Work is Love Made Visible: A Collection of Essays About the Power of Finding Your Purpose From the World’s Greatest Thought Leaders reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Work is Love Made Visible: A Collection of Essays About the Power of Finding Your Purpose From the World’s Greatest Thought Leaders, available here.

Channel happiness and find your purpose with stories from the world’s leading minds

Work is Love Made Visible offers the insights of some of the world’s greatest thought leaders as they tackle one of life’s most difficult treasure hunts: finding purpose. The word “purpose” is big. Very big. And heavy. It carries the weight of a lifetime of work and struggle; the weight of legacy, and the mass of days spent not doing something else. It’s something we all grapple with at some point—some of us find our purpose, others spend a lifetime searching. A lucky few grow to realize they’ve been working their purpose all along. Most of us aren’t quite that lucky; often, fulfilling your purpose requires some kind of change—career, lifestyle, habits, family—and what then? Are we selfish for the upheaval, or are we fulfilling destiny? Once we know our purpose, how do we pursue it?

This book asked those very questions of people who have followed their purpose and succeeded on a global scale. Their un-distilled answers are here, lending you the wisdom of their experiences, their examples, inspiration, and motivations as they:

• Tackle the universal struggle with individual purpose and meaning
• Illustrate how personal thought patterns contribute to real-world action
• Move challenges into the opportunities of their lives

• Reveal how they arrived at their life’s purpose, and what they sacrificed to get there

We all want a meaningful life. We want to work together for a brighter future, we want to celebrate our differences and commit to good. We want to inspire others, nurture their talents, and help them grow. We want to look back one day on a life well-lived, and leave something behind that matters to the world. Work is Love Made Visible shows you how some of us have succeeded, and offers you insight and guidance so that you can do the same.

There are some very smart people featured in this book, who have achieved great things, and who have useful, actionable insights for us to use. The three editors are all very accomplished people, who have embraced and managed effective change in organisations. There is a lot to like in this book, and some useful nuggets and helpful insights. Which it is why it is a little unfortunate that it trips itself up for us due to some repetition and less than optimal experiences for the reader. If we read the Peter Drucker quote about not being able to see the future, but being able to make insights based on what he saw outside his window, once, then we read it at least three times, at which point we stopped counting. An overall editor would have been helpful to ensure we were not served up the same anecdotes and pithy bon mots multiple times. Similarly while the contributing authors were all very knowledgable and wise, their introductory bios for each chapter often seemed longer than the insights themselves. Just as you began to get into someone’s particular wisdom the chapter was over. The pick and mix approach can be helpful and sometimes it can verge a little too much toward bland fortune cookie, Chicken Soup for the Soul insights.

We liked what this book was trying to do, and would have loved to have a bit more depth on the insights, and a little less of the intros which often ended up covering the same ground multiple times.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking