What Is Your Mission? - Ch 3 of Never Eat Alone - Part 2 of 2 at Catch a Gideon

March 19th, 2007 by digerati

This is chapter 3 (part 2) of the Never Eat Alone series at Catch a Gideon. Please leave comments with your reactions to the quotes as well as sharing your personal experiences in college and business.

Step One: Find Your Passion:

A goal is a dream with a deadline.

Look Inside. It is important to conduct an internal review without constraints, doubts, fears, and expectations of what you “should” be doing.

Make a list of your dreams and goals.

All the things that bring me joy and pleassure, the achievements, people and things that move me.

Step one tells you to define what you want for yourself. Dreams are one things, but when you put a timeline on dreams they can become reality. This is hard for a lot of people who don’t feel it is really possible to achieve a dream.

The internal review process is extremely important. You should do it frequently both in small sessions for smaller tasks (like weekly) and at greater intervals for the larger picture. Reevaluate what you want and how your dreams have changed, then set new goals so you stay on track.

Above all, in the review process you must be honest with yourself. This isn’t the time to play up your accomplishments, or use those ultra cool phrases like “I’m in a transition phase.” It’s the time to lay it all out on the table (or floor if you run out of room) and see how you are doing. Then change if you don’t like what you see. If you aren’t honest you won’t see where you need to change, and so you just won’t change at all.

Keeping lists is important too. Written is best. This lets you compare over time and see how you have changed and where you have left to go. Writing lets you become more specific over time. This works both for tangible and intangible things. Qualities and objects you want. The more specific you can be the more obtainable those things become.

Look outside: ask the people who know you best what they think your greatest strengths and weaknesses are. Ask them what they admire about you and what areas you may need to help in.

This follows the persistent point of networking: you are not alone, and you can’t win alone. Use the people around you to help discover who you are and who you want to be. They can show you the traits needed by people who achieved the goals you have. They can point out character traits (flaws?) you never noticed or weren’t honest enough about.

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Never Eat Alone is one of the best networking books written, period. Buy it now and follow along as Catch a Gideon goes through each chapter of the book.