My father made many narrow escapes during his time in Vietnam. I described one earlier that occurred in Vũng Tàu, where an artilleryman fortunately came to his rescue. But there were other times when he was left strictly to his own devices. Occasions like the one I’m about to recount were the scariest.
He told me that he had just dropped off combat soldiers and ordnance near an outlying airfield where US ground troops were positioned. He was hoping for an uneventful return to camp along the Saigon River when he spied Vietcong snipers in the tall trees along the banks of the water. He was in an eight-or nine-cylinder Beaver with a radio engine, which for those of you unfamiliar with various kinds of military aircraft is a pretty conspicuous-sized plane under the circumstances. He knew going in that it wasn’t exactly conducive to keeping a low profile but it was necessary to transport the heavy load of men and equipment he just delivered.
By the time he caught sight of the enemy he was already under heavy fire. All he could see was a blaze of gunshot heading directly for his face. Although the snipers were armed with rifles, they weren’t just shooting bullets. They were shooting marker rounds and those rounds were coming in red hot. They were literally on fire. Miraculously, not a single one hit him.
He was barely in the air at this point, since he had just left the runway. He made a split-second decision, thinking his best option was to continue at a low level across the river until he could climb to a more viable altitude. But that, as it happened, was not the best strategy. With his vision obscured by the barrage, he changed course again, dunking the plane and following a tributary, which luckily had no cables to block his advancement. When he was sure he had passed danger, he guided the aircraft upward and away. He could see the Vietcong scurrying for better placement in the trees, but he was already gone by the time they were newly positioned.
When he arrived safely back at the base and exited the plane, his knees buckled and he fell to the ground. He hadn’t been hit, but the plane clearly had been. It was riddled with holes. The crew on the strip rushed to get him to a flight surgeon for examination, but all he wanted to do was analyze what went wrong for the next time.
One thing every Army pilot knows is that there is no such thing as a routine mission. My dad explained that he could’ve run another one exactly like it the day before and had an entirely different experience. Because war is fluid, new risks are presented with every flight. Weather conditions change, enemy troops are repositioned all the time, and the artillery they are armed with varies with the particular unit you encounter. This is why the military demands that every mission be devised to include planning, preparation, execution, and assessment stages. In any given situation, it wants its troops to have a process for working through all the options and getting the job done.
The planning stage conditions you to think of all the possible things that could go wrong so you can refine your operational choices to avoid those possibilities. Of course, no one can think of every possibility, but meticulous planning can remove multiple obstacles from your path so you can focus better on the one you hadn’t anticipated if and when it arises.
Preparation not only includes gathering every resource you need, it also includes proper training and practice, which is ongoing in the military. This is essential because the rote ability that comes with constant training and preparation enables you to react quickly if and when a plan changes midstream.
The eternal hope for the execution phase is that it goes perfectly according to plan—and if it doesn’t, that your constant exposure to planning and preparing has made you flexible enough to devise and execute a successful contingency on the spot.
The assessment stage ensures that whatever challenges you encountered, and the solution you instantly devised to overcome it, get added to the long list of considerations for the next time you set out to plan a mission.
My father’s story made an indelible impression on me for several reasons. First, because he survived the attack. Second, because he thought quickly enough to attempt more than one escape route. And third, because it taught me that it’s rare for anyone to just wing it and be successful, even when it looks like they are. As my dad said then, “You might wonder why you have to go through all this elaborate devising if the moment a plan is initiated it’s subject to change. But this elaborate devising is necessary to get you familiar with all the assets and options available to you. That’s what the training is all about too. It’s how you get good enough to make those on-the-spot decisions that ultimately accomplish the mission.”
I walked away from that story with the understanding that success is far less likely without devising a complete mission plan—one that includes a well-thought-out game plan, lots of training, the agility to come up with a contingency on a moment’s notice, and the sense to take away a lesson from the experience for future reference.
