1. Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10. Then others as they grow older.
2. Learning programming by writing a real system that actual people will use -- instead of code katas or reading programming books or attending a boot camp.
3. Marrying not only for love, but with the intention of building a business or farm together.
4. Buying a house, with the knowledge you will sell it or convert it into a rental in a certain number of years. Then repeat with another house.
5. Starting a social media account to cover a specific topic, instead of making random posts about anything (have you noticed the most successful accounts are about one topic??).
6. Taking a degree with the intention of using it in a specific way and knowing how much money you will make to pay off the loan and live a comfortable life.
7. Buying a "beater" car, because you want to hire a new offshore employee for a side project instead of making a high lease payment to the bank.
The world is filled with the stories of people who do things purely on emotion and never had "missions" or a "why" they did the thing.
> Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10.
Hol up. A little off topic, but a better goal is to be a supportive and loving parent. Don't have kids with a goal to have them do X by Y. Children are there own person. Guide them, direct them, support them, teach them, but their goals should be their own.
Yeah...your "mission" outcome shouldn't be tied to the performance of your child is some sort of task. Especially an extremely difficult one, like getting a kid to learn calculus by the time they're 10. That's a good way to foster resentment between you and children.
A better mission might be to help your kids explore their own interests, find what they're passionate about, and then do whatever you can to foster and encourage that interest.
I have a kid who I taught to read by 2 years old. That was a mission. She hated it and hated me for it at the time.
But I just came off a 2 hour session with her teaching her SEO. She was jumping to do it, because that early reading taught her how to be self-sufficient in learning things herself from the very beginning.
Another mission was to teach her how to find and learn anything she wants in a short period of time. I did that and now she complains to me that her friends want her to do everything for them.
I told her that's how she makes money. By doing the things that other people are too lazy to do.
The point is that your mission with your kids is to actually force generic life skills down your children's throats. It's not an option!!!
Teach them to read! Teach them basic life values! Teach them global techniques that they can apply to learn anything they want later. These things are not something you leave up to kids -- unless they are learning disabled somehow.
Now she is interested in art, music, computers -- none of which I taught her, because she was able to quickly learn it herself.
A lot of parents just hands-off the kids, particularly in the early stages, and then you end up with a kid that is socially stilted, or unable to do anything for themselves later.
I don't think you have the necessary evidence to show that forcing your kid to read by the age of 2 is what allowed them to be excited about learning SEO today.
> The point is that your mission with your kids is to actually force generic life skills down your children's throats. It's not an option!!!
You're presenting a false dichotomy, where the only options are either forcing skills down your children's throats, or being completely hands off. There's a way to teach them good skills that doesn't include forcing them to hit arbitrary deadlines for reading and calculus, and making a 2 year old hate you in the process.
I'm glad this parenting style has worked for you, but it's not a generically applicable way to raise kids.
I had her rewrite words directly from a book.
But it was a highly disciplined environment to do it. Only 30 minutes at a time each day.
Then i had her put simple words together - syllable by syllable. It was shocking how quickly she learned.
But the key to it was DISCIPLINE.
It was not something she could avoid or say that she did not feel like doing it today. I was cold and unemotional about it. Because its as basic a skill as breathing in the modern world.
As she got older, we spent the summers reading 2 novels each week (Jack Vance). Then as she finished a chapter, i had her bring it to me and summarize what she read.
This is how she learned complex vocabulary. Through practical use. She got A's in anything related to language from the beginning of school.
Coincidentally -- its the same way how i learn new computer languages, by diving into real projects immediately.
>Guide them, direct them, support them, teach them, but their goals should be their own.
Children are definitely their own person and I generally agree with what you're saying, but sometimes kids don't develop their own goals. Then they graduate from high school and their childhood is basically over and they have no inner voice driving them in a certain direction.
This is happening with someone I know right now and the anxiety that it's creating is making the problem much worse.
This is true, but there's also a pretty wide gulf between "do nothing to help your kids form life goals or skills" and "MY mission is to make my kids learn calculus by the time they're 10".
I’m not sure how to phrase this without it sounding bad, and I don’t want to personally offend you, but somewhere in what you wrote is the epitome of everything I hate about tech culture (not saying there’s not a lot about tech culture that I love).
It reminds me of a quora response where Andrew Ng says you should teach your kid to program as a toddler. Not everything has to be hyper-optimized. Let your child live their life.
This is teaching your kids to read. Not code. BIG difference. One is optional, one is required and something that no parents should be solely trusting schools to do.
My dad barely finished high school, but he did teach me to read by the age of 2. It profoundly changed my life.
1. Teach my kids how to become better at learning, and teach myself to minimize the urge to control them.
3. Marrying with the goal of supporting the spouse in their self-actualization, no matter what that might be. Buying things is seldom self-actualization, but a distraction from that.
6. Taking a degree which motivates you (love the process, not the goal - a degree takes too long to just push through)
I kind of, or absolutely agree, with the other ideas.
Some of parent‘s ideas rest on the idea of gaining control over the future or other people (not even little kids can or should be controlled perfectly), or goals that are so far off that it’s unclear that one would ever reach them. Goals that are far off AND specific are more influenced by external factors than one‘s own doing - which is the very definition of gambling.
