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2
Defining Your Dream

Even when some business organizations (and individuals too) discover the usefulness of defining a mission for themselves, they frequently make the mistake of assuming that the challenge before them is primarily one of wordsmithing. They strive with such diligence to draft a statement of their mission that sounds good, they forget that the primary objective should be to define a mission that feels good—that is, one that excites, that motivates, that inspires (compels) action. This is what we mean when we refer to the need for a “compelling” mission.

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The Compelling Mission Statement

Rather than “wordcrafting,” the process of defining the mission in compelling terms is an exercise in basic dreamcrafting. Simply put, a mission—any mission—will qualify as compelling only if it meets three basic criteria:

• It introduces change that is significant and deeply desired.
• It strikes a balance between challenge and achievability.
• It clarifies both short- and long-term priorities.

It’s worth taking a few moments to briefly elaborate on these criteria.

The first mentions “change.” It’s a peculiar thing—most people are inclined to resist and dread change, and yet at the same time most are also inclined to feel dissatisfied with the status quo. Something of a paradox, it would seem.

People fear change over which they have little or no control, change that is not of their choosing, and that brings with it high levels of uncertainty. These are fears that “make us rather bear those ills we have,” as Hamlet puts it, “than fly to others that we know not of.” If it were a question of a genie popping out of a bottle to grant three magic wishes, on the other hand, most people would feel no dread or resistance at all, and would know at once the specific changes they would wish for. All three wishes would probably represent big changes, drastic changes, radical changes. In redefining the Big Dream that will guide our lives, we begin by generating a wish list fit for a genie—this is what we mean by “significant” changes that are “deeply desired.”

Of course, we recognize that even genies may have a hard time making the impossible happen. The second criterion forces us to keep our feet planted in the world of the possible. At the same time, human beings love a good challenge. This is why they engage in such activities as golf or bowling or chess, or (insert your favorite sport or hobby here). Challenges of this sort can be highly motivating—highly compelling, in other words. Slow-motion footage lets us study the Olympic athlete’s determination to muster every available ounce of strength and resolve in order to jump a fraction of an inch higher or cross a finish line a split second sooner. And Uncle Leo’s concentration is just as intense when he’s working on the fine details on his miniature ships.

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Making a mission more challenging makes it more compelling. “Bet you can’t hit this barn with a rock” doesn’t inspire much enthusiasm if the barn is so near you’d have more trouble missing it. “Bet you can’t hit that telephone pole over there” becomes more enticing. The more compelling a mission is, the greater the chances it will generate enough determination to see it through to successful completion. (“How many tries do I get?” asks the rock thrower, indicating that a determination to succeed has taken hold.)

But the “more challenging = more compelling” formula remains true only up to a certain point. When the degree of difficulty threatens to exceed what we sense are the outside limits of our own capabilities, the mission becomes daunting rather than compelling. Instead of fueling determination, the too-formidable mission gives rise to uncertainty, anxiety, and pessimism.

Once we have defined our mission, we need to assess where it falls on the “compellingness curve,” and if necessary, determine what element(s) we must alter to move it to a more favorable position on the curve.

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Finally, the third criterion recognizes that we cannot have it all. Sooner or later some of “this” will have to be sacrificed in order to enjoy more of “that.” There will be tradeoffs, there will be a need to make hard choices, to establish priorities.

A compelling mission makes such choices easier. It simplifies the kinds of decision making that people with no sense of mission routinely agonize over, both at the critical moment and often long after the fact as well. When a life has no clear sense of purpose behind it, who can say, at any given point, which course of action would be best to take? A clear sense of mission places otherwise seemingly equivalent options at specific points on the “does/does not support the mission” continuum, and thus makes many of life’s tougher choices easier to manage.

The Genie’s Wish List

You’ll need a small pad of notepaper, or index cards, and a pencil or pen to derive any benefit from the following exercise. Get them now; doing so will greatly increase your return on investment from this book. (If all you have at hand is ordinary, full-size sheets of paper, cut or tear several sheets into smaller pieces.) Get these materials now! The genie demands it. Obey at once or run the risk of being turned into a toad.