THINKING A STEP AHEAD
Americans are fascinated by the idea of instant success. We think of certain actors, musicians, athletes, and business moguls as overnight sensations when, in fact, they’ve often worked for years honing their craft in less visible places before finally arriving in the spotlight. We, as a culture, also vest a lot of faith in positive thinking to help us achieve our goals. Although this will carry you a distance during the toughest leg of your journey, positive thinking alone will not lead you to victory. Every soldier I’ve ever met knows that you’ve got to do more than just run out onto the battlefield screaming, “We’re going to win!” That right there is a declaration, not a plan for success. You’ve got to plan, prepare, execute, and assess missions countless times before you can let loose that battle cry and really mean it.
“Devise Your Mission” is one of my most essential rules to remember for this reason. It provides a blueprint for winning that’s based on substantive planning and training. It focuses you on the necessary and very specific steps you must take to achieve excellence and fulfill your mission. Because it’s also realistic, it conditions you to anticipate the challenges along the way, and your possible reactions. If you have already begun to implement all of the rules preceding this one, you are definitely ready to devise your own personal mission plan and make whatever you have been dreaming about a reality.
GIRL WITH A GOAL
Every summer while I was growing up, my cousins and I would go to Texarkana, Texas, to visit my grandmother, whom we called Ma Dear. We would stay with her for weeks at a time enjoying her company and her amazing cooking. It was a leisurely respite from my busy and structured life on base.
I think it was the summer I was about to enter sixth grade when my future aspirations really started to become apparent to others as well as to myself. My cousins were still playing with Barbies, but pretend fashion shows didn’t hold my interest for very long anymore. My voice was already deep and my enunciation was crisp from all the reading aloud I did for fun. I would broadcast the dinner menu, narrate the descriptions and reviews I found in the movie section of the newspaper, and I’d tell endless stories to the younger kids and their stuffed animals when it was time for them to fall asleep. I knew I wanted to be a great communicator when I grew up and my voice was already bolder than the voices of other children my age. Being different felt lonely at times, but I tried not to focus on that. Instead I filled up my brain with details about the people I met and the places I had been.
That summer, as I picked peppers alongside Ma Dear in her tiny backyard garden, I told her all about my incessant urge to travel. I said, “All I want to do is journey and collect stories.”
I loved her reply, “Well then, you can’t stay where you are and be at peace because it seems to me the Lord has put a calling on your heart. He’s stirring things up in your soul and soon you will see opportunities come your way. You will travel because He’s stirring your nest, too.” Then she looked at me and said, “You’re lucky you’re blessed to know what you are meant to do.”
We talked more throughout that visit and it occurred to me that even though she was a civilian she really understood the concept of a mission plan. She knew that when you find your purpose, you absolutely need to live it. And in order to do that, you have to have a plan that includes recognizing opportunities and seizing them. She told me that mostly everyone in her large family was poor, but they understood this concept too. She described them to me as, “some of the most motivated folk you ever wanted to meet.” She said, “When one of them caught an idea, it was like fire.” She was like that in the kitchen too. She was such a fabulous chef even though she never had a day of formal training. She taught herself to cook until she had learned how to make everything taste flavorful in new and surprising ways. I loved every meal she prepared. But her real, personal mission was raising a half dozen children to become productive, loving, and creative adults, one of whom was my mom. Ma Dear hated one word more than all the rest: Lazy. I’m certain that I inherited my work ethic from her.
While I first learned the underlying principles of my “Devise Your Mission” rule from my father’s stories and from observing him and other officers on base, it was in talking with Ma Dear that I truly got a sense of how one applies it to their everyday civilian life and to their long-range goals as well. Her encouragement to pursue my dreams and to never let any obstacle stand in my way contributed greatly to my current success. She had an abundance of perseverance, passing away just days before her one hundred first birthday a few years ago. I’m indebted to her for her common-sense wisdom.
PLAN B
Ma Dear was right. I was lucky that I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
The most important mission we will ever embark on is the fulfillment of our life’s purpose.
When you are in the military you are told what the objective of your mission is before you are tasked with devising a plan to achieve it. But the rest of us either struggle to discover our most important objective or we have to learn to trust our intuition about it. Some people take years to figure this out, which is unfortunate when you consider that we are only on this planet for a short while and it requires a lot of planning, preparing, executing, assessing, and refining to achieve that one big goal.
Over time, what began for me as a desire to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met became a burning need to disseminate vital information in a way that helps people look at some pretty difficult situations and still find hope on the other side. Maybe it was growing up in an environment where the prospects for defeat and death were so real that my mission developed into what it is today. But whatever the origins of this twenty-plus-year quest, all I know now is that when darkness is upon us—when serious events occur that leave us all bewildered or searching for understanding—I find it meaningful to be there with the latest details as a point of light for my viewers.
I know that I serve this purpose successfully because people tell me I do. After I delivered the news about the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook, for instance, many viewers wrote to tell me that they felt more comforted getting that soul-wrenching news from me because they saw the pain they were feeling in my eyes, too. I was experiencing the same emotions they were. And I needed to hear answers to the same questions they did.
My earliest practice couldn’t have hinted at how serious a role journalists play in the lives of others, but it was valuable training nevertheless. I documented everything that occurred from my tween years on. I kept loads of composition books filled with notes on every event or subject that caught my attention. I mean those books were filled in the margins and right up through the very last page with notes!
I remember keeping a diary too and announcing to my mother that I was going to lock it up each night so she wouldn’t be tempted to read it. Much to my surprise, she just laughed and said, “Honey I love you, but I’m not going to read that. You write constantly. I don’t have that kind of time.” Then she added, “Besides, you talk so much that I already know what’s in that diary.” I guess you could say that I delivered the daily news of my life to her so she didn’t have to seek it out herself.
I also recall how whenever people told me details about what was going on in their lives, I would say, “Oh, that’s a great story. Do you mind if I put that in my diary?” When they said, “No, I don’t mind. Go ahead,” I’d instantly include what they shared and file it in my journal under lock and key just in case my mother changed her mind about prying. (I knew how important it was that my sources trust me.)
Throughout this book I recount how I went about devising my mission to become the kind of journalist I had always aspired to be. I talk about how I planned and prepared—where I studied, what I majored in, and who some of my biggest influences were. I also talked about how I adopted practices to keep my mind, body, and spirit strong enough to support my goals. I speak of the character traits I continually strive to develop and about the team I lean on most to succeed. In other words, I am teaching you to constantly be nimble so that your preparedness meets the obstacles to victory.
I can see how when one lays it out like this, it looks as if everything went along without a hitch from the earliest of days, but that was not the case at all. It rarely is. Every step I took required a mini mission plan of its own, and you can bet that embedded within each of those mini mission plans was a contingency plan because challenges, roadblocks, and failures are a very real part of the process for everyone—no exceptions.
When I was in Minneapolis at KSTP-TV, for instance, I knew programming experience was necessary to take me to the next level of my career, so I relentlessly pursued my general manager to let me develop my own show. He wanted to support me. He liked my work and didn’t want to see me leave any time soon, but his hands were tied. Local news stations don’t typically create new programming. There just isn’t a place for them to put it. Giving up on this plan, however, was not an option for me. My mother and father didn’t raise me that way. And giving up didn’t exist in the military mind-set either. Can you imagine if my dad ever quit on a mission midflight? That’s how lives are lost in battle and that’s certainly how dreams die for the rest of us.
My father would always say that if something goes wrong in the sky you have to be able to look through the smoke and say convincingly to yourself, I’m going to make it out of here and I’m still going to hit that target because that is what I trained long and hard to do.
