Citation
Currant, N. (2002), "Passion and Purpose: How to Identify and Leverage the Powerful Patterns that Shape Your Work/Life", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 34 No. 7, pp. 290-291. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2002.34.7.290.2
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Passion and Purpose is more than just a book to be read in your spare time. To get the most out of it, you will need to set aside time to engage with the book and think about yourself.
The book is centred on a behaviour‐based personal assessment tool called the System of Identifying Motivated Abilities (SIMA). This is designed to find your natural strengths and interests based on your past behaviour. As such, the book serves two purposes. The first is to explain the ideas behind Motivated Abilities and Innate Motivation and the second to act as a workbook to allow you to do a SIMA assessment for yourself.
If you already love your job and don’t think that doing anything else could be better, or you are a manager with a happy productive team churning out fantastic results then you have absolutely no need for this book. However, if you are a knowledge worker considering a change of career or are not happy with your work, then this book may be of some help to you. The other group which may find this book useful are managers who are interested in getting the best from their employees by making sure the role the employees are performing matches their natural abilities.
The book is divided into three parts.
- (1)
The bulk of this part is the workbook. This contains all the exercises you need to build a picture of your own motivational pattern. These exercises are paper based and require you to highlight events in the past which you found enjoyable, successful or in some way significant. They take you right back to childhood in order to establish a pattern throughout your entire life. The book gives useful examples and individual case studies to help you complete the exercises. The first part also explains what motivational patterns are and gives an understanding of what the concept of innate motivations is and why it will help you.
- (2)
This section deals with how you take your motivational pattern forward and use it to find a new career or manage your current career more effectively. It involves finding out what work actually fits with your natural motivation and abilities. It also includes a section on recognising other people’s natural abilities and how to get the most from them.
- (3)
The final section is a summary of the book and focuses on how to move on from where the book has taken you, in order to achieve what you want out of life.
There is an accompanying Web site to the book, www.motivationalpatterns.com. However, its usefulness extends to directing you to e‐mailing the author or reaching into your wallet to draw out that credit card and buy additional material to help you find and use your motivational pattern.
As a standalone product, the first part of the book explains a powerful idea of why people succeed in their work. It also provides everything necessary to give you an idea of your own natural motivations based on the past. You may already think you know what these are, but what often comes out is that what you think you are good at is really what you feel you should be good at to be successful. Those childhood experiences can be very revealing.
The drawback, with the book alone, is then how to use what you have found out about yourself. This is where the $75 for some additional material or paying for the help of a SIMA expert comes in. The other potential drawback, is that you have to be naturally motivated to want to do this type of analysis of yourself for the book to be useful.
This is a great concept to help you in the future. However, to get the maximum benefit from this book, you’ll probably need to spend additional sums of money. Whilst the text is primarily intended for individual focus and reflection, the approach suggested does provide some useful insights which could potentially be reflected on and applied when designing self/career development or motivation training interventions.