This post is part of my Book Club Series where I share what I’m reading with you. I’m highlighting the “oh my god, you’ve got to read this!” books. These are the ones that I’ve been recommending to clients, friends, and anyone I’ve spoken to while reading the book. I have even been known to buy extra copies and given them to people. These books are great.
Transcript:
Hi, my name is Amber Rahim, and this post is part of my book club series on really great books that I highly recommend, they’re so useful and beneficial to you.
This month’s book review is on Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why.” I’ve chosen this because I’ve been working on my why most recently. Like many of us, we’ve done this kind of work, developing our purpose, figuring out what we’re about, what we want to create in the world, and what kind of impact we want to have.
I went back to this book recently because I found that my why had gotten fuzzy. I found it really difficult to make decisions about what I should do, which direction I should go. Whenever I go into that phase, I know that my purpose or my why what I’m about has become fuzzy again.
It’s a cycle, it happens to me, and so I do the work and go back to reconnect to what I am about. Why am I in the work I that I do? What is my career even about, what’s the good work I want to do in the world?
Going back to the why is really helpful.
What I’ve noticed in my clients and my new clients over the past few months is this their question about their career. Where do they want to go, what do they want to do next? They want to know their why.
They want to connect to what is this thing, if I’m going to put time and effort into something into making something work, why would I even bother, what’s the thing is going to be that’s worthwhile and meaningful for me.
The bottom line for me of what this book is about is, “Do the things that you care about.” That’s your why, the things that you care about.
The world right now is facing so many challenges and quite extreme disruption. Many of us are finding ourselves contemplating and reflecting on what are we about. What do we care about? What are we doing actually? Our world, there has been a big interruption, a disruption, we’ve had to stop the kind of habitual, don’t need to think about this anymore, mindless – not in a negative way, but we just don’t have to actively think about our routines, and our routines have been disrupted. We’re actually now stopping and thinking, what are we actually doing, why do I want to do it, how are we going to do it, what’s the best way – just to see if it makes sense.
So now is a great time to go back to that question.
But then why would I recommend this book?
There are two things in it. There are so many great examples with such clarity about what your why is. In laymans terms, it’s in real common day language, so it’s really easy to understand. Great examples of what other people have been doing to inspire us to think about, “Well, what is it that I care about?”
Two is that I love Simon Sinek. I find that he has a really great storytelling style that allows us to get really engaged with the topic and learn and absorb so much information without it being hard work. This is not a textbook. It’s a set of stories, and it’s a story that he’s telling that’s important to him, and it’s done in a way that he’s taken the complex ideas and made them really simple in the way he explains them.
That’s also why I recommend this book. It’s something that I personally prefer and like – it’s not going to be a hard read for you. We don’t need more hard things right now.
So just in the book in general of why you should read it – those are my two reasons – it’s going to inspire you and give you examples about the why, and it’s going to put all the concepts into simple language that’s really easy and makes it tangible, and you can access it and do something with it.
An extra thing, right now in this moment. The world is asking us to change. Things are happening. Big disruptive things are happening; big important things are happening. It’s like it’s asking us to get into action. But which action do we need to take? What direction do we need to go in? We don’t always know that straight away.
We know that we want to probably do something, and many of us are feeling this already, that I’ve got to do something, but we don’t know what. I think this is one of the first step things that you can do – get inspired about finding the thing that matters to you, so that when you have that urge of “I’ve got to do something” – you know where you want to go and you start this journey.
So those are my reasons for recommending this book. I’d love to hear how you find it, what you think of it, what you like, what you don’t like – what you wish was in there. We can geek out together about Simon Sinek and all the wonderful things that I think he does.
And get into action. I think that’s what we’re here for is to create the world that we want. And that starts with our why. Enjoy.