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Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

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11–20 of 102 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#11
Writing code today is way too hard, my work mission is to try to make it easier. I’m more focused on people who already know how to code than people that don’t.

This drew me to work on React, Jest, React Native, Nuclide (Facebook IDE), create-react-app, prettier... I feel like it’s better than a few years ago but there’s still so much more to do.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#12
post #5

My mission is to make all the people I come in close contact with "Rich". I see money as a way to reward people who you like and use it against people who you dislike. This is what I work for today.

Yikes! A future Trump in the making...

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#13

My day job is to write tools for the sales people who will try to persuade their clients into buying ads on Facebook, I just can't see how that helps improve the society or humanity as a whole. Ideally, I should be using my skills and knowledge to help the people in need, but that just won't pay as good as writing CRUD apps, and I have a whole family to feed.

Sometimes you have to work on something that's not your mission to give you the time to work on your mission - however infrequently that may then be.

You can still help people in need, just do what you can do.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#16

My day job is to write tools for the sales people who will try to persuade their clients into buying ads on Facebook, I just can't see how that helps improve the society or humanity as a whole. Ideally, I should be using my skills and knowledge to help the people in need, but that just won't pay as good as writing CRUD apps, and I have a whole family to feed.

Providing for your family is a perfectly respectable 'mission' in life as far as many people are concerned. Pursuing grand ambitions can take a heavy toll on a family, and it's perfectly sane to choose a more well-travelled path if that's what you value.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#17
Effective Altruism. I discovered the charity GiveDirectly some years ago from the NPR podcast Planet Money episode that featured them. GiveDirectly is one of many charities adopting evidence based outreach, and now I follow GiveWell and it's recommendations as well. The central question of Effective Altruism is given limited resources, how can we do the most good?

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#20
Cal's book is great - but for me, my gut cynical reaction was to wonder if even a successful 'mission' wasn't a false sand-castle that disappears when I die.

Two books make note of this: Ecclesiastes would call a mission mere striving after wind and Becker's Denial of Death that would call mission a an immortality project doomed to irrelevance.

As others here have noted - Ecclesiastes would agree that enjoying the immediate pleasures of food, work, mirth while in the company of friends and family is a gift.

But Cal is also correct, that without a mission you wander aimlessly. That's what makes it hard - I know it doesn't matter and yet it does matter greatly to those around me who need me to be a strong, good, and competent person.

My only bit of small advice: perhaps a mission something that gives you the ability and desire to help other people could give you a direction that has enough meaning to make it worthwhile.

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