Disagree with most of these. Marrying for a high level of intimacy and partnership is by itself often enough — and if followed seriously often more solid - business plans fall through.
Having outsized expectations of children is often a recipe for resentment. Children don’t have tendency to evolve the way you plan before they are born.
Buying a house just to live in is enough for most people.
In my 55 years of experience and seeing friends, family and others around me, having some kind of mission is critical.
You just have to have something to aim for with your spouse, or you do get bored. Currently where I live, i see families working in the family business all the time and they really are forced to be together working on something.
Whereas their children just want to move from the provinces and live in an apartment with a spouse and they are miserable, because they don't have something to work together with.
They think having the house, the wife and the car is enough. It isn't. It's just the recipe for a midlife crisis after you get all of those things.
Couples who work together do have midlife crisis. Children who leave the province do it for a reasons you don't agree. Misery, might or might not be a consequence of "moving from the province" or not having a goal.
Personally I agree with your overall point and disagree with the presentation.
Your examples look like busy work, disguised as meaningful and fulfilling. Something you'd amusingly read in the index of a self-help book, picked up out of curiosity in a dusty box at a garage sale.
To sum up, some people pointed out, that this idea might not be transient to others. It requires the dedication, not just to patrol your life, but to patrol the lives of those who might unknowingly be part of your personal mission.
These all form their own funnels. Take number 3, marriage and building something. That one alone if pursued means your dating preferences are very different from if you have a different purpose/goals. You filter out people differently. Potential actually matters. Idiosyncrasies matter. Lust is interpreted differently.
Your lens would be very different from someone who just marries for "love". Or casual hookups. Or even just marriage by itself.
Alright. Because this personally applies for me, what about creating missions of past decisions made without missions? (This sounds naive, but I could use some insight.)
For ex. I did my undergrad in IT Security. I did an MSDA. I ended up in professional sales. I don't know what to do with all this. I've been good at tackling hard subjects my entire life, but how do you craft a mission from a hodgepodge of difficult and unrelated skillsets?
Don't think of it as one overriding mission. That's very rare. But think of it as a small series of missions ofter overlapping concurrently.
You completed your mission of IT Security. But then you realized you love professional sales. Now you can aim to be the best in that.
For example, I'm a really good programmer for the past 30 years. But now I found i absolutely love online marketing -- so much more than writing Ruby, Erlang and Elixir it's not even close!
Now my mission is to do things related marketing. And I'm putting projects together that will keep me busy doing it. Loving it is not enough, so I force myself to practice it every day by marketing for real customers and products.
> how do you craft a mission from a hodgepodge of difficult and unrelated skillsets?
I'd say you don't have to fit the entirety of your skillset into a mission to be happy/successful, and that a mission with only part of your skillset doesn't imply you'll be at a competitive disadvantage.
All attained skills and knowledge do — or will eventually — contribute in one way or another to your path, even if they are currently irrelevant to your mission.
Personally, the best decision I have made was to start going to a psychologist weekly. It's essentially a debugger for the mind, provided you put in the work of dumping your mind data on them.
The venn diagram of your skills brings up Sales Engineering (also called technical consultant, solutions engineer, pre-sales engineer depending on the company) at an Internet/Security company as a potential career path. Have you heard of or considered that role?
That's a more focussed starting point which may lead you to find your mission.
No one can build your strategy for you-- you'll want one suited for you, and no one knows you better than yourself. Although I am sure certain folks can help: Life Coaches, Counselors, Psychologists, etc.
Find resources on:
- Skills that BOTH interest you, and are economically in demand
- Geographical areas where those skills have a competitive advantage and are in demand
[3] You can find entire libraries of skills at sites like Lynda.com and Udemy.com
I am an web app developer. No tech degree.
How? Built my skills. And strategically: I am creative, interested in business & entrepreneurship, interested in freedom, technology, and building things. And, I want to make good income so I can support a community where I help people grow.
Looking at those desires... it fits well with a Web App Developer career.
Likewise, you need to determine:
A. What do you want ("Goal". Not having a goal is like having a map without a destination: Going nowhere)
B. What you're willing to get what you want ("How badly do you _want_ to reach your goal? Do you really _want_ it? Again-- how badly? Are you willing to take 6 months off from work to grow your own skillset, full time, via project-based work, in order to leapfrog yourself into a new career?)
Just some ideas. It's not tough. Just ask a search engine the right questions. And know yourself.
Go through trials, tribulations, challenges-- One doesn't get to know their self by living an easy, meandering life. We get to know our self and what we're capable of by going through significant challenges-- By testing ourselves.
1. Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10. Then others as they grow older.
2. Learning programming by writing a real system that actual people will use -- instead of code katas or reading programming books or attending a boot camp.
3. Marrying not only for love, but with the intention of building a business or farm together.
4. Buying a house, with the knowledge you will sell it or convert it into a rental in a certain number of years. Then repeat with another house.
5. Starting a social media account to cover a specific topic, instead of making random posts about anything (have you noticed the most successful accounts are about one topic??).
6. Taking a degree with the intention of using it in a specific way and knowing how much money you will make to pay off the loan and live a comfortable life.
7. Buying a "beater" car, because you want to hire a new offshore employee for a side project instead of making a high lease payment to the bank.
The world is filled with the stories of people who do things purely on emotion and never had "missions" or a "why" they did the thing.