How Do You Have a Mission and Still Be a Dreamer?

... or, how do you get nitty-gritty and fuzzy all at once?

Dan Pallotta had a post a few months ago urging missions, not just "mission statements":

Don't waste your advertising space on your mission statement. Use the space to tell people what you've accomplished, or what amazing thing your product will do — use it to show them what mission you're actually on.

And from Steve Jobs's Stanford speech, where he asked himself:

"If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

When I ran an adult ESOL program, I came up with a clear mission statement outlining exactly what my students would get out of it. 

The four most important things: 1) Everyday language skills, like how to talk to the doctor.  2) Academic behaviors and skills, like arriving on time to class and organizing a binder.  3) Setting goals that are realistic and achievable.  4) Links to "next steps," i.e. the program they could continue on to after graduating from mine.

I talked about them constantly.  I would even say, "I'm on a mission to help them ..."  And I focused like a laser on making sure they happened.  Did they happen?  You bet they did.  I wouldn't let them not happen. 

But if you focus like a laser, how do you remember all the other things you care about?  One class, we tried to get students job placements, and failed.  We got them more job-ready, but they didn't have enough English to do more.  I saw how hard it was for my immigrant students to change certain parenting habits.  I saw how even the many services my human-services agency provided--food stamps applications to immigration assistance--weren't enough to move most families out of poverty.  I constantly wanted to expand to more levels of ESOL, but without expanding staff, it wasn't realistic.

I was so focused on what I could do and had to do--and how to do it better.  That was the mission.  

How did I keep dreaming about solving the bigger problems?  I sat on the porch on summer Saturdays reading about language acquisition, or the Harlem Children's Zone.  I spent a couple months visiting other programs doing similar but slightly different things.  I schlepped to trainings, networked, debated ideas over food and beer.  I piloted a bunch of ideas in my program--some successes, some failures.  Any way to increase the flow of ideas into my brain--and classroom.   

But ultimately I found the day-to-day work, in a one-man program in a small agency, was so demanding that it shut off the really big dreaming.  I moved on.

Wherever I land next, I hope I can answer the question, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" with a resounding "Yes."  I hope my workplace makes it easy to do that.  I hope my colleagues are asking themselves the same question.  Nonprofits must focus on doing excellent work every day.  It is about the daily impact.  It is, at some level, about the next grant.  But it has to be about dreaming, too.