J is for Jerry Maguire

At the beginning of Cameron Crowe's 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, the main character stays up all night to write a mission statement (more a manifesto than a memo) about the future of his business.  It takes him by storm.

"I am not a writer but I can’t stop from writing this. It is something pure, from the deepest part of me."

Of course, he gets into trouble after he impulsively makes a few hundred copies of it, complete with the Holden Caulfield-esqe cover, and distributes it to everyone at his sports agency company.

In my opinion, the movie kind of goes downhill from there.  But that first scene grabs me every time.  Only recently I learned that Cameron Crowe actually wrote the whole mission statement, not just the snippets that we hear on screen.  You can read all 5,600 words of it here.  It's really quite good.

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.

How do we wish to define our lives? 

The lesson Jerry learns, which gets him into all that trouble, is that quality matters more than quantity, and people matter even more.

The answer is fewer clients. Less dancing. More truth. We must crack open the tightly clenched fist of commerce and give a little back for the greater good. Eventually revenues will be the same, and that goodness will be infectious. We will have taken our number oneness and turned it into something greater. And eventually smaller will become bigger, in every way, and especially in our hearts.

True confession time.  I've had a text file sitting on my computer called "quo-vadis.txt" for almost 10 years.  Every so often, I think of something to add to it... one more little snippet about where I think my own professional field should be headed.  The bullet items are in the second person imperative, addressed to future-me.  Maybe to future-us.  Here's how a few of them begin:

• Give...
• Rail against...
• Don't half-ass...
• Be wary of...

Someday I plan to get myself into trouble, too.  I'm with ya, Jerry.

Let us start a revolution. Let us start a revolution that is not just about basketball shoes, or official licensed merchandise. I am prepared to die for something. I am prepared to live for our cause. The cause is caring about each other. The secret to this job is personal relationships.