Our mission at SecretPenguin is: To make communities better… and more fun.
This is the reason why we do things each day.
It’s easy to say, but how do we live this out?
Contrary to our mission, community is last on our priority list.
The reason is – if we’re thinking long-term about a community, we need to think long-term about having a healthy workplace with healthy people.
Here’s how our priorities breakdown:
1. Yourself
This is not in a selfish way.
It’s harder to take care of others if you’re not healthy.
So, we prioritize each individuals’ mental, physical, and spiritual health – whatever any of that means for each individual. We will do our best to plan projects and have an environment that supports this priority.
2. Family & Friends
Relationships play a big part of happiness and healthiness.
A study from Harvard found that healthy relationships result in healthier people.
3. Work
If we’re healthy and our relationships are healthy, then it’s easier to focus on work when we’re at work.
I used to put work before relationships. Years ago, I would work long hours. In my mind, I was doing it for my family. But since having my first kid, I focused on working smarter vs working longer. When working such long hours, it’s too easy to fill those long hours with work (Parkinson’s Law – work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion). To help focus, I like to assign start and finish times to tasks, so it’s easier to get them done more efficiently.
4. Community
And, last is community – only because if we want to participate long-term, we need to be healthier.
If we’re healthy, our relationships are healthy, and our workplace is healthy with a good balance – this allows us a few things:
• We’ll be around longer to make a bigger impact.
• We’ll have more time outside of work to volunteer in the community.
• For those with kids, we’ll have more balance to focus on raising our kids to be good stewards of the community.
This is our framework of how we prioritize at SecretPenguin.
We’ll never be perfect, but we’ll do our best to be healthy – and to me, that feels perfect.
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