howes every single time I had a speaking engagement, I was afraid of how I would look on stage. I was afraid of saying the wrong thing and being embarrassed while people laughed at me. I thought I would start stuttering and fall all over my words, if I didn’t fall on the stairs on the way to the stage.
A few hours before one of my big events, I told one of my coaches, Chris Lee, about my fears. He challenged me to flip the script running in my head by pointing out that my fears were all about me. How I might look. How I might feel. How I might make a mistake. What if I made it all about serving other people? Why was I speaking? For me or for my audience?
I know that if my focus was on serving other people, then all my fears about what might happen to me became irrelevant.
Roberts “Failure teaches you your limits and makes you realize what you did wrong. It shows you what you could do differently.”
The Doubt Diagram #2 FEAR OF SUCCESS
The Second Fear in the Doubt Diagram is less intuitive.
The Fear of success.
This one may seem illogical at first. After all, isn’t success what we all want?
When success is the finish line, it can be easy to run the race. But what will happen after you cross the finish line? How will you lead a growing organization? What if you have to deal with the press or the public spotlight? What if people take advantage of you and you lose money and look stupid doing it? That’s where doubt can creep in and hold you back from even attempting to succeed. How will I keep up the pace? Will I be able to withstand the pressure or the spotlight? What if I achieve it and still don’t feel fulfilled? What if I’m not good enough to succeed again?
According to Tim Grover, we should embrace the change that success can bring as a way out of our routines and see the wins in that opportunity. As Tim and I talked, he suggested we move forward on the journey and experience things that might cause us to hear and convert them to opportunities by choosing to see them through that lens. “Count them as wins,” he suggested, not as losses or negatives.
The Doubt Diagram#3 FEAR OF JUDGMENT
Here is the truth: people will judge you no matter what you do. If you sit on the couch and do nothing, people will criticize you. If you chase your dreams, people will judge you. Either way you are being judged, so you might as well go for your dreams and do the thing you love the most.
When you look in the mirror, you should at least be proud that you gave your all on the field no matter what the critics may say. Be true to you.
One question retired Navy Seal Commander Rich Diviney posed to me was: How do you really know what people are thinking? Usually, you don’t. You only think you do. The reality is, you usually don’t have a clue. Rich suggests we tend to obsess over negative things people might be thinking because of the way the brain works:
We consciously lodge a question into our forebrain. Our brain immediately begins to come up with answers. I do this experiment with people in classes I teach. I say, “Just take a moment. I’ll give you thirty seconds to answer this question. How could I double my income in the next thirty days? Anything that pops into your head, write it down on a piece of paper.” They generate a little list.
They usually get three,four,five, and sometimes even seven or right answers. Why? Because they launched a question to their forebrain.
The fear of failure, success, and judgment are part of growth.
Each time we want to grow we need to step out of our comfort zone and that requires that we think at a different level.
We want to step in between stimulus and response and choose the heroic response.
This reminds me of Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is The Way There is an old zen story about a king whose people had grown soft and entitled. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he hoped to teach them a lesson. His plan was simple: He would place a large boulder in the middle of the main road, completely blocking entry into the city. He would then hide nearby and observe their reaction.
How would they respond? Would they band together to remove it? Or would they get discouraged, quit, and return home?
With growing disappointment, the king watched as subject after subject came to this impediment and turned away. Or, at best, tried half-heartedly before giving up. Many openly complained or cursed the king or fortune or bemoaned the inconvenience, but none managed to do anything about it.
After several days, a lone peasant came along on his way into town. He did not turn away. Instead, he strained and strained, trying to push it out of the way. Then an idea came to him: he scrambled into the nearby woods to find something he could use for leverage. Finally, he returned with a large branch he had crafted into a lever and deployed it to dislodge the massive rock from the road.
Beneath the rock were a purse of gold coins and a note from the king, which said: “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”
Finding your Identity
To live out your own greatness and not someone else’s idea of it, you have to be intentional about crafting your identity. Part of this intentionality might mean rejecting some old parts of yourself and visualizing the new you that you want to become.
While speaking with me about the need for change, Leon Howard, South Carolina state representative, shared a story he read about two men who decided to quit smoking. One of the men, when offered a smoke, responded, “No, I’m trying to quit.” He still visualized himself as a smoker, one who was trying to quit, but a smoker nonetheless. The other replied, “No, I don’t smoke.” He was fully invested in a new identity by taking off his old self and claiming a new identity.
