Jerry Maguire is one of my all-time favourite movies. I find the mission statement Jerry wrote in his Miami hotel room the most interesting part. The idea of having a moment of clarity (breakhthrough not a breakdown) is life-changing. He (i know Jerry is not real :) ) wrote a genius document that applies to any profession really not just sports agents.
Cameron Crowe released the full mission statement on the 20th anniversary at link. Jerry reads parts of it in the movie but when I read the whole thing, I couldn’t believe how it spoke to me.
The mission statement is titled “THE THINGS WE THINK AND DO NOT SAY”. Below are some of my favourite paragraphs and my commentary.
And yet, as I sit here in the wonderful Miami Hilton, I have never been so happy to be alive. I have said “later” to most anything that required true sacrifice. Later I will spend a weekend reading real books, not just magazines. Later I will visit my grandmother who is 100 and unable to really know the difference. Later I will visit the clients whose careers are over, but of course I promised to stay in touch. Later later later later. It is too easy to say “later” because we all believe our work to be too important to stop, minute to minute, for something that might interfere with the restless and relentless pursuit of forward motion. Of greater success. Make no mistake, I am a huge fan of success. But tonight, I propose a better kind of success. I could be wrong, but if you keep reading and I keep writing, we might get there together.
Well, I couldn’t have said it better. it’s all about moving forward and success. Right? You work and expect that would make you successful and maybe then you would be happy. Maybe!? Maybe not.
Somehow all this has been bubbling up inside me. A man is the sum total of his experiences. And it is now that I am interested in shaping the experiences to come. What is the future of what we do? Give me a goal, and I will achieve it. That has been my secret design for most of my life. Perhaps you are the same. We’re all goal-oriented, so I hereby present a goal.
How can we do something surprising, and memorable with our lives? How can we turn this job, in small but important ways, into a better representation of ourselves? Most of us would easily say that we are our jobs. That’s obvious from the late hours we all keep. So then, it is bigger than work, isn’t it? It is about us.
The idea of experiences defining a person (and their future) is interesting. Are our jobs representation of how we are? when someone says “i am my job”, Does it even make sense? I thought of myself as a person who would say that. but now i am not too sure.
I have never been a writer, but I can see how this great lost art will never truly die. Putting words to paper is a sacred thing. It’s more than a phone conversation, it is a document. It is something you are putting on paper. The relationship between a phone call and a letter is the difference between a magazine and a phone book. One you leave on a plane, the other you save.
“Putting words in paper”, as he puts it, is an art that will live forever. Abraham Lincoln said ‘The written word may be man’s greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn’ and it does seem like the greatest invention. In this context, Jerry is comparing a letter to phone call. But it explains why he is writing his mission statement. somethings are meant to be read and admired. it is like “If a tree falls in the forest with no ears to hear does it make a sound” situation.