فصل 17

• UNCOVERING YOUR TALENTS

An important part of developing a personal mission statement is discovering what you’re good at. One thing I know for sure is that everyone has a talent, a gift, something they do well. Some talents, like having the singing voice of an angel, attract a lot of attention. But there are many other talents, maybe not as attention grabbing but every bit as important if not more—things like being skilled at listening, making people laugh, giving, forgiving, drawing, or just being nice.

Another truth is that we all blossom at different times. So if you’re a late bloomer, relax. It may take you a while to uncover your talents.

After carving a beautiful sculpture, Michelangelo was asked how he was able to do it. He replied by saying that the sculpture was already in the block of granite from the very beginning; he just had to chisel off everything else around it.

Likewise, Victor Frankl, a famous Jewish-Austrian psychiatrist who survived the death camps of Nazi Germany, taught that we don’t invent our talents in life but rather we detect them. In other words, you are already born with your talents, you just need to uncover them.

I’ll never forget my experience with finding a talent I never thought I had. To fulfill Mr. Williams’ creative writing assignment for freshman English, I excitedly turned in my first high school paper, entitled “The Old Man and the Fish.” It was the same story my father had often told me at night while I was growing up. I just assumed he had made it up. He didn’t bother telling me he had stolen the plot directly from Ernest Hemingway’s award-winning novel The Old Man and the Sea. I was shocked when my paper was returned with the remarks, “Sounds a bit trite. Like Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea.” “Who’s this guy Hemingway?” I thought. “And how come he copied my dad?” That was my poor start to four years of rather boring high school English classes, which were about as exciting to me as a clump of dirt.

It wasn’t until college, when I took a short story class from a remarkable professor, that I began to detect my passion for writing. If you can believe it, I even majored in English. Mr. Williams would have died.

The Great Discovery

The Great Discovery* is a fun activity designed to help you get in touch with your deeper self as you prepare to write a mission statement. As you walk through it, answer the questions honestly. You can write your answers in the book, if you’d like. If you don’t feel like writing your answers down, just think them through. When you’re finished, I think you’ll have a much better idea of what inspires you, what you enjoy doing, whom you admire, and where you want to take your life.

1 Think of a person who made a positive difference in your life. What qualities does that person have that you would like to develop?

2 Imagine 20 years from now—you are surrounded by the most important people in your life. Who are they and what are you doing?

3 If a steel beam (6 inches wide) were placed across two skyscrapers, for what would you be willing to cross? A thousand dollars? A million? Your pet? Your brother? Fame? Think carefully… 4 If you could spend one day in a great library studying anything you wanted, what would you study?

5 List 10 things you love to do. It could be singing, dancing, looking at magazines, drawing, reading, daydreaming … anything you absolutely love to do!

6 Describe a time when you were deeply inspired.

7 Five years from now, your local paper does a story about you and they want to interview three people … a parent, a brother or sister, and a friend. What would you want them to say about you?

8 Think of something that represents you … a rose, a song, an animal… Why does it represent you?

9 If you could spend an hour with any person who ever lived, who would that be? Why that person? What would you ask?

10 Everyone has one or more talents. Which of the ones above are you good at? Or write down ones not listed.

Good with numbers

Good with words

Creative thinking

Athletics

Making things happen

Sensing needs

Mechanical

Artistic

Working well with people

Memorizing things

Decision making

Building things

Accepting others

Predicting what will happen

Speaking

Writing

Dancing

Listening

Singing

Humorous

Sharing

Music

Trivia

Getting Started on Your Mission Statement

Now that you’ve taken the time to walk through The Great Discovery, you’ve got a good jump-start on developing a mission statement. Below, I’ve listed four easy methods to help you get started writing your own mission statement. You may want to try one of them or combine all four of them in any way you see fit. These are just suggestions, so feel free to find your own method.

Method 1: The Quote Collection. Collect one to five of your very favorite quotes onto one sheet of paper. The sum of these quotes then becomes your mission statement. For some, great quotes are very inspiring, and this method works well for them.

Method 2: The Brain Dump. Speed write about your mission for fifteen minutes. Don’t worry about what’s coming out. Don’t edit what you’re writing. Just keep writing and don’t stop writing. Get all of your ideas down on paper. If you get stuck, reflect upon your answers to The Great Discovery. That should get your imagination in gear. When your brain has been sufficiently purged, take another fifteen minutes to edit, arrange, and make sense of your brain dump.

The result is that in just thirty minutes, you’ll have a rough draft of your mission statement. Then over the next several weeks you can revise it, add to it, clarify it, or do whatever else you need to make it inspire you.

Method 3: The Retreat. Plan a large chunk of time, like an entire afternoon, and go to a place you adore and where you can be alone. Think deeply about your life and what you want to make of it. Review your answers to The Great Discovery. Look to the mission statement examples in this book for ideas. Take your time and construct your own mission statement using any method you see fit.

Method 4: The Big Lazy. If you’re really lazy, use the U.S. Army’s slogan “Be All That You Can Be” as your personal mission statement. (Hey, I’m only joking.) A big mistake teens make when writing a mission statement is that they spend so much time thinking about making it perfect they never get started. You are much better off writing an imperfect rough draft and then improving it later.

Another big mistake is that teens try to make their mission statements look like everyone else’s. That doesn’t work. Mission statements come in many forms—a poem, a song, a quote, a picture, many words, a single word, a collage of magazine pictures. There is no single right way to do it. You’re not writing it for anyone else but you. You’re not writing it for your English teacher and it’s not going to be graded by anyone. It is your secret document. So make it sing! The most important question to ask yourself is, “Does it inspire me?” If you can answer yes, you did it right.

Once you have it written, put it in a place where you can easily access it, like inside your journal or on your mirror. Or you could reduce it, laminate it, and put it in your purse or wallet. Then refer to it often, or, even better, memorize it.

Here are two more examples of teen mission statements, each very different in style and length.