Luckily my GM was as persistent as I was. He came back to me with an idea. The only other platform he had to offer me was radio. Internet programming was in its infancy then. Of course, this wasn’t what I originally planned, but I still jumped at the chance because it served my purpose. The idea is to get to the end goal through whatever alternative and appropriate means necessary. So I created a radio program on 107.1 FM with what was a fresh idea at the time—an all-women talk show format. It was called The Harris Faulkner Show. I engaged my listeners with motivational content. It aired between the 5:00 P.M. evening and 10:00 P.M. nightly news, both of which I coanchored on TV. It was a little hectic to do both television and radio side by side like that, but the experience was invaluable.
There were other occasions in my career when a job was no longer helping me to grow and I knew a change was definitely in order. Because there are a limited number of anchor positions in any given region, uprooting my life and moving to another city always had to be factored into my contingency plans. If the goal was important enough to me, I knew I had to make the tough decisions and follow through on them, even if it meant leaving trusted colleagues, friends, and a beloved city and viewership behind. Since another of my goals was to keep important people in my life, I knew that I would still find a way to do that too. There were also times when an idea or a proposed innovation never got past “go” for a variety of reasons, from funding and timing to manpower or other resources. I just used lessons from these instances to plan and prepare better for the next time. The experience often fueled a future endeavor that ended up being more exciting and that effectively offset the earlier disappointment.
Even now, I love juggling different projects. I am always looking for ways to expand my knowledge and eagerly seeking fresh ways to create new content and to serve a different role in its dissemination. I enjoy brainstorming with others in the Fox family who are exploring similar opportunities. When these ideas take greater shape, then devising a mission plan is what will catapult all of us to the next level.
The message here is that you should never give up. Success takes practice. In the military, tests are administered before you can rise to the next level. If you fail at first, it’s expected that you will try again until you succeed. The same is true in the legal profession, where people take the bar exam as many times as they must until they pass. If you are a student, know that even if it will have no bearing on your grade, you should approach your teacher or professor and ask to take a test again if you believe you could do better a second time around. The effort improves your skills and the initiative improves your character.
The military teaches you that every plan and every contingency must be developed with pinpoint specificity, and this is true. But in broader terms, let me say this: The plan is always to meet your goal and the contingency is to never give up!
“Devising Your Mission” is absolutely vital to achieving your life purpose. I can’t state that strongly enough. It is one of my primary rules, and can be the first one you put into effect in your life or it can be one you explore further down the line, after you have worked on some of the other areas we’ve discussed so far. But make no mistake about it: This rule is crucial to learn and practice frequently and completely.
I employ it to meet a whole host of other objectives in my daily life. I rely on it so much that I can tick off the boxes of each stage in my mind as I’ve done them. It’s especially ideal for parents. Anyone with children whose extracurricular activities pull them in multiple directions absolutely cannot survive a weekend without a mission plan. That assures all family members are everywhere they’re supposed to be on time. Buying or building a home requires a mission plan. Holiday shopping requires a mission plan. Taking your family on vacation requires a mission plan. Every contractor will tell you things go wrong. Every store runs out of its most popular toys in December, and every traveler gets delayed or misses a flight some time or another. Contingencies include hiring people with mission planning skills that far exceed the standard, shopping online a few weeks or months early, and investing in a VIP pass so there’s no waiting in line at the theme park once you’ve finally arrived at your family vacation destination. In other words, there are always options when you plan and prepare and when you remember what hiccups to avoid the next time around.
My dad has been so conditioned to do this by the military that even years after his retirement he still devises a mission plan to head down to the local pharmacy. How many times have you left the drugstore without getting everything you need? Military spouses are also great examples of people who use this rule effectively. There are few other people on the planet who can pack up a house, ship everything off to a new location, get their kids settled in yet another school, or juggle being both mom and dad for months at a time better than they can. And they will tell you it’s because they do it with a mission plan.
If it sounds like a lot of work, trust me—it takes far less effort than the alternative of digging yourself out from under the mound of problems that pile up when you don’t plan, prepare, execute, and assess. The risk-to-reward ratio makes the investment totally worthwhile. I also understand that few of these issues are a matter of life or death. However, devising a plan in civilian life does help to ensure a better quality of life. Believe me, you will be in a far better mind-set to succeed at achieving your larger life goals when you’re not stressed out.
