Please Be Curious: The Quest Before the Mission

Another excerpt from Mildly Creative: 7 Ways to Lead a Life of Quiet Inspiration, a book in progress.

Some books send you on a mission, or at least they try. They teach you how to set goals, take action, and make things happen.

I read a lot of those books. Unfortunately, nothing much ever happened. I could never get past the goal setting.

Oh, I was a goal setting machine. I’d set one-month goals, six-months goals, one-year, five-year, and ten-year goals. I’d set goals for everything (family, finance, health, sanity), write them all down, and forget about them.

Maybe you did the same. You set your goals and forgot about them – sort of.

You remember setting them. You just forgot to do anything with them because they seemed more like a list of chores than an enticing vision for the rest of your life. But set them you did, and forget them you did, and that’s how the name calling began. Lazy, you called yourself. Flaky, you said you were. Weak, you believed yourself to be.

But instead of a lack of character, your problem was probably a lack of knowledge. I’m not referring to what you didn’t know about art or business math or Hungarian cooking. I’m talking about what you didn’t know about you.

Getting What You Want is Hard When You Don’t Know What It Is

The trouble with so many of those mission-directed, objective-focused, action-oriented books is their assumption that we know what we want. You’d be surprised how many people don’t. And just as many know what they want but won’t acknowledge it.

If you fall into one of those two groups, those who don’t know or those who won’t accept what they know, then it’s possible the goals you put in writing simply weren’t your own.

The Quest Before the Mission

If you want a mission, you may have some preliminary work to do. That’s where curiosity comes in, because before you go on a mission, you may first have to go on a quest.

A mission is a terrific thing. It’s specific. It’s tangible. It provides you with a set of measurable steps, a timeline, and a clear way of knowing when you’ve accomplished what you set out to do.

But it can be just as beneficial to go on a quest, a journey in the form of a question. You set forth without knowing precisely where you’re going or what you’re going to find.

Far too often, we put the mission before the quest. We set goals without knowing what goals will actually have the power to propel us forward. We want a shortcut to happiness and success, so we look at what everyone else is doing or listen to what everyone else is telling us and fail to take the time to explore and discover the things that interest us and matter to us, the strengths we possess and the ones we want to develop.

But when we begin with the quest, we’re open to discovery and willing to change directions as often as we need.

If we’re willing to keep our eyes open, one day, when we least expect it, we see a flash of sunlight reflecting off something in the distance. Curious, we approach it to get a better look, and lo and behold, there it is – our mission – poking up out of the ground, just waiting for us to dig it up.

Or even stranger, we discover our mission has been right beside us all along; we just didn’t recognize it, but the quest has made us wiser and sharpened our senses. We hear and see and understand what once escaped us.

Almost every good thing that’s happened to me in the past two years came about because I was willing to go on a quest. I really had no other options. I was simply worn out from going on missions that carried no meaning for me. Maybe you are too.

To start your quest, you’ll have to go where all quests begin. Within.

Next in this Series: Right Now – An Exercise in Quiet Inspiration

Previously in the Series: You Don’t Know What You Think You Know