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iQuestions Faculty, Pat Gelsinger 
 
 
Question: 
 
Any key tools or guidelines to help manage balance in your life? 
 
Answer:  
 
As one considers the topic of balance in your life, the first question I 
challenge you with is, “What do you want to get accomplished? What 
do you want to do?” As I struggled with that question some years ago, 
I sat down and I developed my personal mission statement, a clear 
view of what it was that I wanted to do with that most precious 
resource that God gave me: time. 
 
We make plans for everything that we do. We make vacation plans. 
We make plans to buy a new car or maybe buy a house or remodel our 
house. Everything has a plan. But have you made a plan for your life? 
How do you want to use your time, your resources, your skills in your 
life? 
 
And that’s what a personal mission statement is about. For me, I 
broke mine into three pieces—sort of an epitaph. What, singularly, do I 
want people to say about me? What are my values? These are sort of 
the guardrails for my life, what I want people to know me for. And 
then, finally, some specific goals. These are the things I’m going to get 
accomplished. 
 
Based on those, now I can decide how much I want to put at work, 
what my objectives are there, how much I want to spend at home, 
how much I want to apply in my personal life. Every year, I come back 
and I grade myself: how am I doing against those goals? Do I need to 
 
 
adjust things about myself? Am I, in a disciplined way, accomplishing 
what I’ve said in my personal mission statement?  
 
The idea of a personal mission statement can be very powerful in your 
life. Have your spouse read it and ask, “Is that the person that I want 
you to become?” Yourself, struggle over it as you write it. Write it 
several times, rip it up, and do it again. Maybe your mentors and other 
people who know you well, have them read it, and give you input as 
well. 
 
But the most important thing is, live by it in a disciplined way. Come 
back, read it, grade yourself against it, and it truly can start to change 
the way that you live and change your life. 
 
 
 
Gelsinger -2- 
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