Do you remember watching the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire ?
Remember Tom Cruise playing the slick sports agent whose career implodes in a single afternoon?
In the first three minutes of the movie we get the Cliffs Notes of his life. He has spent years working for the most successful sports management company of his day. He is fierce and suave, and he is dying inside.
In his words, he had become “another shark in a suit.”
One night, just before his corporate conference, he finds himself at a moral crossroads, a point of breakthrough. During his wrestling—his epiphany—he does headstands in his hotel room and unravels what he had previously learned about the world.
He starts writing a mission statement
He is not merely writing a memo, he realizes, but a mission statement. A suggestion for the future. In it, he advocates a provocative concept to his coworkers: charge less money, take on fewer clients, and give more personal attention. In the next scene we see him running 110 bound copies of his manifesto, title page and all, and stuffing them one by one into his colleagues’ in-boxes.
He calls it “The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business.”
Jerry Maguire is alive again.
His mission statement makes him famous, but for all the wrong reasons.
His peers smile as they make eye contact from across the conference room while making sure not to stand close enough to catch the career-suicide bug that they knew had surely infected him.
Soon Jerry is fired and leaves the office with his mission statement in one hand and the goldfish, his only heretic recruit, in the other.
OK. To be fair, the cute secretary comes with him, as well. She can’t resist a man of principle.
What does Jerry Maguire have to do with me?
Everything. What you are reading now is a mission statement. Not merely a memo, but a suggestion for the future. You awoke to your in-box stuffed full of my sweat-stained declaration of independence.
This is a manifesto. A coup d’état. A sudden illegal overthrow.
I am inviting you to unravel what the world has taught you about your work, your career, and your future.
I may end up being the lonely guy holding a goldfish with no one following me. But, like Jerry, I’m willing to run the risk.
I’ve lived too long following the rules and expecting the outcome to match the promises.
It hasn’t worked.
*Expert from eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.
For your complete free copy download here.
