A purpose statement is a conclusion

The single most common mistake with the Purpose Story is to confuse it with a purpose statement, the one flat line companies write to sum up why they exist. They are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole lesson. One quick note before we start, because it trips people up. You will hear the words purpose, mission and vision used in a hundred contradictory ways, and people argue endlessly about which is which. Ignore all of that here. The Story System does not build a Mission Story at all. It builds six stories, and two of them are these: the Purpose Story, the fight you are in now, in the present, and the Vision Story, the world you are building, in the future.

Here is the cleanest way to hold it. Your purpose is why you exist, the change you want in the world. Your mission is what you actually do, who you serve, and how, the daily work that pursues the purpose. And in this system, that mission, the concrete activity you could put a number against, lives inside the Purpose Story, in the part we will call the Action. So forget the labels. One story is the fight now. One is the future. That is the only distinction that matters.