When working with a team of executives, we begin the process of defining a corporate mission by asking them to list their “strategic priorities”—what are they currently working on, what is keeping them awake at night? What are the issues they must manage well over the next year or two, issues that if poorly handled would have a devastating effect on their business? Each individual generates his or her personal list. Then the lists are compared. Common items are transferred to a master list. The most critical items on this master list will form the basis of their corporate mission.

The process is faster and simpler for an individual seeking to redefine a personal mission in life. In a moment we will set the genie free, and you will have an opportunity to make your three wishes. But first, to help you choose wisely, create a preliminary list of all your possible wishes on separate cards or sheets of notepaper.You can record as many wishes as you like; we’ll winnow it down to three in a moment.

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Step One: Creating the Wish List

The key question to guide your thinking is, What Big Dream would you like to see come true in your life? Don’t worry about whether your answers are practical (or even possible) right now; we’ll evaluate them later. Don’t worry if some of the “big dreams” don’t even seem all that big; just list as many dreams as you can immediately think of. Write each idea down on a separate note or card or slip of paper. Leave some empty space along the side, as illustrated below. Jot your ideas quickly, just as they come to you, without concern for wording or spelling. Stay fast and loose. Keep writing till you run out of ideas; when you do, this first step of the exercise is over.

Step Two: Grouping Where Appropriate

Do your ideas overlap? Can any of them be easily grouped or combined in some way? Review your list and look for any logical opportunities to group ideas together. For example, if your third item reads “better job” and your seventh reads “higher income,” these may belong together; discard them both and create a new item that reads “better, higher-paying job.”

But group only when ideas can very easily and logically be combined. If your seventh item instead reads “untold riches,” for example, this may have nothing at all to do with your job—perhaps your dream is to win the jackpot on a quiz show or at a casino. Our objective in grouping items is not to trick the genie into granting more than three wishes. (He’s a sly old genie and can always tell when someone is trying to sneak extra wishes past him; his usual response is to disappear without granting any wishes at all.) Our goal is to be precise, to avoid leaving out any key elements in the wording of our wishes. It’s as if we were saying to the genie, “By a ‘better’ job I don’t just mean in a nicer office with nicer people, I also mean with a higher salary.”

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Often there are no opportunities for grouping or combining, so don’t be concerned if you don’t see any in your list.

Step Three: Rating Your Wishes

The trick at this point is to review your list and apply a value to each item, based on how badly you want that dream to come true. Don’t worry about how sensible or likely the item is; rate it purely on the basis of how badly you want it. Take the time to carefully think this through. When you’re sure you know which dream you would most like to see come true, mark a number 1 beside it. Assign the number 2 to the next-most-desirable item, and so on down the list, until every item has been rated.

Step Four: Picking Your Top Three Wishes

This is where you have to start looking for that balance between challenge and achievability. Study your number 1 dream. Is it pure absurd fantasy that only a genie in a bottle could ever make happen, or is it a daringly auda- cious goal you might be able to pull off yourself in real life if it turned out the genie wasn’t available? If you know very well it’s something only a genie could manage, move on; it’s probably foolhardy to hang your precious hopes for the life you really want on the whims of some genie that can’t even find his own way out of a bottle without help. But if your number 1 wish falls within the “it would be tough, but I believe it’s something I could achieve if I really tried” category, then move the number one card or slip of paper to a separate area on your work surface.

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Proceed to the item marked 2, then 3, and so on in the numerical order of your ratings (not in the order they were originally written down). Discard the obvious “never-in-a-million-years” items and move to the separate area those that are potentially achievable even if the genie were to let you down and you had to make it happen by yourself. Continue until a total of three items have been moved to the new area. Remove all the rest from your work surface.

Because the numbers on these items reflect their “desirability rating,” arrange them in numerical order; that is, the one with the highest rating (the number 1, or closest to 1) should be listed first, and the others in numerical order below it.

Look long and hard at your three wishes. Do you still feel they’re your top three? (It’s not too late to change your mind if you’d like to make a last-minute substitution.) Are you still happy with the order they’re in? If not, change the numbering so that the number 1 item is your new candidate for “most desired dream.”

You now have the raw materials with which to fashion a compelling personal mission statement.

