Sublime

M stands for Mission. Your mission is the written statement of what you will accomplish. It’s the one main goal that makes us develop the qualities and character needed to accomplish everything else we want for our lives.

The term mission can sound grandiose. For our purposes, we’ll demote it to a more pragmatic definition: any ongoing goal or service that directs your professional life. Andrew Wiles had a mission to solve Fermat’s last theorem. Winning grants, effectively managing HR requests, producing new creative briefs, and crafting elegant computer programs

• Tesla: “Accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”


• TED: “Spread ideas.”


• Stripe: “Increase the GDP of the internet.”


• IKEA: “Create a better everyday life for the many people.”


• Patagonia: “Use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”


• Slack: “Make work life simpler, more

A good mission has a finish line—you must be able to know when you’ve done it, like the moon mission or a mountaintop. A good mission is risky, falling in the gray area where reason says, “This is unreasonable,” and intuition says, “But we believe we can do it nonetheless.” We like to use the following phrase to convey the idea of mission: big,