Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

I read &quot;So Good They Can&#x27;t Ignore You&quot; last year and was having the same question: &quot;what is my mission in life and how to get&#x2F;realize&#x2F;understand that?&quot;<p>My conclusion was: I don&#x27;t know and don&#x27;t have a specific mission. The closest I have to a mission is a set of positive (may probably not conscious) principles in life that I&#x27;m sticking to. Examples:<p>- always be improving - learn, learn, learn - work hard - presented with negative or ambiguous choices, choose the best available one (don&#x27;t screw up everything because of frustration)<p>I&#x27;d also be curious to hear opinions on these:<p>- Is it &quot;necessary&quot; to have a specific higher mission? Can&#x27;t I just stick to the set of positive principles? - Do I have to actively be looking for a mission? Or I wait and let it happen?

Become enlightened, and if it&#x27;s as good as they say, spend the rest of my life teaching others how to get there too. I know for me, it&#x27;s what I&#x27;m here for. Nothing else is as important to me. I can&#x27;t wait to teach, but it must be from the perspective of my own personal, direct experience. There are already enough charlatans in the world, I don&#x27;t intend to become one myself.<p>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s enough awareness the state can be achieved through specific practice. People like Osho, J Krishnamurti, Eckharte Tolle... they all seemed to have it just spontaneously happen and then try to retrofit techniques they think will probably work. Their approaches seem biased towards people who can already do what they&#x27;re talking about (&quot;just be aware&quot;), instead of being more systematic processes that circumvent the mind.<p>The people who inspire me the most are the householders, living in the world who still managed to attain this greatest of prizes. They&#x27;re the people who inspire me, and something I aspire to be. I think it&#x27;s a valuable backstory that makes the teaching more approachable and easier to relate to if it&#x27;s clear you don&#x27;t need to give up this world to attain true happiness.<p>Having this mission puts the corporate world and paid work really into perspective as something that supports my life, but doesn&#x27;t define it. That helps me keep it at a slight distance and allows me to take more risks - which incidentally have paid off.

Writing code today is way too hard, my work mission is to try to make it easier. I’m more focused on people who already know how to code than people that don’t.<p>This drew me to work on React, Jest, React Native, Nuclide (Facebook IDE), create-react-app, prettier... I feel like it’s better than a few years ago but there’s still so much more to do.

I feel that we&#x27;re alive at a unique moment in human history, when humanity must either &quot;figure out&quot; how to live sustainably on a finite planet or suffer the consequences. It&#x27;s a daunting but wonderful challenge. I can&#x27;t imagine living at this time and not being part of this project.<p>For the past (almost) 15 years, contributing in some way to this project has been my &quot;mission&quot;. In that time, I&#x27;ve experienced the highs of having an important purpose; and the lows of not achieving enough; and burnout.<p>After having worked on various projects (climate, ecological footprint, bikes, etc.), I&#x27;ve come to be focused on one aspect that has particular resonance for me: biodiversity conservation. This blends my higher (intellectually motivated) purpose with my selfish desire to enjoy and preserve what I love most in the world. I find this combination is the most sustainable for me personally.

My missions are as follows:<p>- Work: Create profitable businesses that enable my teams to have healthy life-work balance with 35 hour work weeks and 6 weeks vacation so that they have time for family, adventure, positive mental health and time to perhaps start their own businesses.<p>- Life: Be a great father, husband and to travel to over 100 countries. Do things that make the word a better place.

I live in a country (Italy) that has been crushed and whatever mission I might’ve ever had or sense of accomplishment I might’ve ever earned has been superseded by a never-ending sense of dread and struggle to not drown in a decaying world.<p>I have very little time for glib self-improvement or self-coaching. I’m starting to wonder what purpose all of this could possibly serve (”none at all”, comes my self-reply).

Cal&#x27;s book is great - but for me, my gut cynical reaction was to wonder if even a successful &#x27;mission&#x27; wasn&#x27;t a false sand-castle that disappears when I die.<p>Two books make note of this: Ecclesiastes would call a mission mere striving after wind and Becker&#x27;s Denial of Death that would call mission a an immortality project doomed to irrelevance.<p>As others here have noted - Ecclesiastes would agree that enjoying the immediate pleasures of food, work, mirth while in the company of friends and family is a gift.<p>But Cal is also correct, that without a mission you wander aimlessly. That&#x27;s what makes it hard - I know it doesn&#x27;t matter and yet it does matter greatly to those around me who need me to be a strong, good, and competent person.<p>My only bit of small advice: perhaps a mission something that gives you the ability and desire to help other people could give you a direction that has enough meaning to make it worthwhile.

My mission is to breakdown barriers and level the playing field by allowing people to leverage the huge amount of knowledge we have available today to understand the world and subsequently tinker with abstraction. I want to help people make the jump from &quot;rookie&quot; to somebody who understands abstraction and can look past it, as smoothly as possible.<p>You&#x27;d be surprised what we can do as a species if everybody could understand this huge corpus of information we already have.