Clarity of Purpose

Time to get very precise about the mission you’re considering. Any imprecision in the true nature of the objective can sabotage your mission right at the outset. In terms of the first of five dreamcrafting macroskills, this first critical “craft” component involves defining the dream itself with the greatest possible clarity.You need to know exactly what it is you’re setting out to accomplish.

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To illustrate: in the crowded parking lot of a busy shopping center, a blue car is circling around the entrance doors. The time has come, the driver of this car has decided, to “finally do something about this body of mine” and invest in a treadmill and one of those step machines for the home. The driver is becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of parking spaces, however. At this rate it looks like it’s going to be necessary to walk all the way from the far end of the parking lot. Worse, it turns out the escalator to the second floor is out of order; now our shopper has to climb a whole flight of stairs just to make these purchases. Why can’t this shopping center get its act together?

What’s wrong with this picture?

Another illustration: Good news, smokers—here’s a wonderful breakthrough that will help you quit smoking once and for all! Simply continue taking regular doses of the drug you’re addicted to, but without using cigarettes! You can use a skin patch instead, or chewing gum, or even direct intravenous injection if you prefer. Just think, no more cigarettes! And even if you still die prematurely from nicotine poisoning, think how those around you will appreciate not having had to inhale your secondhand smoke.

In these two illustrations, what is the specific mission? This is the crucial question. What is it these people actually desire?

Our shopper wants to “finally do something” about his or her body— but do what, exactly? Lose weight? Become more fit? Both at once, perhaps? This is where clarity and precision are essential. Judging by the shopper’s reluctance to do any unnecessary walking or stair climbing, for instance, this person’s mission is probably not “to achieve greater physical fitness through a more active lifestyle.” Maybe in the back of the shopper’s mind the mission has more to do with “getting these flabby jodhpur-thighs under control before swimsuit season.” But if this is the case, then for our shopper it may not be too long before another fad diet begins looking like an even better and far less strenuous way to accomplish the objective, and the treadmill and step machine will be put into permanent storage. Come swimsuit season, of course, our shopper will have joined the ranks of unsuccessful dieters, and will be full of self-recrimination over his or her “pathetic lack of willpower.”

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Failure to define the objective with precision leads to a diluted sense of mission—and thus, in most cases, to a mission unachieved. As we’ll explore in more detail in the following chapter, the culprit is not a lack of willpower, but rather the power of the will sabotaged by an unclear mission. It takes skill to define the objective with clarity and precision.

A poorly defined mission is wired to fail from the outset.

Many readers may have the words quit smoking somewhere in their wish list. We suspect that most smokers who decide to break the nicotine habit would offer precisely those two words to describe their objective—not recognizing that those very words may well represent a willpower short circuit that will ultimately sabotage their effort. If all you want to do is quit smoking, switching to a nicotine patch or gum should do the trick nicely. The danger is that the day your supply of patches or gum temporarily runs out and no replacements are readily available, your undiminished craving for nicotine may push you toward the cigarette counter just to “get you through.” Everyone who has ever tried unsuccessfully to “quit smoking” will vividly recall that one puff they took in a bar or at a party just to get them through a particularly strong craving— which turned out to be the end of their nonsmoking period.

Perhaps the smoker has a different wish altogether as the basis for deciding to break the habit: healthier lungs. But what if the doctor does a thorough checkup and declares, “Your lungs are actually in surprisingly good shape, at least so far. Most smokers your age are worse off.” What happens to the smoker’s resolve now?

As author Paul discovered when he became a nonsmoker himself years ago, the smokers with the best chances of successfully breaking their drug habit are those whose fundamental mission is to break their drug habit. This is not trivial wordplay. The difference in the mission statements cited above may seem slight, but the results will be worlds apart. For a smoker seeking to break his or her addiction to nicotine, the sole objective is to never feel even the slightest craving for that drug. It means alternate nicotine delivery systems are therefore out of the question. It may require two weeks of real withdrawal discomfort, followed by more weeks of mild sporadic cravings, but in a matter of two or three months this person’s addiction will have become a thing of the past.

