How to Write a Personal Mission Statement

Good day class. Today I'll be discussing how to write a personal mission statement.

You might ask, “Why do I need a personal mission statement?” That is a good question. Some believe a personal mission statement provides you with a sense of clarity and a sense of purpose. Some believe it helps define who you are and how you live. Some believe it helps win a job interview or otherwise succeed at endeavors. Others like me believe if you seriously think you need a mission statement, what you really need is to ditch your job for a few hours and get a hobby.

Serious or not, many will agree a personal mission statement will aid you obtaining employment in the corporate world as an obedient company zombie. And by further blurring the line between “company” and “person,” having a personal mission statement can be useful to prove you are actually a company when taken to trial for polluting, stealing, or causing grievous bodily injury, particularly if your mission statement declares you are against such things. Your mission statement may be the legally deciding difference between you as a felonious person, or acting as an agent in good faith of your felonious corporate personhood.

Your mission statement can also be thought of as a part of your personal “brand” - useful if you view yourself as a salable object like a prostitute or politician. It defines for you a rank above the lowly consumer, the average schmuck, one of the masses. It also helps you decide who to socialize with, namely, others with personal mission statements.

To write an effective mission statement, you will need to start with markety, overused, and obnoxious corporate sounding words. Some examples include: “solution,” “paradigm,” and “technology.” You will need to arrange the words into a pithy and impressive sounding phrase, keeping it personal, but without saying anything definitive, specific, or intelligible. Some examples would be: “Providing technology aware personal solutions for modern paradigms,” and “Providing personal paradigms for modern technology aware solutions,” and “Providing modern solutions for technology aware personal paradigms.”

Note in the above examples, the statements are grounded in the present, yet future oriented. They contain no traces of past achievements, because, what are past achievements other than relics of a former time? They are not reminders of what you can do, they are reminders of what you are not doing today.

Regardless of what vapid corporate terminology you use, the key to writing a successful mission statement is not to dumb down an idea, but to leap further and remove all traces of any ideas. If you find it difficult to reduce a complex person such as yourself down to a meaningless slogan, remember, you are not a complex person anymore, you have become a corporate person. Your goal is to impress other corporate-types with an impressive-sounding sentence fragment, and ideas only distract from the desired focus, muddy your statement with meaning, and force the reader to think. Your goal should be to preclude thought; one method is to fit your mission statement in a single line of a presentation slide, since many corporate-types seem to be too busy or ignorant to read anything more complicated.

Once your mission statement is complete, don’t worry about upholding its mandate; if you successfully crafted your statement, there will be nothing you will need to live up to.

Class dismissed.