Hard Is Hard, Part II: Your Compass Was Always There
Last week, I ended with this:
The climb ahead is yours. And the compass that guides it is your values.
Today, we start unpacking that.
But before we go any further, I want to remind you of something I’ve said in different ways over the months. I am not writing this from a mountaintop with a perfect view of the answers. I am but a few steps ahead of you, in step with you, or sometimes just behind you. I do not have it all figured out. I am on my own journey too.
If anything, that’s why this matters. Because none of us are experts in our own becoming. We’re just paying attention and trying to name what’s been quietly guiding us all along.
Because before you find your purpose or write a vision or define a mission, you have to understand something no book really warns you about. The definitions themselves are a mess. Purpose. Vision. Mission. Values. Creed. Principles. Frameworks. Mantras. Depending on the author, they mean different things. They get mixed. Reordered. Repackaged.
And that’s why so many people freeze. They think they’re doing it wrong before they even start. Check out this prompt response from ChatGPT (give me various interpretations of mission from the why to the how to the what and who those variations are attributed to) to emphasize my point. It’s not perfect (but progress not perfection is a way of life). You should get the idea:
Good god. Awful. And I read a lot of those books and I don’t think ChatGPTs interpretation is necessarily spot on….moving on….
Next Prompt: so when you help me personally and or Members' Wealth define mission - which of these 10 do you work with and why:
Response: Here’s the honest answer in your voice, with no consulting fluff. When I help you personally or Members’ Wealth define a mission, I do not pick one of the 10 interpretations.
I blend four of them — deliberately — because together they create a mission that is:
true to your values
clear for your team
motivating for you
usable in the real world
And most importantly it does not trap you in optimization or false purpose.
What?
Then ChatGPT sums it up with this:
If I had to distill the “Dane + Members’ Wealth Method” into one line:
Mission = Live your values to create transformational impact for a specific type of person through a repeatable and aligned method.
That’s the blend.
That’s what works.
That’s what will last ten years without feeling like a costume.
Of course, you can keep going back and forth with ChatGPT and the more you interact, the more she knows about you and the better the responses seem to get. But I find they are always mostly missing a key ingredient that ChatGPT cannot have….my personal evolution, growth, and passage of time. I don’t learn all in one day. She can shortcut things but I have an absorption rate and processing speed cap. Faster is not always better. Bigger is not always better. Someone else doing the work or the shortcut is not always better. Sometimes you have to live it and for that you need the passage of time.
If this work were simple, everyone would have a crisp, inspiring mission statement written on a napkin (or not, because you don’t need a mission). But the truth is more honest. Most quietly burdened high achievers don’t start with purpose or mission. They start with confusion.
And that’s okay.
Because you don’t build your compass by picking the right vocabulary. You build it by noticing what’s already been true about you all along (and slowly discarding the rest). Same holds true for the Chinese who discovered the compass. They did not invent magnetic north. The magnetic north was already there, as is yours.
That’s why I started with values. Not because I’m wise. Because I was tired. Because I didn’t know where else to start. Because values weren’t aspirational. They were already inside me. I just hadn’t named them.
Truth is, I got lucky. And a little serendipitous. I didn’t choose values first on purpose. Values chose me first – through the work with a coach that happened to work based on what he learned from the book The One Thing.
My Values: GROW
Growth. Relationships. Ownership. Wanderlust. Simple. Honest. Already lived.
Not polished. Not aspirational. Not marketing-ready. Just me.
Once I started living them intentionally, clarity showed up. Slowly at first. Then all at once. Decisions got easier. My energy got cleaner. I stopped gripping so tight. And the space that opened up is the same space where purpose and mission eventually start to form.
That’s why values matter. They simplify everything. They don’t solve it. They steady it.
And look, you don’t need all the definitions right now. You don’t need to sort purpose from mission or creed from vision. You don’t need to write your future on a whiteboard or craft the perfect line that explains your life.
You just need to bring to the surface what has already been guiding you. The stuff you’ve been living for years but haven’t slowed down long enough to notice.
That’s the real tension in this next chapter. Not lack of intelligence. Not lack of desire. Just lack of patience with yourself. I saw it with myself and with everyone I see who seeks out their values: they don’t want to do it, they think its fluff or not what will help or whatever, then they buy in, and then they want it done yesterday. Patience, my friend. Patience.
Hard things are hard. And this work is hard. You can’t rush it. But you can begin.
And beginning starts with values because values are already yours. You’ve lived them through some of your best decisions and some of your worst. You’ve lived them in moments you’re proud of and moments you wish you had back. You’ve lived them long before you could name them.
Next week, the ascent begins….Jerry meets Buddha and Nirvana as he walks his path with his steps alone…
If this work is tugging at something inside you, and you’d rather explore it with someone who’s actually lived the mess, reach out. No templates. No shortcuts. Just the next honest step.