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The key to achieving precision in a mission statement lies in making the distinction between cause and effect, between the means and the end. For treadmill owners, running is the means; fitness through increased physical activity is (or at least probably should be) the end. And running is not the only means for achieving this end. The treadmill owner whose original mission was “to firm up a pair of flabby legs” may discover that finding the time and the energy for those twenty-minute running workouts is proving to be difficult after long, tiring days at work. Gradually the treadmill slips into disuse. The treadmill owner whose mission was “increased physical activity” may also be finding it difficult to free up time for the treadmill. But if he or she is routinely bypassing elevators to use stairs whenever possible, playing tennis more often, and so on, the mission is still being accomplished. And when time does permit, he or she will feel a strong incentive to use the treadmill to further enhance the positive results already achieved.

Incidentally, because the foregoing uses a running example to illustrate the need for precision in the mission, this is not meant to suggest it is necessarily imprecise to make running itself the basis for a personal mission. For instance, someone who has a passion for running, who participates in many marathons and other running competitions, who reads books and magazines devoted to running, but who in recent years has increasingly let other activities get in the way of running—for such a person, a mission that involves buying a treadmill to get back into run- ning, as a source of satisfaction and of improved health, is a mission defined with exemplary precision.

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Take a moment to review your top three dreams. Are they too vague? You may know exactly what you mean by the single word money, for example, but this could pull you in several directions at once. “Move into a higher-paying job” is a very different mission from “invest aggressively in the stock market.” Aspirational fields generate their energy along a single axis only; mission objectives that pull in several directions at once tend to dissipate energy rather than bring it into a powerful alignment.

Use a new card or slip of paper to spell out exactly what you have in mind for your top item. What is the specific condition, situation, or problem you want to introduce, transform, or eliminate with this first item? This represents the end. If you can, also specify the means by which you intend to accomplish this (e.g., “improved fitness through greater physical activity”).

It can sometimes help us move toward greater precision if we break the dream into an “A-because-B” or “A-so-that-B” structure: “I would love A; the reason I want it is B.” Anyone who wrote “win the lottery” as their number 1 item, for example, may be doing themselves a favor by adding the words “to be out of debt.” The reason this added B clause is useful is because it reminds us that a lottery win is not the only way to get out of debt. It means getting out of debt may be the real number 1 dream. Winning the lottery scores very poorly on the achievability scale, since we can do so little to increase the meager odds of a win. (Have you seen the bumper sticker that reads, “Lottery: A tax imposed on people who are poor at math?”) Some other options fall more favorably within the “challenging yet achievable” range when it comes to reducing and ultimately eliminating our debt.

When you have finished spelling out your top dream with clarity, check it against the criteria for “compellingness”: does it introduce a change into your life, a change that you deeply desire? Does it fall nicely within the range of challenging-yet-achievable? Do you think it will help you clarify priorities for your life, for your future?

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If you are not certain that it meets one or more of these criteria, what can you change in the wording to help it do so? Make the change now. When you have made your top item as precise as you can make it, repeat the process for the two remaining items.

Review all three items. Does the desirability ranking remain the same after the rewording exercise? If not, assign the number 1 position to the new top item, the one that best meets all three criteria for compellingness.

This number 1 item now becomes, in effect, your mission statement.

What about items 2 and 3, you may be asking. Isn’t the genie prepared to grant three wishes?

As was mentioned earlier, this is a sly old genie. Truth is, he cannot make dreams come true at all, as you may already have guessed. What he can do is help people more clearly formulate their dreams, bring their aspirations into clearer focus so that they will be much better equipped to begin making their most-cherished Big Dream come true by themselves. He knows if he promised to grant only one wish, you’d agonize over it, bring all kinds of complicating factors into your selection process, and perhaps even find yourself torn and unable to make up your mind. He invites you to think of three dreams and then rank them. He does this to make it easier for you to achieve clarity of purpose so that you’ll stand a better chance of making the one dream that matters most to you come true. He knows aspirational fields can only come into alignment along a single axis. In skillful dreamcrafting, it’s strictly one Big Dream at a time—that’s what power words like focus and alignment are all about. Indeed, that’s the root of the first macroskill: a sense of mission by definition derives from a single, clearly defined objective. As the objectives multiply, or become less clearly defined, so their motivational power weakens.

This sly old genie’s work is done here; it’s time for him to move on.

So where does this leave you? You have just bumped into the very first of the many decisions you’re going to have to make in order to achieve your mission. Your first big decision, of course, is whether or not to accept the mission in the first place.

