Sharpen Your Purpose: Making the Mission Statement

Achieving success with intention is within our grasp—if we're willing to put in the work.

Keep curious. Keep sharp.

In the first installment in this two-part series, we explored the mission-driven (or not so mission-driven) outcomes of two enterprises, namely the Writescast Network and Kill Your Darlings Candle Company. This was, as a reminder, in service of the mission statement we laid out for ourselves for this discussion:

We’re here to sharpen our sense of purpose to achieve success with intention.

Now, having developed an understanding of the differences between success and success with intention, we can finally explore how to sharpen our sense of purpose and unlock success with intention.

Before we do, though, check out the expected takeaways from this article below, along with questions to consider as you read.

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Expected Takeaways

• A mission statement provides focus and direction. It should be a clear declaration of purpose that guides decisions and goals.

• Prioritization is key. Rather than juggling multiple priorities, a strong mission statement centers around a singular, overarching objective.

• Mission statements should be concise and meaningful. Avoiding generic values and excessive wording helps ensure they’re memorable and actionable.

Questions to Consider

• What is the single most important priority that drives your project or personal mission?

• How can you refine your mission statement to make it more specific, actionable, and unique?

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Mission Statements, Defined

A quick glance about the web will confirm what many of you might already suspect: there are about as many definitions for mission statement out there as there are get-rich-quick schemes.

It’s my observation that there are common threads that run through these definitions, which converge on the notion that a mission statement is a declaration of purpose that provides focus and direction for an organization, project, or person. It’s a reference from which one’s goals will spring and, as we saw in our examination of KYD Candle Co. in the last post, against which decisions can be made and measured.

Mission Statements, Declared

So, how can we knit it all of this together?

We’ll start here: I see mission statements as boiling down to a handful of key components: priority, values, goals, and how.

Priority (Not Plural)

The word priority came into English via Old French (which itself picked up the word from Medieval Latin) sometime in the late Middle English era. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1930s that a plural form of the word came into widespread use, especially compared to the historic use of the singular form.

Historically, then, the very notion of priorities in the plural is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its advent is made even more clear when one looks at the explosion in use of the word prioritization. After all, there’d be no need to prioritize if there were only one priority, right?

What I mean to drive home here is that, in the context of a mission statement, it behooves us to be singularly minded: what is the absolute number one priority that our business, project, or person is focused on? Once this has been determined, you’ll have taken a tremendous step forward in crafting an effective mission statement.

Ask yourself: what’s the one thing you or your endeavor needs to elevate above all else?

Value(s)—Plural If You’d Like!

Defining values to undergird your mission is a critical step in developing an effective mission statement. Remember the word sustainably in KYD Candle Co.’s mission statement to sustainably illuminate the lives of readers, writers, and their communities? That word on its own is a communication of values, and so is the mention of communities at the end.

I point this out because, after making a list of our values¹, it can become far too easy to drop a laundry list of them into our mission statements. This ballooning makes it far more challenging to recall our mission statements when we need them most, and if we can’t readily recall them, we’re far less likely to embody them.

When it comes to values, then, I encourage you to include only those values that will set your organization, project, or personal brand apart. Think, for a moment, about some of the more tiresome mission statements you have seen in the past. How many of them mentioned integrity, excellence, and innovation? These are great values, but they don’t really tell us anything. After all, who doesn’t want to do novel things well?

Think of it this way: if the nature of your business, project, or brand would imply a particular value, it doesn’t need to be mentioned explicitly in your mission statement. As in creative writing, let context do the heavy lifting for you whenever possible.

Your turn: what values do you see as core to your mission? Once you have a list, strike from it any values that don’t set you apart or that are implied by the nature of your project.

Goal

It should come as no surprise that one’s goal is an extension of one’s priority. The overlap between these is significant enough, in fact, that it can be hard to tell them apart. I do this by considering the goal in a mission statement to be a distillation of the priority; goal is a statement of what you’re doing right now to drive the embodiment of your priority.

In this way, then, goal in a mission statement is not some future state that you’re aiming to achieve. Instead, it’s a nod to the ongoing embrace of your what.² It’s this interpretation that also leads me to be a strong advocate for the removal of words like “aim” or “strive” from mission statements. Don’t tell me what you’re trying to do; tell me what you do.

Think: what is it that you or your organization does to embody your priority? If you struggle to answer this question, don’t worry; we’ll create an example mission statement later to guide you forward.

A Suggestion of How

Earlier, I mentioned the word sustainably in the KYD Candle Co. mission statement was a declaration of (one of) the company’s values.

It was also a suggestion of how it went about its work.

Here, we see that the elements of a quality mission statement can overlap. There is a relationship between a suggestion of how and values in the same way there’s a coincidence between priority and goal.

Furthermore, KYD Candle Co. managed to include a suggestion of how in a single word. There was no COMPANY does THING by EXTREMELY LONG COMMA-SEPARATED LIST OF NONSENSE formula at play.

Challenge yourself: what is your organization’s how? Start with a list if you need to, but then whittle that list down to one or two key hows. As a tip, see if you can make an adverb of one of those hows to make its inclusion in your mission more concise.

Mission Statements, Done

Let’s build a mission statement now. Or, rather, let’s see if we can use the mission statement I’ve articulated for R: On Everything and your responses to the challenges I’ve left you along the way to put this all together.

Priority (but Also Values!)

In creating a mission statement for this blog, I started by asking myself what the priority would be. I wanted to make sure it would be something that guided me forward with an emphasis on quality, community, curiosity, and value, which ultimately made me realize I wasn’t starting with priority at all. I was starting with values!

