When I read Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People back in early 2023, it was suddenly outlined to me that I was in complete control of my own outcomes, of my own life. No-one else was going to help me – everyone has got their own battles to fight. And if that’s the case, I’d better make sure I’m damn good with a sword.
In fact, continuous self-development “sharpening the sword” is one of the Seven Habits, and probably the one which requires the most discipline. This requires regular enhancement of your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being. It’s the reason why I exercise a lot and try to read 20 books a year. But it’s not the focus of this article.
This article focuses more on Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind. Define your long-term goals and values, and visualise what you want to achieve in various areas of your life. This habit emphasises setting clear intentions and aligning your actions with your values. You must ask yourself:
What am I actually trying to achieve with my life?
It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Most of us spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what we’re going to do next – tomorrow, next week, next month, perhaps even next year – but very little time thinking about the really big picture. What if we flip this thinking and instead decide what we want our life to be about before we start worrying about what we’re doing tomorrow?
This is where a Personal Mission Statement comes in. This is essentially a written statement of what you want your life to stand for. A personal constitution. It doesn’t need to be complicated (in fact, the simpler it is, the easier it will be to follow), nor does it need to sound impressive – but it does need to be something you print out and frame on you wall. Somewhere you can see it every day (your fridge or office wall), and be held accountable.
The Personal Mission Statement is a simple way of answering life’s most fundamental questions: What matters to me? What sort of person do I want to be? What do I want to achieve? How do I want to spend my limited time on Earth? What am I not willing to sacrifice along the way? The last question here is particularly important – it’s very easy to become successful at something you don’t actually care about.
Begin with the End in Mind
When you consider this habit at its absolute core, like all good ideas it distills into something beautifully simple: imagine the end of your life and work backwards. What would you want people to say about you? What would you consider a life well lived? What would you regret not doing? What would you wish you’d spent more time doing? While these may not be easy questions to answer, they’re incredibly useful in determining which direction to navigate your life in.
Once you know where you want to end up, decisions become much easier. If your ultimate goal is to spend more time with your family, a job that requires 50-hour (or more) weeks suddenly looks rather different. If your goal is financial independence, spending every penny you earn on increasingly expensive possessions becomes less attractive. If your goal is to remain healthy and independent into old age, sacrificing your health for career progression starts to look like a particularly poor trade.
Your Personal Mission Statement is a compass
This is the most useful way to think about the Mission Statement. While a map tells you exactly which road to take, a compass simply tells you which direction you’re heading. This is important because life will throw you curveballs. Often the path you thought you wanted turns out to not be the right one.
A rigid five-year plan can therefore become (surprisingly) useless, but a set of timeless principles in your Mission Statement will be much more resilient. When faced with a difficult decision, you can ask: Does this really move me towards the life I actually want?
This is where the Personal Mission Statement becomes particularly relevant to personal finance. Money is not the goal – it is a tool. I’ve written many times before about the importance of saving and investing, but it’s easy for personal finance to become an end in itself. You can become obsessed with your net worth, investment returns, savings rate or the size of your pension pot. But what are you actually trying to achieve with this? The answer is ultimately freedom. The freedom to do what you want, when you want, and with who you want.
Money gives you options. It gives you the ability to say no to things you don’t want to do. It gives you flexibility over your time. It can allow you to change careers, take time away from work, travel, spend more time with people you care about or simply live life at your own pace. This is why financial independence is so powerful.
But it also means that saving every penny isn’t the answer. If your Personal Mission Statement says that experiences, relationships and health are important to you, then you should absolutely spend money on these things. The objective isn’t to die with the biggest investment portfolio – it’s to use your money to build the life you actually want.
When to say “no”
One of the greatest benefits of knowing what matters to you is that it makes saying no considerably easier. A Personal Mission Statement gives you permission to say: “No. That’s not important to me.” This might mean turning down a promotion because it would require sacrificing too much of your personal life, or refusing to work on weekends, or spending more money on travel and experiences, while less on material possessions. There’s no correct answer here, your mission belongs to you. That’s the point.
Your Mission Statement will change
It’s not written in stone. You will change, your circumstances will change; what matters to you at 25 may not be what matters at 45. This is fine – think of your Mission Statement as a living document. Review it occasionally – perhaps once a year, or whenever you see a turning point in your life. Ask yourself: Is this still the life I want to live? If the answer changes, update it.
I’ve already updated my mission statement once. This is it now:
My mission is to love myself, my body, my family and friends deeply, while contributing in a meaningful way to society that fosters positivity and future development. Appreciate the small things, be inquisitive and kind, protect the planet and always keep one eye on the sky. Never give up.
It’s important to consider that we spend an extraordinary amount of time planning our finances, careers and futures, yet surprisingly little time deciding what we’re actually trying to achieve with them. That’s the real value of a Personal Mission Statement; it forces you to step back from the day-to-day noise of life and think about the bigger picture. It gives your money a purpose, it gives your career a direction, and (most importantly), it gives your time some meaning.
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