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The optimal response is not, “Well, okay, I guess I’m ready to give it a try, see what happens.” This is not the sort of resolve that produces heroic results. Accepting the mission means making up your mind that you’re going to give it everything you’ve got, that you intend to let nothing block your way to success.

If you decide to accept the mission, it means from this point on, you will see everything you do, day in, day out—literally everything, no matter how trivial or mundane—as either potentially contributing to the success of your mission, or potentially detracting from it. The mission will become a dominant factor in your daily life, a filter through which all decisions will be measured or evaluated. Some tasks that you traditionally dislike and avoid may now seem a necessary part of achieving the mission. (By scrubbing the floors or taking out the garbage, for example, you help maintain a happy smooth-running household, which is vital to your mission because it avoids the kind of domestic tensions that sap energy and bring progress to a halt.) Some of your favorite pastimes and activities may now seem less worthwhile. (How does another evening spent vegetating in a semicoma in front of the television set bring the mission closer to success?)

It is perfectly reasonable—and in many cases preferable—to take several days, perhaps even weeks, to make up your mind about taking on a mission. Sometimes an immediate adrenaline-charged cry of “I’m in!” can reflect a brand of supercharged determination that is at risk of evaporating as suddenly as it came into being.

If you feel yourself on the verge of commitment to your mission but hesitate because you’re not sure you’re quite ready, or you’re unclear what your next step should be, or even what all the steps should be to make this bold dream of yours come true, take heart. Everybody feels this way when they first make the big decision to pursue a Big Dream. When President Kennedy declared in 1960 that he believed the nation “should commit itself to putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth before the decade is out,” he had absolutely no idea whatsoever how this was going to be accomplished. Not even the foremost minds in the aerospace industry at the time knew how to achieve this mission. No detailed guidebook listed the many problems that would be encountered with handy step-by-step instructions on how to overcome them; everything had to be invented from scratch, on the run. But the aspirational field around this mission was extremely powerful. Technology, people, finances, public opinion, science, the media—everyone and everything necessary to make it happen—came into alignment. The mission was accomplished. Many technological innovations emerged as spin-offs out of that decade-long whirlwind of creative effort and continue to enrich our lives to this day.

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Ask anyone who has ever been part of any heroic venture—in the military, in government, in business, in the community, even in private life—and they’ll tell you that getting ordinary people to do extraordinary things is not the hard part. When people truly believe in something, there’s almost no limit to what they can accomplish. The hard part is getting them to want to do extraordinary things, to get them burning with determination to do extraordinary things.

This is where a compelling vision of success can help.

Envisioning Success

It was called the “moon race”—Russia versus America. The first one to set foot on the moon wins. Kennedy’s 1960 speech was just another way of saying, as if directly to a rival superpower, “Bet we can beat you to the moon.” Russia’s response, in essence, was, “Bet you can’t.” And the race was on.

Strictly speaking, “putting a man on the moon” was not the actual mission. Three years earlier, Russia had successfully placed the first artificial satellite in Earth orbit. Sputnik was a blow to American pride; it suggested that in technological terms, the Russians were more advanced than we were. The newly elected young president wanted to restore America’s faith in its own technological superiority. That was really the mission. But how to generate excitement, motivation, determination around so vague and abstract an objective? Kennedy was a visionary; he gave the world a vision everyone could relate to with excitement—a race with a finish line that was out of this world. The first-ever footstep on the moon will be made by an American—that was the vision.

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The space agency janitor who saw his cleanly swept floor as helping put a man on the moon knew how his personal role contributed to the overall mission objective—but he used the terms of the vision to express his point.

This is the power of having a vision statement. It boils the whole mission down to a single compelling image of success. That short, snappy image becomes a symbol for all that the mission represents. It keeps us focused, reminds us what success is going to look like. Even in times of stress and turmoil, when the bulky wording of our complete mission statement may be hard to recall, a simple picture is always there for immediate reference, equal to a thousand words in our mind’s eye, like a navigational beacon to keep us on course through even the stormiest seas. A compelling vision of success becomes one more source of fuel to keep the fires of our determination burning brightly.