Help kids to grasp the different concepts of science in form of story because kids score good grades but have no idea of how things are working. Actually a wish to revive the era when Muslims were good both in scientific and religious knowledge. I am targeting locals hence will be writing in Urdu. Not easy work though, specially picking a topic and then convert to a story and respective illustration.

My day job is to write tools for the sales people who will try to persuade their clients into buying ads on Facebook, I just can&#x27;t see how that helps improve the society or humanity as a whole. Ideally, I should be using my skills and knowledge to help the people in need, but that just won&#x27;t pay as good as writing CRUD apps, and I have a whole family to feed.

First, achieving a stable financial situation. Then, the big goal:<p>Making the world better by: - Stopping the mass murder of animals - Bringing the demise of irrational practices such as religion and astrology - Pushing knowledge forward by contributing to science or teaching those who will hopefully do so, and by making the software environment tidier

For me: work, life, family, everything is built on these foundations (albeit imperfectly):<p>Q. 1. What is the chief end of man? A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reformed.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;WSC.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reformed.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;WSC.html</a><p>He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8 ESV)

Just yesterday I offered &quot;So Good They Can&#x27;t Ignore You&quot; to someone about to start their professional career. Mostly as a counterweight to the mainstream advice.<p>I recommend watching Bret Victor&#x27;s &quot;Inventing on Principle&quot; [0] for a very interesting variant on the theme of &quot;your mission in life &amp; work&quot;.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;36579366" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;36579366</a>

My mission is to play, laugh, dance and not take life so seriously.

My mission is to build amazing free software that is accessible and usable by the whole world.

Effective Altruism. I discovered the charity GiveDirectly some years ago from the NPR podcast Planet Money episode that featured them. GiveDirectly is one of many charities adopting evidence based outreach, and now I follow GiveWell and it&#x27;s recommendations as well. The central question of Effective Altruism is given limited resources, how can we do the most good?

1-. Leave my poor country, as i feel it keeps me from reaching superior goals.<p>2-. Study abroad<p>3-. Work for a company that makes people&#x27;s lives easier<p>4-. Learn everything to replicate these ideas on my own country.<p>5-. Return to my country, help people in any way possible using what i&#x27;ve learned. Make the world a bit better and reduce some suffering.<p>I&#x27;m 25 years old and still at step 1, but I know I will make it happen.

I don&#x27;t know if I can do it but I would really like to dramatically lower the bar for people to change careers. I think a lot of people get stuck in their careers which they pick too early and then the costs of switching are way too high (lack of information, available learning resources, other barriers to entry).<p>The job market is very skewed towards specialists which causes a lot of &quot;must have experience to get experience&quot; chicken-and-egg issues. i.e. &quot;find someone who has done X for 5 years&quot;. I think that is fine, but there should be an avenue to value and recruit people with diverse experiences i.e. someone who has done X -AND- Y.<p>I think the key solve is to help companies take on people who want to career switch but have applicable prior experience that you&#x27;re not completely throwing away either. I think this happens anyway so I&#x27;m completely unsure what if anything I can do to help it.

Software is a mess.<p>There are too many programming languages, libraries, frameworks, websites, apps, devices, etc. We&#x27;re still far from what was imagined 50 years ago. We still use text files. Most people still can&#x27;t program. That&#x27;s a problem.<p>My mission is to clean up this mess. It could take a lot of different shapes, but the high-level pitch is to build one application&#x2F;interface&#x2F;language&#x2F;platform&#x2F;system that will replace all of the others.<p>Imagine if Google, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, LinkedIn, Twitch, eBay, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Google Maps, Spotify, Uber, Gmail, Pinterest, Domino&#x27;s Pizza, Tinder, and Craigslist were all just one application. That&#x27;s my mission.

My mission is to make clean energy to help people spend time doing what they want to do. As David Lilienthal said, energy is a replacement for the labor of human beings.

Very timely. I&#x27;m working on writing mine down this weekend. This is where my current thoughts are going: I want to live my life in a manner the inspires and encourages everyone I cross paths with to be the best they can be, to give their best, to continual strive to improve .5 % everyday. I want to be a bucket filler and to live out that attitude is more important than aptitude.

My mission is to:<p>“Empower engineers and technical leaders with the tools and mindsets to perform at their highest levels, so that they create the meaningful impact they’re capable of.”<p>That mission started with me writing and self-publishing The Effective Engineer three years ago. And then recently I co-founded a company Co Leadership (coleadership.com) to focus on leadership development full-time.

My mission to help spread the message that geography is not destiny.<p>I was lucky enough to be born during the internet age in the 90s. Because the internet already existed I was able to teach myself skills and find work that allowed me to be anywhere as long as I had an internet connection.<p>With the internet, you can choose who to serve and you can do it from anywhere.