So, then, I had to distill those values down into a singular notion, and hopefully one I could articulate using a strong verb. The word curiosity stood out to me as one worth tying to that verb, which led me here as a starting point.

R: On Everything encourages curiosity…

I liked this. The verb encourage comes with a positive connotation, in my view, and I avoided the trap of saying I try to encourage and instead stated flat-out that this blog encourages curiosity.

Focusing on Values

I had a start to the mission statement, but I also had other values to account for—and, hopefully, not by simply slapping them in my mission statement as part of a comma-separated list.

I turned to community next, as it would help answer the question of for whom the blog exists. In other words, whose curiosity are we trying to encourage?

First of all, I knew it had to stimulate my own curiosity; it’d be hard to keep up if I were researching and writing about topics I found uninteresting. But, given my long-term goals for this project, it also couldn’t be only for me.

This led me to expounding on what I’d written earlier, landing me here:

R: On Everything encourages curiosity amongst its author and readers…

Hmm. Author and readers? That is a community, but there could be a stronger articulation of who those readers are, especially.

With that in mind, I tried again.

R: On Everything encourages curiosity by cultivating a community of like-minded polymaths…

This increased specificity paints a much stronger picture of what this blog values and who it is for, namely people (like me) whose interests are wide ranging. One could argue that this is casting too wide of a net, but I would argue the community of individuals who are genuinely interested in all of the topics I cover (more on that in a moment) is a smaller, tighter-knit group than one might expect.

And on those topics, well, those form (part of) our how.

Encouraging Curiosity: The How of It All

First off, I’d already started to articulate the blog’s how with the phrase by cultivating a community. As they used to say in those cable TV call-in commercials, though, wait, there’s more!

Cultivating a community is a good how, but in the same way that author and readers read as too generic, cultivating a community could, on its own, land a little flat. I aimed to avoid becoming ensnared in the land of the generic by ensuring I made mention of what topics I intended to cover.

R: On Everything encourages curiosity by cultivating a community of like-minded polymaths through the thoughtful exploration of topics at the intersection of technology, publishing, leadership, and culture.

This bought me a few things, including the inclusion of one of the values that got left out of the previous draft. The word thoughtful makes a nod to the notion of quality, and the list of topics—though broad—is actually a winnowing in the context of polymathy.

The Ghost of a Goal

We seem to have arrived at a fully fleshed out mission statement without having focused specifically on incorporating a goal.

Despite not having developed a goal overtly, we wound up with one anyway. Cultivating community is a demonstration of how we serve our priority, yes, but it’s also a goal.

When we pair that thought with our earlier discussion of the interplay between goal and priority, we see that it didn’t prove necessary to focus specifically on forcing a goal into the mission statement; it arose instead as a result of the confluence of the elements that seemed most important for us to focus on first.

This goes to show that though the components of a mission statement can be described in a discrete fashion, they don’t need to be (and really shouldn’t be) put forward in a paint-by-numbers fashion.

It may be necessary to start with a formulaic-sounding mission statement, and if yours reads as one, pause for a time and reflect on what overlap exists between its elements to sharpen it further.

Time Sharpens All

On that note, I should point out that, since initially writing this post, revisiting it before publication has me reflecting further on the mission statement I’ve written for R: On Everything above.

Though it does cover all the bases, after a couple of months of letting it sit, I’ve come back to it now with fresh eyes. My first impression is that it’s more verbose than it needs to be. To address this whenever it comes up—and it does more often than one might think—the first thing I do is look for redundancies or overlaps, rather than focus on shaving off a word or two here or there.

If I unsheathe my word machete, I can slash out a significant chunk of the mission statement’s middle.

R: On Everything encourages curiosity at the intersection of technology, publishing, leadership, and culture.

Now that’s a sharpened mission statement.

This version does lose the suggestion of how and the inclusion of two of our values, namely thoughtfulness and community. However, once one knows what R: On Everything is—and that the comment sections on these posts are meant to be as interactive as possible—context does a lot of heavy lifting for us.

Public-Private Missions

The above winnowing of the R: On Everything mission statement does have me seeing the notion of context in a new light. For the first time, I’m considering perhaps one can have a more thorough mission statement behind the curtain, so to speak, while a shortened version of the same mission is available to those who have more context into the endeavor.

But be careful: I don’t mean to suggest that one should have unique mission statements on either side of the private-public divide. Recall that our missions have a single priority. This, along with our goals, suggestion of how, and values should be the same both publicly and privately; it’s simply what we choose to emphasize in our outward declaration that varies.

Regardless of whether one has two versions of the same mission, a quality mission statement will convey to anyone who reads it what an organization, project, or person is all about. In the end, though, the mission serves to sharpen the purpose of the individual(s) assuming responsibility for the verb at the heart of the statement’s priority.

In other words, your mission is for you.

And as we’ve seen with the diverse outcomes of the Writescast Network and Kill Your Darlings Candle Company, carefully crafting a mission statement makes all the difference between achieving success and success with intention.

Tell Me in the Comments

• What’s your mission statement, personally or for a project you’re part of?

• What is the single most important priority that drives your project or personal mission?

• How can you refine your mission statement to make it more specific, actionable, and unique?

Let’s see if we can help each other do what we set out to do at the start of this series, which was, as a reminder, to sharpen our sense of purpose to achieve success with intention.

1. Opinions differ with respect to values.

Laurie Buchanan

, for example, embraces a core value (singular), and uses that one value to generate a vision and mission statement. Her book, The Business of Being, covers this in great detail. I recommend it for further reading.

2. Any time I bring up whats, hows, and whys, I’m remiss if I don’t plug Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek. You can read the book, or, alternatively, get the most crucial content by watching the TED talk that spawned the book.