Chad Swaney: E-Learning Designer and Social Media Advocate

As part of an exercise for Paul Sparks’ class in my doctoral program, we were asked to come up with a personal mission statement. This was a task that I took seriously, because I saw what I was doing in my education as a potential turning point–well, more of a focus point. I wasn’t planning on turning anything around; I was working on developing a focus on what was important to me. A year later, I have come to understand the importance of aligning my energy with what it is that I want, and as I look back at my mission statement, I can see that it is more relevant than ever.

My mission statement is:

Pursuing truth and community through technology

Pretty simple, right? This mission statement has three core components that represent exactly what is important to me.

Truth

For me, the ultimate virtue is truth. This has meant different things at different times in my life, but above all, truth to me is a pure, sincere, honest, and objective understanding of how the universe works. My ideas of how the universe works have changed over time, but my fidelity to pursuing why things are the way they are has never wavered. Truth isn’t just a lofty ethereal concept, though. Truth is just as much about the basic metaphysical laws of the universe as it is about how to repair a toaster. Maybe this is just my odd way of justifying what I do for a living, but there is just as much truth in a repair manual for a Xerox machine as there is in the great treatises of Plato, Kierkegaard, or Jung (an odd grouping, I know, but just some examples).

Elucidating the truth about our surroundings, whether that means explaining the power of collective will or teaching someone how to use a piece of software, is one of my core reasons for being.

Community

The second pursuit in my mission statement is community. Yes, I read and demi-worshipped Ayn Rand for most of my life, so I want to make sure I separate  community from collectivism. Community is the non-coercive sharing of resources–the most important of which is ideas. Collectivism is the coercive pooling of resources–usually material. Community is the group of friends who gather every week to watch a TV show, or who share a workspace and bounce ideas off each other. Community is a team of people in a workplace who share a vision and goals and work together to improve a business process. Community is the means by which people can create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Technology

The third component of my mission statement is the means by which I pursue community and truth: technology. Sharing ideas about how the world works isn’t something that has sprung out of the earth in the last 5 years. We didn’t need Facebook to get together with friends and share a glass of wine and a business idea. Before Twitter, there were plenty of people who had creative ideas for solving the world’s problems. Jim Collins says that technology is an accelerator, but I prefer to think of it as an amplifier. Technology’s purpose is to is to amplify human endeavor. Instead of sharing an idea for providing clean drinking water to villages in South America with 10 people in a church, technology allows an innovator to share that idea with millions.

What it means

So this is all pretty “up in the ether” kind of stuff. And I am the first to admit that this isn’t the kind of mission statement that one can use as a measuring stick for behavior–it is descriptive, not prescriptive. The simple, three-part statement is a very clear way to describe just what it is that matters to me. It reminds me to stick to what’s important, and line up my energy to pursue that.