In “Live Life in Crescendo: Your Most Important Work Is Always Ahead of You,” Stephen Covey set out to answer questions such as “How can you pull yourself out of a midlife crisis?” and “How can you contribute once you’ve achieved success?” Covey died before finishing “Crescendo,” but his daughter, Cynthia Haller, who had worked alongside him, completed the project.
Early on in “Crescendo,” Covey and Haller address some of the challenges facing men and women in their late 30s to their early 60s, especially during those tough times when they feel overworked and underappreciated, struggle in their marriages, or believe they’ve failed to fulfill their potential. Signs of that fatigue and sense of failure include burnout, depression, a lack of direction, or attempts to regain their lost youth by “dressing and acting like a teenager,” or worse, abandoning their families “to find themselves.”
Covey and Haller then offer readers help and advice in chapters with titles like “People Are More Important Than Things,” a wise reminder to value our loved ones more than our work. But the title that struck home with me belongs to the first chapter, “Life Is a Mission, Not a Career.”
We Americans are very much career- and work-oriented. Assured that education will bring us success, many of us jump through hoop after hoop—high school, college, further professional training, internships—all in the hope of finding work that will deliver satisfaction and money.
Ask people what sort of work they do, and the replies trip off the tongue: surgeon, mason, software sales rep, stay-at-home mom.
Ask them “What’s your mission in life?” and confusion reigns.
That question occurred to me while reading “Crescendo’s” first chapter, and an answer proved difficult. I’m an old guy who can tick off his accomplishments and failures, but have I lived my whole life with a sense of mission guiding me along life’s rocky pathways? Not really.
Some people with a strong religious faith know their mission. In the Baltimore Catechism, for example, used years ago by Catholic schoolchildren, we find the question “Why did God make you?” and this answer: “To know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven.”
Now, there’s a mission statement, plain and simple.
Few of us, I suspect, have so clear-cut a mission statement, yet as Covey tells us this concept is vital to our well-being. Wrapped up in that term are things like our purpose in life, our goals, and our loves. And if we do experience a midlife crisis, that dreary condition may stem from forgetting or failing to discern and live out our mission, our reason for being on this earth.
Reading “Crescendo,” I realized that each of us is actually pursuing several different missions. The 40-year-old attorney who’s married with two children and coaches his daughter’s soccer team has several missions: working for his clients, loving and caring for his wife, raising his children to be adults, and teaching young girls the rules and tactics of a game, as well as sportsmanship.
His overall mission then becomes a matter of priorities and balance. What’s most important to him should head the list.
And because all missions end with the attainment of a final objective, surely the goal of a life mission is our legacy. What memories and lessons will we leave to others? What will we have added to the world?
A worthy life mission acts as the guiding star necessary for the creation of our best selves and a future of vision and hope.
