Are you on a mission?

“It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”

– Henry David Thoreau

A new year begins. What are you working on? Are you on a mission? Yes, you’re working hard but are you doing something meaningful? For a company that stands for something? Do you wake up without an alarm clock because the mission beckons?

“Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.”

– Pablo Picasso

Does your work seamlessly blend with your life and what you want to get out of it? Does the line blur because you love the challenge you’ve set before yourself? Even the low points and the small failures along the way?

“Persistency of purpose is a power. It creates confidence in others. Everybody believes in the determined man.”

– Orison Swett Marden

Have you surrounded yourself with people on the same mission, people working toward the same purpose? You can do it alone but you don’t have to. Are your ideas powerful enough to share? Are they attracting others to your cause? Are your beliefs infectious?

“You have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.”

– Theodore Hesburgh

Have you taken the time to write out precisely what you’re trying to accomplish? When you share it with others, do their eyes light up? Do they get it immediately? If not, try the next draft. And the next. Go until you can recite it like a mantra, even in your sleep. If you are not absolutely convinced in what you’re doing, who else will be? Not coworkers, not potential partners and certainly not customers.

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

– Steve Jobs

Another year is now underway. Get busy doing your best work – the work you were meant to be doing. And if you are not in a position to do that, then do something about it before another year goes by.

“There’s a redemptive power that making a choice has rather than feeling like you’re an effect to all the things that are happening. 

Make a choice. 

Just decide what it’s gonna be, who you’re gonna be, how you are going to do it. 

Just decide. 

And from that point, the universe will get out of your way.”

– Will Smith

Just decide.