My Mission: To Be The Best That I Can
How? By using words, of course
When I was asked to write a vision and a mission statement for a company recently, I did some research and found some pretty cool stuff.
Vision: “Transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere for everyone”.
Mission: “Uber is evolving the way the world moves. By seamlessly connecting riders to drivers through our apps, we make cities more accessible, opening up more possibilities for riders and more business for drivers”.
According to Wikipedia, “A mission statement is a short statement of why an organization exists, what its overall goal is, identifying the goal of its operations: what kind of product or service it provides, its primary customers or market, and its geographical region of operation”.
Boring and full of hot air? (Which is what I initially thought). Check this one out:
“To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”: Tesla vision
Tesla mission: “Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.”
And another one:
“Our mission statement is simple, yet the foundation of everything we do here at Virgin Atlantic Airways… to embrace the human spirit and let it fly.”
I love the play on words with this one. In a nutshell, it is telling us, the consumer, everything we need to know at a glance about that organisation.
The concise nature of the statement is designed so that it can be easily remembered and repeated. TED gets the top prize for theirs:
“Spread ideas”
Branding
It’s all about branding and selling that brand. Which is what we do as writers. We sell our unique ‘brand’ of writing to our readers.
Amazon: “Our mission is to continually raise the bar of the customer experience by using the internet and technology to help consumers find, discover and buy anything, and empower businesses and content creators to maximise their success. We aim to be Earth’s most customer centric company”.
As a frequent customer, I think I can safely say that Amazon has delivered (ahem) on their mission.
Fulfilling Our Mission
This brings me to my mission — and hopefully yours too. If you are reading this on Medium then I’m guessing you want to be the best writer you can be. How can we fulfill that mission?
Forget the monetization, the claps, and the followers. If you have done your research, crafted your words well, and with passion, you can publish or present that piece of writing to your target audience knowing that you have put every ounce of effort you possibly can into that piece. That’s all you can do. You could use an editor, who will charge for their services, but the building blocks of your writing and the creativity used to create that story comes from you.
Apple
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began their epic Apple journey back in 1976, it took years of hard slog, vision, skill and determination to succeed. It wasn’t an overnight success.
Remember the Lisa computer, Macintosh and the myriad of stepping stones that the two Steves took to create the Apple empire?
Success has to be earned
Tim Denning’s story: How I made $11,000 from Writing in 30 Days illustrates that to succeed, you must work at it. Success has to be earned; it’s not an instant fix.
Validation — Does it Have to Be Money?
If like me, you get a buzz out of writing, then payment feels like validation that what I have written is ‘worth’ something. After one month on Medium, I noticed that when my first story was published, it earned a few cents and that was it.
Having read on the platform about how to get ‘more eyes on screens’ to read my work, I published another fourteen stories throughout the month, and, hey presto, the stone moved and started rolling. Slowly, at first, but it is gathering momentum and the cents have turned into dollars and hopefully the dollars will keep racking up the more people keep reading my work. Which would be wonderful, but not my overall aim.
The frisson of excitement that I feel when finishing a piece (like an artist, I never feel that my stories are ever ‘complete’), is like the gift of giving: I love to watch somebody’s face when they receive a present from me that they genuinely like. That’s how I feel when I have a complete story ready for publication.
The Reason I Write
“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” Annie Proulx
This statement sums up beautifully why I write.
Fulfilling My Mission
In conclusion, in order to fulfill my mission, I must:-
1. Ensure I reach my target audience
2. Present stories that are effectively written with integrity
3. Thoroughly research and reference my work
4. Be concise but imaginative
5. Act as a guiding light to reflect my style of work, which in turn will:
6. Keep readers reading to the end of the story
7. Inspire those reading my stories
My favourite mission statement:
“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Guess who? Google, of course.
Finally, if you have reached this far, I will hopefully have inspired you to fulfill your mission. My takeaway for you today?
Just do it!