PURPOSE + HUSTLE = SUCCESS
This whole book, as you know, is intended to help you achieve excellence and success in all the areas you wish to. But for a moment I want to engage you in an exercise designed to help you discover the mother of all goals: Living your purpose. Then, together, we’ll walk through an example of how you can devise your mission around that purpose.
It may sound daunting at first, but if you’ve begun to put some of the guidance offered in prior chapters to work, you will be well fortified for this effort.
To all the readers who have identified their life purpose already, please continue to follow along as well. You may find further insight to help you reach that goal, or you may discover a new direction that will lead more efficiently to it. Or perhaps you will find a way to combine one talent with another to supercharge your mission. I suggest this because my father always taught me that the most successful tactic—whether you have ten years, ten days, or ten minutes to devise, prepare, and execute a mission—is to squeeze in as many reviews of your plan as you can before, during, and after the event.
By the way, one of the things I love about the military is that they are actually great at helping their soldiers find a place and purpose. After a new recruit interviews and gets a thumbs-up for having the necessary physical, mental, and ethical attributes, they take a three-hour comprehensive test called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). The multiple-choice questions and written components across several disciplines are designed to help match each prospective service member’s skills to a branch that could benefit from those skills. This test is followed by a physical exam that helps determine if a recruit has a trait that would negatively impact his or her ability to do a particular job. For example, many jobs require normal color vision to be able to receive signals involving lights or flares. A recruit who is found to have red/green color blindness would naturally be unable to perform those jobs to expectation. Collectively these tests are used to identify the military occupation that best suits each soldier. During basic training, additional opportunities exist to observe how effectively each service member’s skills are applied, and to plot his or her further development and career path. The military’s success rate is pretty awesome. There are times when troops have resisted their placement, thinking that there were better options for them, only to discover later that they would have been undertasked in those other roles.
In the absence of these kinds of measures in civilian life, you’ll have to find your purpose another way. That’s where the following questions and prompts come in. Please consider each with care and remember that this is not the time to be modest. Only you will see your answers, so be as honest with yourself as possible.
Begin by constructing a list of your very best skills. It’s not quite as objective as taking the ASVAB, but it is a strong start. Really think about what capabilities belong on that list. Leave the list somewhere you can see it for at least a week and add to it as more and more of your talents pop into your head. So many of us take our best skills for granted because they are second nature to us. Giving yourself some time to notice them again in your daily life will ensure that you don’t overlook them as possible long-term pursuits.
Continue the process by asking yourself which activities on that list you enjoy doing most of all? What makes you feel happy and productive? Do any of these skills make you feel useful to others?
Then consider all of the activities you engage in that tend to earn you the greatest respect and compliments from the people around you. Their added perspective can help you focus on your best assets. For instance, I am a pretty decent chef. (I get that quality from Ma Dear too!) I’m always baking something and, in fact, before sitting down to write this chapter, I just devoured some guilt-free brownies that I made from vanilla yogurt. Not only do I crave them, but my family and friends ask for them as well, especially when these gooey, addictive treats are topped with an irresistible layer of my homemade Chantilly sauce. So at my loved ones’ encouragement, I might put baking or sauce-making on my list, but I would also put several other pursuits I enjoy and excel at on that list.
Be sure to make your list as long and robust as possible, and then look it over carefully. In short order that list will start organizing itself into clearer and clearer priorities.
In my case, it would become apparent that while I am someone whose mini goals include making delectable desserts for those around me, I’m not really a baker or a sauce-maker by trade. Something else on my list would be calling out to me more emphatically as a career.
Over time, all the attributes associated with a storyteller who thrives on sharing relevant and important information with others would naturally top my list of skills. Today it’s clear to me, and to most others, that my purpose in life is to do exactly what I am doing. My inner circle knows it and is happy to support my purpose in whatever ways they can. My viewers support it too. My social media feeds are filled with comments from people telling me that they like to hear the news from me because they trust me. I consider their trust an incredible honor. I also consider it a serious responsibility. As a result, I try to live my purpose to its fullest capacity every day. It defines my existence and further shapes my mission.
