#95 - Are Personal Mission Statements Worthwhile?
To What Purpose?; Better Moving Pictures; Fooling with Email
Hello, my friends,
This week has been Michael’s very first winter break from school and I’m feeling like everything is a little bit discombobulated. With Christmas and New Years coming in the middle of the week, regular routines are disrupted so my feet seem off the ground; work isn’t quite like work, slow things are fast and vice versa, and the second season of Rhythm+Flow on Netflix just isn’t as good as the first. In some ways, this slightly frenetic airy feeling is good because it’s giving me the freedom to think about 2025 as a distinct object and do some strategic planning. My usual inclinations is to stick to the present like it’s magnetic so being able to get away from that is refreshing. I’ve been looking for an excuse to use Canva, so I’ve been working on a deck with some 2025 goals using the HERO framework:
H: Health - Mental health, physical health, self-care, doctor's appointments, exercise, etc.
E: Education - Lifelong learning, traditional school, personal development, religion/spirituality, skill-building
R: Relationships - Partner, kids, God, friends, work colleagues, any goals related to interactions with other people
O: Occupation - Long and short-term career goals, side gigs, volunteering, whatever you consider work
Also, Michael and I are taking a last-minute year-end camping trip over this weekend. It’s only one night, but I’m looking forward to hanging out and enjoying nature. It’s not going to be the quietest, most peaceful time, but it will be fun. Michael received a Minions-themed Uno game as a gift from his aunt so I’m sure we’ll make good use of that.
To What Purpose?
Speaking of strategic planning, one of the most sensical approaches to starting off with something like that is to create an overarching, top down mission statement or statement of purpose. I got into the idea of creating a personal mission statement in late 2022 after reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Stephen Covey for the first time. Indeed, I made one for myself (which I won’t share here) and went back to it every few weeks, then every few months, to try to get it right. But it isn’t easy.
My interests and focus changes regularly so the statement I came up with in 2023 feels old hat. The general thrust of it is still true — I don’t disagree with any of it — but it doesn’t feel as fresh and interesting. I wonder if I started from scratch right now, what would I change? The most challenging part wouldn’t be what to add, but what to remove from the previous one.
In my opinion, a personal mission statement has to be short. Something that can be read in a breath but is packed with meaning. The format I maintained was “To X, Y, Z, through A, B, C” with each of the first items touching on a general activity at the core of my values (one of them is “…empower authenticity in others”) while the second triplet giving a method of doing it (for instance, “creative expression”). The key is that they must be big enough in scope to encompass the purposeful activities of my life but not so general to be meaningless. Now that I’m thinking about it, my own statement doesn’t need major changes as it does slight adjustments to wording.
A few of you out there are surely scoffing at how hokey this whole endeavor is. “A personal mission statement…how corporate, how quaint. Do you live on LinkedIn, sir?” And yeah, okay, referring to it in the same way that organizations talk about a high-level dictum does give office culture vibes. I’m a human being (perhaps a system?), not a business, so why this?
Because I’m drawn to the idea of mindful, deliberate decision-making based on established higher principles. I already feel too light on the wind much of the time, which is a strength since it’s how my curiosity functions, but it’s also a tension. A personal mission statement, a plan for the year, a reading list (that I stick to…good luck!) makes me feel heavier in a good way — more stable. Does this new activity I’m considering fit with my purpose in life? Oh, it doesn’t? Maybe I should continue to put time into what I already care about.
Unfortunately, we humans are so reasonable. Can I finagle almost anything into a relationship with my mission statement? I’m not going to answer that. I guess it’s not specific enough. 😐
Better Moving Pictures
Hacker News is one of my favorite sites on the web. I probably read it more regularly than anything else these days. While I don’t understand 85% of the stuff on there, the other 15% makes a big difference in my computing life. Whereas the internet itself is a subculture, the folks on Hacker News are a sub-sub culture, which in itself has many deeper subs. It’s primarily made up of developers, engineers, and other tinkering types whose computing philosophy and habits are very different from the majority of the population. For instance, how many of my readers regularly use a command line interface (CLI)? A few do, but most don’t even know what that is. Not to anyone’s detriment, mind you, since the average computer user never needs to interact with a device using the command line. Well, on Hacker News, people regularly post about new terminal software…You know, different apps to use command line.
