Louis Cares

Values, Purpose & Mission

I wrote some words about creating and capturing value here, with the goal of setting out concrete rules to adhere to, as well as objective metrics to optimise for - in order to achieve my idealistic and ill-defined goal of 'doing something meaningful / making the world a better place / etc'

I think I did an ok job with the rules, but the half-baked attempt at a north star metric left a fair bit to desired. I don't really want to spend my life building, say, invoicing software for dentists, but according to my own rules, if people were willing to pay for it, that's 100% what I should be doing.

So, I guess if I'm really going to stick with the whole "make the world a better place" thing, I'm going to need to decide what that actually means, to me, and then try to shift things in that direction. And perhaps as long as I acknowledge that this isn't objectively better, it's just what I consider to be better, then it's fine? The creating/capture value rules are there as guardrails to ensure I don't do anything 'bad'.

Ok, so, how exactly do I want the world to be different? Not sure. We'll come back to that. For now, some definitions.

Values

This is easy, right? It's the rules you live by. For most people, this is some superset of the laws and norms of the society you live in.

For me, this is the "only capture value I created" thing.

Values are not however, a goal, or even a direction to move in. They're just the rules of the road. You need to have them figured out before you can decide where to go, but they're only step 1.

Purpose

This is one of those words - like impact - which has lost nearly all meaning. I'm going to ignore all that and decide that something has purpose if you can answer "what is the point of doing this?"

The purpose of doing something might be "to keep my boss happy so that he gets his promotion", or it might be "so that more elementary school children take up reading for pleasure".

Unlike say doomscrolling at 3am, there is a point to doing both of these things. In both cases, the something is contributing to the success of some larger task, or, dare I say - mission.

Mission

This one is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. It's a mission. A complex task with a well defined goal, it encompasses many smaller tasks, and typically takes a significant amount of time to complete. In this context, I'm going to propose we think in terms of years or decades.

Perhaps the other important thing about a mission is there is no guarantee of success.

...so?

Yes, why is any of this even remotely useful. Great question.

I think the point is that you need all three of these to be well defined before you can expect to feel fulfilled from how you spend your time.

The values are the rules of the road: they're there to stop you from accomplishing your mission only to look back and realise you were a massive dick and everyone you care about has disowned you.

The mission is the piece that you care about, accomplishing this (probably as part of a team!) is what you get for your efforts - and this is where your motivation comes from.

Purpose is just making sure that you're spending your time in a role you are well suited to, in an organisation that uses it's resources efficiently.

Mission = ++Control

I'm reaching here, but I think that most examples of "mission" are in fact "exert ever-greater control over x"

It is that action of exerting control that gives that life affirming, warm fuzzy sense of accomplishment that we crave.

The thing that differs between missions is the thing being controlled, and the manner in which it is impacted.

I've worked with people who just can't get enough of company politics, and measure their success by how many people are in their org. Their mission is to exert control over an ever-larger piece of the company.

I've worked with people who just really love money. They want as much as they can get, as quickly as possible. Their mission is to exert control over ever-increasing amounts of money. And without getting into it now, that really is kinda just the most abstract form of amassing control (money being the thing that is - with some, although shockingly few, exceptions - pretty universally convertible into control).

Lastly, what about the people out really saving the world? Bill Gates' mission to eradicate Polio for example? Well, he's just trying to exert control over all of the Polio in the world, and destroy the lot of it. That's kinda as greedy as it gets?

Picking Missions

Not sure about this part yet. Some things I plan to ask myself:

Seems like if the answer to all of the above is yes, then it's going to be a rewarding mission. And if it fails, at least I tried.