A compelling vision of success is one that

• Translates “mission accomplished” into visual terms
• Describes a particular moment of triumph
• Creates an opportunity for celebration

To help organizational leaders become more visionary in their thinking, we play a little game we call “armchair photojournalist.” We give them some topic or concept and ask them to describe the single image for the front page of their imaginary newspaper or magazine that will depict or convey that particular topic or idea. Would you like to play?

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What single image would you use to depict the whole Vietnam War? What about the Fall of International Communism? Do any visual images spring to mind?

(Most people cite the photo of the naked young girl fleeing a napalm attack for their Vietnam story and the smashing of the Berlin Wall for the fall of communism, but of course these are not the only possible choices.)

Years ago, Paul, one of the authors of this book, worked out a personal mission that involved earning a living as a writer and speaker. He had a vision to go with it. He’d seen the movie On Golden Pond and had fallen in love with the film’s beautiful setting. In his vision of success, he saw himself sitting by the side of a tranquil lake, typing. That vision guided many of the choices he made over the years. Today we are typing these words on a laptop inside a gazebo by the edge of the beautiful lake that borders his property. That vision of long ago guided us here, a navigational beacon.

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Think about your own mission—your number 1 Big Dream. Do you have any ideas for a photo on an imaginary magazine cover that would visually convey your achievement of that dream?

Now take a moment to consider the second criterion of compelling visions of success: they describe a particular moment of triumph. Especially when the nature of the mission makes it difficult to know just when the objective has been fully achieved (“regain technological supremacy over the Russians”), a corresponding vision is needed that pinpoints a specific moment in time—a moment that can be seen drawing nearer and nearer until at last it arrives (“a man sets foot on the lunar surface”). The cutting of a ribbon, the lighting of a torch, the unveiling of a plaque, the ringing of a bell, the laying of a first brick, the hammering of a last spike, the cutting of a cake, the breaking of new ground, the raising of a flag, the appearance of a target number on a bathroom scale or on a bank balance or on a toteboard—anything that signals the achievement of a difficult and challenging objective—these are moments of triumph that people vividly remember years after the fact. The greater the suspense as the anticipated moment draws nearer, the greater the determination to finish the job—and the greater the feeling of triumph when the moment of completion finally arrives.

Think again about the visual image to convey your successful achievement of your Big Dream. Does it have a moment of triumph built in? Is there a suspense element associated with it as it draws nearer? If not, is there a way to assign target numbers specifying, for example, “how much” by “when”? In some cases, target numbers of this sort can be so compelling they become a kind of vision statement in and of themselves: a weight-loss mission with the vision “30 in 90” (thirty pounds shed within ninety days); a monetary mission with the vision “1M by XX” (a million dollars by a date ten years from today). Can you modify your vision statement so that it has some of these qualities? Even if nothing sufficiently compelling comes to mind immediately, instruct your subconscious to continue searching; inspiration will strike sooner or later.

The final criterion for a compelling vision involves celebration. Because it nails the achievement of the mission down to a specific moment in time, it provides a glorious opportunity for extravagant celebration.

Marking a triumphant personal achievement with plenty of fanfare and hoopla is not frivolous or inappropriately egotistical. All of the euphoric feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment associated with achieving a difficult objective reach their highest levels in moments of post-triumph celebration, especially when the celebration is immediate, or as close to immediate as possible. These feelings of euphoria may prove to be highpoints in our entire lives, times when our happiness and sheer joy of living are at their peak. The intensity of such feelings will be long remembered—and will fuel our determination to make the next Big Dream come true.

Determination—it’s what makes our fictional and real-life heroes “heroic.” They are driven by an all-consuming sense of mission, an overpowering will to succeed, and they never give up. They have clarified their actual objective with great precision. Their enthusiasm seems boundless, their optimism unshakable. (We’ll uncover some rich sources of enthusiasm and optimism in the following chapters.)

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Our heroes inspire us to emulate them. And if we do so, by igniting a sense of mission in our own lives, and skillfully achieving our own clarity of purpose, and using a compelling vision of success to help fuel our own determination to succeed, then we have not only begun the process of making a Big Dream of our own come true. We are also potentially on the way to becoming, in the eyes of one or more younger persons close to us, the kind of hero they may one day feel inspired to emulate.

That, too, is something worth dreaming about.