As someone who has had a foot in the alt-computing space for over a decade, I’m always interested in different — sometimes better — ways to use my devices. Particularly apps that allow me to scoot around the snooping, addictive, dark-pattern-filled software created by large companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others. To that end, someone recently posted about an app called Grayjay that aggregates media content from various common sources. Basically, it pulls videos from YouTube (and other sources, if you wish) and allows you to watch them without ads in a neat, well-designed interface, without being bombarded by Shorts, incongruous recommendations, and other anti-user design decisions (like constantly asking me to renew a YouTube Premium subscription that I cancelled before COVID). I’ve been watching YouTube videos on the website using the Brave browser for a couple of years now just to avoid some of these things.
But the best thing about Grayjay is the search. In case you haven’t noticed, YouTube search basically has ADHD. When you query it, it’ll give you a like five mostly relevant popular videos related to your search and then pretty much go off the rails. Even when you do a search on a topic where there should be, at least, hundreds of videos that hit the bullseye, you will have to scroll through a morass of vaguely related sponsored videos, shorts, “Previously watched” lists, “From related searches” and so on and so forth. Listen, I searched for “humanistic psychology”, why am I seeing this?
Grayjay, on the other hand, stays focused on my keywords and serves no ads (I don’t even really care about the ads, tbh, I just ignore them). So basic, yet, so profoundly refreshing! This is where we are with the web, that I’m relieved to get search results that actually make sense. And I have to go away from the company that makes the world’s foremost search engine to get this satisfaction. I would feel even better if I could search for videos by length and upload date, the idiotic way this is implemented on YouTube actually makes me angry. What is the reason I can’t search for videos that are exactly 20-30 minutes long that were uploaded from 2015-2017? Honestly, I’m not sure I want to know.
I do recommend Grayjay, though. Check it out!
Fooling with Email
Combining technology and future plans, email has felt overwhelming this year. I get several really interesting newsletters that publish on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule and a variety of other stuff but it takes me a long time to get through it all. Sometimes things stay in my inbox for weeks or months before I get to it. For some people, this isn’t an issue, but I like things neat and my inbox is akin to a desktop that is super-cluttered. Off the top of my head, here are the categories of messages in my inbox in order of frequency:
Newsletters and magazines waiting to be evaluated and maybe read. Some I know I’m going to read and some I want to look at to see if there’s anything interesting for me.
Items I need to attend to sooner or later: Insurance payments, stuff for the kid’s school, bills, events I’d like to attend, etc.
Personal messages that I need to answer.
I know all about email rules and filters, but I think there are also other ways to address these categories. Here are some thoughts I’ve had lately that I’d like to implement in the new year:
For newsletters, I’d like to see if I can automate combining multiple issues of the same newsletter into an epub file that I can read on my phone or ereader. Every so often, when I have like 30 minutes at a coffee shop, I’ll do a “from:” search for a single author and just knock out several issues that way. But if I can write a bit of code to combine them, pass them to another app to convert to epub, and plop them into my ereader app, that would be nice. Apparently, Gmail does allow scripting, so that’s a start.
I guess, if I wanted to complicate my life less, I could also just create rules to put all my newsletters into a folder. Probably I’ll try that first.
For action items, I may need to restart using a simple todo list app. Probably I’ll try something from here that I could easily sync between devices.
For personal messages, it’s just a matter of settling down and answering them. When I email with friends, I get the idea that I have to be in a certain frame of mind (like fountain pen users (refer to around 3:31 of video below)) to write a response, which is usually just an illusion. More so, I just need set time aside.
Are you anxious about your email? Kvetch about it in the comments.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite videos on YouTube:
See you in 2025!
Does it say something about me that simultaneously I am charmed by the courtly ritual and attentive Japanese store owner, and yet also there's a part of me that wants to scream and tip all the perfectly-arranged fountain pens onto the floor?