Loyalty to your mission?

Seth Godin's book, Linchpin, continues to offer so many valuable insights into my work. One of the great things about this book is that it has put words to so much of what I experience and haven't been able to fully describe.

For much of my career, I have grappled with a great deal of fear: fear of rejection, fear of failure. This has its roots in my academic career and a screwed up understanding of self-value. I get that and am working on overcoming it.

However, something that I did not pick up on is a sense of loyalty. More specifically, where are my loyalties? Are there conflicting loyalties? Godin writes, "The self-hating artist burns out. The hypercritical lizard brain will pick apart anything we do in order to preserve a sense of short-term safety. The alternative is to develop a sense of loyalty to your mission and generosity to your work."

I'm reading this and thinking, "What the heck?"

Loyalty to your mission?

Really?

It is okay to be loyal to your mission.

It is okay that perhaps loyalty to mission might trump loyalty to a company, a brand, or some kind of corporate identity.

This developing sense of loyalty to my mission is beginning to develop into a new sense of what my work is about.