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Too Much? No, Too Little…

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Now this is really interesting. I haven’t put things together in this way before, but I think it’s right:

“Your feelings of being overwhelmed don’t spring from having too much on your plate, but from having too little [emphasis added], too little of what strengthens you. The specific activities that strengthen you have been drowned out by everything else.

Wow. The problem is not too much to do — there is too much to do, but that’s not the problem. The problem is doing too little that aligns with your strengths — that is, not devoting the majority of your attention to the things that make you feel strong. We let the “too much” crowd out the things where we can really make a contribution, with the result that we do too little of what we are best at.

So, what is the solution?

Prioritize your to-dos based on what makes you feel strong. Which ones do you love? Which ones are you actually looking forward to? Make a plan to do those first, and to find a small way to celebrate them when you’ve done them. Cradling these activities will give you strength and resilience to get through everything else.

This is from Marcus Buckingham’s new book Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently.

(As an aside here: Yes, you read that sub-title correctly: it’s for women. I love Buckingham’s stuff, but almost skipped this one for that reason. I ended up buying it for my wife and have now been reading it tonight instead of her, while she reads one of my other Marcus Buckingham books.

(Marcus Buckingham is “the strengths guy” who worked for the Gallup organization and wrote the paradigm-shaping books First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently [on management] and Now, Discover Your Strengths [on developing your strengths]. I find everything that he writes to be incredibly insightful.

(His latest book here was a surprise to me [and I’m not a fan of the pink cover — but it’s not for me, anyway], but it’s an extension of his teaching on strengths to the problems women face. So I decided that it would be a great gift to serve my wife. And, it looks like there are a lot of good things in it that men can learn from, too.)

What Needs to Be Done?

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From Drucker’s The Effective Executive:

The first practice [of an effective executive] is to ask what needs to be done. Note that the question is not “What do I want to do?” Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success. Failure to ask this question will render even the ablest executive ineffectual.

5 Questions to Consider When Creating a Personal Mission Statement

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I recently came across a helpful article by Rick Warren on defining your life’s mission.

Warren, obviously, is most well-known for his book The Purpose Driven Life. Now, I would want to say that we should be promise-driven people rather than purpose-driven. (The promise is the gospel of Christ’s death and resurrection for us. God acts on our behalf. Therefore we can work.)

I doubt Warren would disagree with that. I see it as very important for understanding the role of a mission statement correctly. In sum, a mission statement is not the ultimate motivating purpose in our life. God’s work on our behalf in Christ is. Our purpose — and motivation for it — flows from that.

Now, within this context, I think that personal mission statements are useful and important. They help guide your direction in life so that you are not aimless, but rather focused on what is most important for you to be doing.

In this regard, I’ve found that Warren’s article provides very helpful insight into creating an effective mission statement. He points out that there are really five questions to address:

  1. What will be the center of my life?
  2. What will be the character of my life?
  3. What will be the contribution of my life?
  4. What will be the communication of my life?
  5. What will be the community of my life?

What is so unique and helpful about this is that we often think of a mission statement simply in terms of what we should do — the ultimate, overriding aim that we are to achieve in our life.

But Warren points out that our mission involves more than just what we are to accomplish. It involves what we say through our lives — the overriding message we communicate in all we do — and, further, our mission should not be conceived apart from a context of relationships with others.

His thoughts on the center of your life echo what Covey has to say about that in The Seven Habits. Covey speaks of the problems that come from being possession-centered, or career-centered, or self-centered, or person-centered, and advocates being principle-centered. I think that the true and ultimate expression of that is to be God-centered, and Warren hits that well here also.

Anyway, enough commentary. Read the whole thing.