You are a combination of all your experiences, communities, and beliefs.
Visualize the best version of yourself: what habit, mindset, and character do you have?
In Psycho-Cybernetics – To achieve your best possible “self” if you will form a picture in your imagination of the self you want to be and see yourself in the new role. This is a necessary condition to personality transformation, regardless of the method of therapy used. Somehow, before a person can change, he must see himself in a new role.
Edward McGoldrick, founder of New York’s Alcoholic Therapy Bureau in the 1940s, used this technique in helping alcoholics cross the bridge from the old self to the new self. Each day, he had his students close their eyes, relax their bodies as much as possible, and create a “mental motion picture” of themselves as they would like to be. In this mental motion picture they would see themselves as sober, responsible persons. They would see themselves actually enjoying life without liquor.
Accept the Challenge 30-60-90-days
I love challenges. I get energized by tackling a 30-60-90-day challenge and overcoming it. If you want to become fearless, you have to check off the items on your Fear List by going all in on your fears until the fear disappears. I start by taking one fear at a time and creating challenges to help face it.
When I was younger, I was afraid to talk to girls. I asked myself, How can I overcome that through a challenge? I committed to talk to a girl every day for the entire summer. By the end of the summer, I had all the confidence in the world. At age 17, I was confidently talking with a 40-year-old woman, simply as a challenge to see if I could.
I discovered that with every fear I overcame, I believed myself more capable going to the next fear challenge. Overcoming my fear of speaking to women gave me the boost I needed to face my fear of rejection in salsa dancing. The detail of the fear didn’t matter as much as the fact that I was proving to myself that I could overcome my fears. Because I could learn to talk to women and salsa dance, that confidence transferred into believing I could be a public speaker, make successful webinars, and write a best-selling book.
Improving by 1% isn’t particularly notable, sometimes it isn’t even noticeable. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.
I ask myself these three questions to get 1% better.
What did I do right?
What did I learn?
What can I do to improve?
CELEBRATE: YOU ARE ENOUGH
When I was younger, I never celebrated my accomplishments because I never felt like I was worthy of celebration. No success was big enough for me to feel worthy to celebrate. Even when I accomplished my goals of becoming an All-American athlete twice, of becoming a professional athlete, or of breaking a world record in sports, I never allowed myself to celebrate because I didn’t feel like I was enough.
I thought I needed to go bigger and be better – to be more.
It wasn’t until I started my healing journey about nine years ago that I allowed myself to really celebrate wins. I don’t mean celebrating that I had arrived at my destination and was done. It was more a celebration of what I had achieved and realizing there was still more to my mission to be fulfilled.
I don’t ever want to be done. I want to keep growing and learning and developing and creating. Celebrating just allows me to enjoy those powerful moments instead of feeling pressure to keep going because I’m not yet good enough.
I challenge you to take the time each evening to celebrate three things that happened that day. Sometimes it might all be related to one of your life players. It might be all Wellness or all Relationship related. Maybe you got to spend extra time with your family. Whatever it is, just take time to acknowledge the good. Get in a routine of asking, What are the three things that stand out today that I can be grateful for and celebrate?
Gary Indiana, had a slight rash on her face and went down to the Doctor. They prescribed some drugs for her. The drug settled into her eye and lost her sight. The insurance company gave her 1 million dollars.
Let me ask you a simple question.
If you were given a chance to swap places with that lady. Would you take the 1 million dollar and she would take your sight. Would you seriously swap places with her? I don’t believe a person who has good vision would make that exchange.
Los Angeles California a lady got into an airplane accident her back is broken for the rest of her life. The insurance company settled with her for 1 million dollars. Here is the same question: how many of you can walk around would you swap places with that lady? You go to bed for the rest of your life and you take her 1 million dollars and let her go back to walking. I don’t believe there is one who would exchange places with her.
You know where we already arrive at 1 million dollars for our eyes, 1 million dollars for our back , 1 million dollars for our legs, that’s 3 million dollars we haven’t even started yet. How many of you are starting to like yourself a little better?
Just by writing down what you’re grateful for in 1 week you’re 20% more happy.
Each time you celebrate your win. You’re reinforcing your self-image, the best version of yourself. I can do this.
Lover of wisdom. I love to help people become the best version of themselves. Believe in others so that they believe in themselves so that together we can achieve our Goals and Dreams. Learn more to become the best version of yourself at Michael Herr Arete.com
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