The 25 Word Exercise

The 25 word exercise is not about acclaim or fame unless that is what drives you – it is about becoming what we want for ourselves. Success has meaning on a personal scale, not as defined by the newspaper or the television good-news stories. Success on a personal scale is about being pleased with what we are and what we are doing. Others don't have to see this as success at all, what they see doesn't matter. What matters is what I desire to do with my life.

If you choose to allow others to define success for you then you will be limited to their objectives. It is more important, I believe, to choose for ourselves. Having a strong sense of what is important – and learning to let go all that is not – enables us to make choices which we do not wish to revise tomorrow.

When I started my first full-time employment as a professional engineer I was placed under the individual tutelage of an older man who resented my presence (for reasons unrelated to me). In no time he made my life totally miserable and made me certain that engineering was not a career for me – indeed he made me wish I had never been born.

I was lucky to have other counsellors. One of those – Bob Eastick – challenged me to write in 25 words what I wanted to do with my life. Exactly 25 words – not one more nor less. It is an excellent exercise and vastly more difficult than it appears if one is to be satisfied with the result. Bob focussed me on myself. He understood that I could not find my way in the world until I knew who I was. I have made many important decisions since, and never once have I doubted why I was making one.

It is routinely the case that we use clichés and other phrases to say what we think about ourselves and our objectives. One of the things I learned at this time is that we must be able to say the same ideas in other words if we are to be confident that we understand what we mean when we use those phrases – and that it is most often the case that we are unable to – precisely because we have not thought carefully about what those phrases mean.

The 25 word exercise forces us to focus hard on the meaning of every word in the sentence, to understand those 25 words entirely, and thus to better understand ourselves. I was fortunate also that my mentor was willing to maintain a continued correspondence with me and over the following weeks to challenge me on every one of the 25 words I wrote.

To think that you will do it privately by yourself is to kid yourself. It is necessary to have a respondent to examine your 25 words rigorously and to expose the presumptions for you. In order to understand yourself it is necessary to expose yourself.

Don't imagine that this is easy.

Peter Hoban

I am willing to correspond with anyone who asks:
e-mail:

Original: December ‘99
This page is part of “Living in the Light”
found at: http://www.geocities.com/phoban2000/

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