Is there something others always seem to trust you to do? Are you skilled enough at fixing cars that your friends will ask you to tune up theirs? Do you have such flair and style—not to mention skill with a sewing machine—that your sister has asked you to design and make her wedding dress, veil, or accessories?
As you can see, taking a deep look inside while also paying close attention to the feedback of others can help you identify your purpose too.
By the way, you may find more useful hints in your childhood. Think back to hobbies and potentially untapped talents that have remained with you all along, but have since been glossed over because of all the other obligations you have. Ask your loved ones what they remember about the activities you instinctively gravitated toward in your youth. What impressed them the most? What did they think you were going to be when you grew up? What encouragement did your teachers give you? There may be some wonderful clues about your purpose in their reflections as well as in your own.
Once you’ve identified your life purpose—as this exercise aims to help you do—think about how often you are actively engaged in living some aspect of it already. I’ve always believed that when you’ve found your purpose—and certainly after you’ve sought proper training for it—you could look at a situation, a room full of people, or a task at hand, and just know that no one else in that room would do it quite the way you would because you’d bring something special to it.
Knowing your purpose is about recognizing your place in the world—the lane you want to drive in better than anybody else. Of course, two or more of us may cruise that lane, but we each do it in a way that makes it uniquely our own. For instance, my husband, who runs his own successful media-relations company, was a great live-shot artist in the news business when we met. He definitely knew his way around that lane. In fact, that’s my joke—when I met my Tony I got my first Emmy, because learning from him made me a better live-shot artist too. Although we both enjoyed success in the same business, I had developed a different on-air skill. When it comes to breaking news, I’m quite good at sitting calmly in a chair while millions of people watch, processing reports and videos regarding an unfolding situation as they trickle in, and talking to the corners of those images for the benefit of our viewers until I’ve helped make some sense of it all. Somehow, I can always find a way to draw the audience in with what we do know, and not pontificate or extrapolate anything, but just be in the moment intuiting the right thing to say. My husband is a great storyteller—better than I am—but he doesn’t have that particular skill. That unique ability to ad-lib, to go into extemporaneous talk mode for an extended period of time until more and more details are organically unveiled. That’s a very specific skill and that’s the lane I like driving in.
You can see this principle at work in other fields. For instance, there are certainly other clergymen out there in the world, but few understand their purpose and live it quite like Bishop T. D. Jakes. Jakes founded the nondenominational megachurch, The Potter’s House, in Dallas, Texas. He speaks to women’s issues so compellingly that he has his own show on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
Is there anyone who really inspires you? If so, why? Is theirs a lane you might consider driving in as well?
Take Action
Once you have determined the lane you belong in, you’ll want to plan how you will navigate it all the way to the point of success, including reaching each scheduled milestone along the way. You’ll prepare for getting there with proper training. You’ll execute your plan, and of course, should you get stalled along the way, you’ll assess the obstacles in your path and, like the Waze app, you’ll find the best means to get around them. That’s not just the way the military devises a mission; it’s how you should devise all your missions going forward.
Let’s look at how this would play out if, for example, you wanted to be even more of a baker than I’m prepared to be (aka a supremely professional one rather than an amateur one.) I use this analogy because dabbling in it as a hobby has taught me a little bit more about it than most other endeavors, except obviously broadcast journalism.
When devising your mission, remember to be as specific as you can. In order to craft the ideal plan, you must state your goal up top. Is it your desire to someday be the best baker in the world? Can you name who that person is today? How does one even define the best in this field of endeavor? Is it your aim to actually place at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie (literally the world cup for bakers)? Do you want to run a place more like the Dominique Ansel Bakery in New York City, the Tatte in Boston, or the pâtisserie Sadaharu AOKI in Tokyo and Paris? (These are currently considered among the top bakeries in the universe!) Or do you much prefer to bring your confections to dessert-lovers via a restaurant, catering service, or trendy food truck?
