Why my Mission Statement helps me Make a better Living

Today, I was Mario (as in Super Mario) and I hated it.

Admittedly, it was my choice to do it and I did it for the cash.

I wasn’t alone. There were 90 bad Halloween-costumed Mario’s in flight mode with a raccoon’s tail and ears roaming Michigan Avenue. It was ridiculous.

There is nothing about this that resembles what I want to be doing with my life—except maybe “entertaining” in the broadest sense of the word. There is nothing about this that shares the qualities of my mission: human interest, play, storytelling, acting or truth. There is nothing about this that I want to do!

However, here the good: in knowing my objective now, I can at least point to the incongruities and, hopefully, avoid such distracting jobs in the future.

What I did today was unnecessarily scramble for some dough out of fear.

This is okay. Sometimes I do things I don’t want to do in order to have cash to eat or live under a good roof.

Yet, more often than not, I’m finding when I “flow my bliss” (Joseph Campbell) the rewards are much more lucrative. 

Tomorrow, I have a Voice Over job that pays, in one hour of work, over three-times more than I made as Mario in four hours of work. Even better, I like what I’m doing!

I don’t have to sell my soul to do something that pays well. I don’t have to sell anything at all.

Is making a living really this simple?

Post Script: one hour in total where I mainly edited out sentences to make a story.