I don&#x27;t really have a mission statement. Maybe I should, I don&#x27;t know. But there are a few things that strongly interest me and long have. They probably look diverse and scattered to other people, but not to me. Yet, I don&#x27;t know how to readily sum it up in a nutshell.<p>Perhaps it could be summed up as a desire to inject health and stability into the existing system by focusing on some humanocentric first principles. To me, that stability needs to be rooted in flexibility, not rigidity. I think most people see stability and rigidity as going together and that&#x27;s part of the problem.<p>The world is in a state of flux. We have 7 billion people and unprecedented globalization and unprecedented tech. The tendency here is to run roughshod over people. The result is scary destabilization that has even millionaires acting as preppers because they fear the world coming apart at the seams and see no real means to stop it.<p>Jobs are moving to big cities and&#x2F;or being replaced with gig work. Towns and rural areas are experiencing duress due to the lack of earning opportunities. Big cities are experiencing duress because they aren&#x27;t affordable. Housing prices have spun crazily out of control. There is a huge lack of affordable housing nationwide in the US.<p>People have become prisoners of and slaves to the system. We seem to have forgotten that business should serve people, not the other way around.<p>I am interested in promulgating mostly market based solutions to some of the social ills of our era. I think that framing business as an evil force and charity (such as UBI) as the only hope of an antidote is part of the problem.<p>Business can be designed to serve basic human needs while turning a profit. It doesn&#x27;t have to be pursued on a model of making a few people filthy rich while bleeding the masses or screwing them over. You have to make a conscious decision to design it in a healthy, sustainable fashion. It doesn&#x27;t just happen. But it can happen.

My mission is to gain knowledge in order to understand the world in a new way, and communicate this such that I can do my part to help help Life succeed in the very long term.<p>I wrote about what I believe the &quot;Purpose of Life&quot; is on my blog, though I haven&#x27;t publicized it very much yet:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goose.us&#x2F;thoughts&#x2F;the-purpose-of-life&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goose.us&#x2F;thoughts&#x2F;the-purpose-of-life&#x2F;</a><p>(TL;DR - the purpose of life is to maximize the area under the complexity curve for our enclosing system. I use Sean Carroll&#x27;s <i>The Big Picture</i> and some MinutePhysics&#x2F;Earth videos to help make the point.)<p>Right now I&#x27;m learning more about complex systems while practicing writing and speaking in order to refine the message for wider consumption. I would love to engage with anyone on the topic who is willing.

Just leaving everything better than I found it.<p>Making life a bit easier for my family.<p>Making life a bit easier for my co-workers.<p>Making life a bit easier for my friends.<p>Making life a bit easier for the strangers at the grocery store.<p>Making an impact on the environment where I can.<p>Just leave the world a little better than you found it.

My work mission is purely to do a decent job so that I can make my life mission come true. Which is to raise decent kids that are aware that this life is not just the start and end of everything but a journey of their soul.

Take a look to School of Life&#x27;s &quot;Finding your mission&quot; video [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=c5-LfK2i2J4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=c5-LfK2i2J4</a>

* Seek deep understanding. What are the most fundamental underlying mechanisms and processes that make up the world around us? Since the beginning of time, what events have transpired to bring us to the current moment?<p>* Learn how to distill ideas and communicate them effectively -- knowledge and wisdom must be dispersed and made understandable<p>* Search for the largest available levers that one can use to make a beneficial impact<p>* Try to live mindfully and humanely

To contribute something meaningful that I see being used by people daily. An example will be fixing my favorite tool in the ecosystem that is used by a lot of people and seeing my patch hit stable making life a lot easier. It makes sense for me to contribute more and also to value the work of others that I get to use in the first place.

Would you say it&#x27;s possible to use computational modeling to derive a sociopolitical belief system that won&#x27;t inevitably degenerate into inequality and war? If it&#x27;s not purely fantastical, it&#x27;s something I might want to try my hand at...

“Junior M.A.F.I.A” lyrics spring to mind every time someone asks, and I chuckle to myself.<p>But seriously ... if I had to have one, it’d be to get over myself eventually and abandon cleverness in favour of wisdom worth a damn in the biggest of pictures.

Right now it&#x27;s to find my mission. There are so many things I care about and want to improve in the world. But funding the intersection of those causes and my skill set still feels elusive.

* Live as if you were to die tomorrow. * Learn as if you were to live forever.<p>-- quote by someone famous (some say its Gandhi, but am not sure)<p>--- Lather, rinse, repeat.

To have a massive positive impact on the world.

To crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of their women.

Thank you so much for all the valuable &amp; interesting comments! Much appreciated! :)

My mission is to enjoy every aspect of my life, from work to family and friends....

To decrease ignorance, greed, and hatred in the world (inlcluding myself).

My mission is to eat tacos. As many as possible.

Solve global warming.

My mission is to make all the people I come in close contact with &quot;Rich&quot;.<p>I see money as a way to reward people who you like and use it against people who you dislike.<p>This is what I work for today.