After you define success for yourself, you can proceed to investigate the different paths the bakers you most admire have taken to achieve their current status. From their experiences and wisdom, you will get a reasonable idea of how long it will take you to achieve a similar goal. You will set an end date by which you aim to meet your goal. You will look into the various culinary schools, online courses, and websites that can teach you all of the necessary techniques and recipes. Again, you will note the series of milestones you’ll need to meet before arriving at your final goal date.
Prepare
You will proceed by training in every way possible—in controlled situations and in the field. In other words, you will actually enroll in a culinary school, or seek an apprenticeship with a master baker/pastry maker/culinary artist near you or at a bakery of your choice. You will make profiteroles, tarts, cupcakes, and just about everything else that elicits raves from friends, family, and strangers. You will offer to bake for a local fundraising event so you can benefit from the added experience. You will contact a favorite magazine or blog and volunteer to test recipes for them. You will enter contests—maybe even one on the Food Network. And if you are truly daring, you will send your local newspaper’s food or restaurant critic some delectables made just for him or her. The feedback will be invaluable.
Execute
After planning and preparing to achieve your goal, you will finally enact it. You’ll work hard, sometimes rising the way military people do at zero dark thirty (aka 5:30 A.M.) to be sure your freshly mixed popover batter is in the oven on time for the breakfast rush. You’ll keep your specific career goal in mind at all times. Did you decide to establish a bakery, a restaurant beloved for its desserts, a catering service, or a trendy food cart or truck of your own? Or did you decide to work your magic at an already established and popular eatery where you are sure to garner attention? Will you put your skills to slightly different use and perhaps develop the tastiest low-calorie desserts Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig has ever offered to their clientele? You’ve done the research; you know the lane you’re in, and you’ve planned how to cruise that lane in your own style, so don’t be afraid to be different. Strike out and do whatever it is you have carefully planned and prepared to do.
Assess
Has anything you’ve tried not worked? Although yours is a time-tested art, don’t forget to think about how new developments can help you revise your approach. Remember: Review, review, review. Are you fluent in all the ways the digital world can help you expand your craft and business? Are you using new kitchen technologies to your best advantage? Have you fully explored and informed yourself about all the options? Are you reaching high enough? If not, simply make time for changes. You will remain poised throughout this entire process to assess your progress and make whatever adjustments to your plan that are required to assure you rise to success the way your best dough recipe does. You will naturally add a pinch more of this or a pinch more of that to perfect your confections.
If there are times when you struggle with one too many fallen soufflés (in other words, when you experience mission failure), think again about the example of my dad and other military men and women. Failure is not an option for them. They can’t afford to just give up and quit. And frankly, after your investment of time, energy, and money, you can’t either. You simply need to rethink and reset your plan. There is no shame in that.
After seeing how devising your mission works in a career situation such as the one above, you are now ready to apply the same principle steps to every other objective you wish to achieve in your life. I don’t know about you, but I see hashtag goals all over Twitter these days. There are #workgoals, #marriagegoals, and #fitnessgoals to name a few. And, of course, #yolo, reminding each of us that we only live once. Think about how it will feel to add #victory and #doneanddone to your social media feeds, then do it.
Even after you have arrived at your goals and enjoyed the sweet and savory results of your labor, be sure to revisit and revise your mission(s) every now and then so you are always expanding your possibilities and gaining new skills.
I know I used an example from the kitchen instead of from the battlefield, but the lessons really are the same. If you hunger to succeed you need a detailed plan that will give your efforts a fighting chance.
Here again, very succinctly, is the military’s recipe for successfully devising your mission along with my own recipe for helping you define your most important objective.
FOR YOUR OBJECTIVE
Fold the following ingredients together:
Let sit and gel.
FOR THE MISSION
Set a timer with firm deadlines for each stage.
Complete the mission and enjoy.