Establishing the Pyramid of Power: The Purpose

The end of Chapter Two of Susan Robison's Peak Performing Professor establishes the Pyramid of Power.  I won't summarize it here (because I want to respect Robison's intellectual property), but I will point to places where Robison does that work, or her reviewers do that work.

First, the four parts of the pyramid:

Robison defines the parts of the pyramid in an interview with Kim Pawlak:

Purpose Statement. Your purpose statement is your philosophical belief. This doesn’t change much across your whole lifetime. “You may be able to come up with your purpose statement in minutes, or it may take you over a year,” she said. “The amount of time it takes is no reflection on your intelligence, your physical attractiveness, or your mental health. It is a phenomena all by itself. So if you’re struggling with your purpose statement, it’s something that’s going to be an ongoing take-home assignment for you. One woman I worked with spent half of her time teaching at a university and the other half of her time serving as a liaison between a diversity center on campus and the urban community in which she lived. We came up with a purpose statement for her that said: ‘I am a bridge connecting ideas and people for the greater good.'”
Mission Statement. Your mission statement is more practical, and changes every three to five years for adults, and sooner for students. Your mission statement answers the question, “If I am here for this purpose, what shall I do about it? “To write your mission statement, you will need to know what your strengths are (three verbs), what your values are, and to whom you typically offer yourself to,” she said. “As a result, your mission statement will follow this formula: ‘My mission is to (verb, verb, verb), that are my strengths, for, to, or with (people, people, people), who want (value, value, value – your four to eight values). When you put your mission statement together, it’s really helpful to use information from the outside world, such as your students.”
Vision Statement. Your vision statement is the outcome of your mission. Here’s a device to get at your vision, she said: “The phone rings five years from now. You’ve been waiting a long time for this very special call. Who is it and what do you want them to ask you? Is it the Nobel Committee asking you to come to Stockholm to accept your award? Is it yet another publisher chasing you down, offering you millions of dollars to write a book? What kind of call is it that you have hoped for and worked for your whole life and it’s finally coming together?”
Goals:  What things shall I do to make my vision come alive because I’m living my mission because I know what my purpose is? These things are your goals, which can be broken down into tasks. “Once your Pyramid of Power is in place, it motivates and energizes everything you do,” she said.

The goal of Chapter Three is to force reflection on purpose (summarized here):

Each of us needs to reflect upon and construct a 1 or 2 sentence explanation that answers the question: why am I here on this earth? What am I here to do? This may seem hard. We all have so many talents and passions, but if we really boil it all down, what essentially is our purpose? 

The purpose statement operates at a very high level of generality.  An example given here is "“I am a bridge connecting ideas and people for the greater good.”"

Note that phrased with that level of generality, the purpose statement applies to professional, family and community life.

So what is my purpose?

In speech, in writing, and in listening, I cultivate the free expression of ideas and the free expression of self in myself and in others.