Being at heart a writer, creative person and goal-achiever, I’m a big fan of the mission statement. It’s my chance to craft a succinct statement about the desired goals of a certain collection of people and ideas.

In order to write a mission statement, I first need to back up a little and consider what my values are. Basically, an ideal world. The kind of world I want to live in. In my brief brainstorming this morning, I came up with these words that describe my values:

Frugal. Sustainable. Artful. Meaningful. Strong. Small. Good. Social. Futuristic.

These are the words that are resonating with me right now.  They are the seeds that are causing me to want to add something to the world.  To help create a world that is more frugal, more sustainable, more artful, more meaningful, etc.

The next step is to think about how I see myself in this world.  What is my contribution to this world?

Since I love constraints, I have decided to restrict my mission statement to being exactly 125 characters.  I chose 125 because I plan on making a piece of art out of this mission statement, in order to make it official.  It will be reminiscent of something I made Kellianne for Christmas last year:

This is a hand-drawn sheet of 1,000 paper cranes.  They are colored in order to correspond with a 125-character message translated into binary.  Each binary character is a series of 8 zeroes and ones, which conveniently make 125 characters 1,000 zeroes and ones.

In Japan, there is a tradition to fold 1,000 cranes in times of great intention.  Each crane is an intention, and when all 1,000 are together, they represent a great hope or wish for health, community, and strength.

What better way to set a mission statement in stone (slash paper) than to transform it into an artful, meaningful, intention?

I’ve got my first draft of the mission statement ready.  I’m going to sit on it and revise it and then turn it into reality.

This entry was posted by Buster on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 7:30 pm. It is filed under Enjoymentland and has these tags: 1000 binary cranes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.