Review of Purpose
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Alaina McNeal
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- Latest Review: Purpose by Gina Bianchini
Review of Purpose
[Following is a volunteer review of "Purpose" by Gina Bianchini.]
Gina Bianchini is the CEO & Founder of the Mighty Network, and her book, Purpose: Design A Community & Change Your Life, takes what she's learned through her journey and puts in on the page for others to benefit from. It's a perfect pairing, since Bianchini conveys many times throughout the book how important it is to her to set others up for creative success through community. Bianchini also makes sure to remind us that purpose isn't something that's set in stone - it's a changing, adjusting thing, just as we are, and deserves to be reflected on regularly.
The book is made up of three parts, which helps break down the key topics of the book. The first part, "Find Your Purpose," addresses all the ins and outs of discovering your purpose in life and how to continue to assess it over time. Bianchini walks us through her life and how it led to finding her purpose through grief and community in her personal life, the communities she's been a part of, and the highs and lows of her career. Practices, inventories, and rituals are outlined so that the reader can follow in Bianchini's footsteps to find their own personal purpose. Then, this purpose is connected to the reader's life, relationships, and community in order to make it more rich and meaningful.
For me, this might have been the most difficult-to-read section and made the book a bit slow. It read more like a summary of Bianchini's life for most of it and, at times, a bit like a parent lecturing at their child about purpose and social media. It felt unrelatable as a 30-something who hasn't yet figured it out and felt like someone with many more years of experience and much more success was telling me how I could just "find my purpose!" while promoting their successful endeavor, The Mighty Network. It also never really cleared up how social media, which was almost always framed negatively, was different than these digital communities in a way that felt important or memorable.
In the second section, "Build a Community", Bianchini begins to expand on how to find your community, how to build space for people to connect, and how to have important conversations with them. This is where the book really starts to shine, feeling more like the step-by-step guide it was marketed as (rather than the indulgent memoir framed as self-help the first part felt like). The information provided was actually helpful, like debunking what reservations people might have in hosting a community and what kind of questions to ask yourself as you create your community. The skills in question asking that a great host need are also laid out in this section, including my favorite subheading of "THE ENDLESS QUESTION GENERATOR." Bianchini even includes a list of her favorite questions for readers to "steal" and use on their own.
It wasn't until this section that the book felt alive and meaningful. I had clear, solid examples of what I could be doing to build a community. It wasn't the journaling and abstract ideas of the first section, of just endless notes about my purpose and figuring out what I wanted, but ways to make things into a reality. If more of this could be brought into the first part of the book, this would be a stellar book from beginning to end. With the book's formatting, the soul of the book is buried under the pages of the first section, but it's definitely worth the slog to get there.
The final section, "Take Your Purpose Digital", shows a lot of what the rest of the book was talking about in solid examples. Bianchini uses real-life examples, such as the yoga network from YouTuber Adriene Mishler transferring their community from Facebook to the Mighty Network and how much it benefited them. This was the kind of thing I wish we saw since part one. Maybe it was there and I missed it because of the lack of connection I felt to part one.
If part two of the book was the soul, this is definitely the heart of the book. There's so much life and practical applications in this section of how to find your ideal community member, what patterns to expect from your community before growth happens, and pages and pages of examples of other communities, how they worked out, the goals they have, and things like monthly themes or weekly schedules. For the first time in this book, Bianchini also includes some visuals. I was thrilled to see a few graphics outlining community agreements and designing your plan. It made me realize how much I missed them in the rest of the book.
As a whole, I really loved this book, which is why I would rate it 4/4 or 4/5. It's well-written, has a lot of valuable information I wouldn't want other creatives and community builders to miss out on, and I feel more empowered and informed after reading it. But, the first part of the book was a challenge for me to get through and almost made me miss out on all the rich information hidden behind parts two and three. This is the main reason that it was knocked down from a 5/5 to a 4/5, but I could it wasn't enough to rate it a 3/4 because it was an excellent book overall.
Seeing graphics included in the final part, even if they were brief, made me realize how much the rest of the book could benefit from a graphic here or there. Give me a Venn Diagram or a flow chart or a word web to further accentuate your ideas. Another of the more major criticisms I have is I still don't quite get the differentiation between digital communities and social media, at least through the author's lens. More elaboration on that could have made the "social media bad" messaging Bianchini sometimes conveyed more impactful, rather than it sometimes coming across as a tactic to promote her own paid digital platform, the Mighty Network.
Overall, a great read. I would recommend it to anyone looking to build communities or connect their life more fully with their passions. Those who have enjoyed books from Austin Kleon such as Steal Like An Artist or listen to the Creative Pep Talk will thoroughly enjoy this book.
******
Purpose
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Gina Bianchini is the CEO & Founder of the Mighty Network, and her book, Purpose: Design A Community & Change Your Life, takes what she's learned through her journey and puts in on the page for others to benefit from. It's a perfect pairing, since Bianchini conveys many times throughout the book how important it is to her to set others up for creative success through community. Bianchini also makes sure to remind us that purpose isn't something that's set in stone - it's a changing, adjusting thing, just as we are, and deserves to be reflected on regularly.
The book is made up of three parts, which helps break down the key topics of the book. The first part, "Find Your Purpose," addresses all the ins and outs of discovering your purpose in life and how to continue to assess it over time. Bianchini walks us through her life and how it led to finding her purpose through grief and community in her personal life, the communities she's been a part of, and the highs and lows of her career. Practices, inventories, and rituals are outlined so that the reader can follow in Bianchini's footsteps to find their own personal purpose. Then, this purpose is connected to the reader's life, relationships, and community in order to make it more rich and meaningful.
For me, this might have been the most difficult-to-read section and made the book a bit slow. It read more like a summary of Bianchini's life for most of it and, at times, a bit like a parent lecturing at their child about purpose and social media. It felt unrelatable as a 30-something who hasn't yet figured it out and felt like someone with many more years of experience and much more success was telling me how I could just "find my purpose!" while promoting their successful endeavor, The Mighty Network. It also never really cleared up how social media, which was almost always framed negatively, was different than these digital communities in a way that felt important or memorable.
In the second section, "Build a Community", Bianchini begins to expand on how to find your community, how to build space for people to connect, and how to have important conversations with them. This is where the book really starts to shine, feeling more like the step-by-step guide it was marketed as (rather than the indulgent memoir framed as self-help the first part felt like). The information provided was actually helpful, like debunking what reservations people might have in hosting a community and what kind of questions to ask yourself as you create your community. The skills in question asking that a great host need are also laid out in this section, including my favorite subheading of "THE ENDLESS QUESTION GENERATOR." Bianchini even includes a list of her favorite questions for readers to "steal" and use on their own.
It wasn't until this section that the book felt alive and meaningful. I had clear, solid examples of what I could be doing to build a community. It wasn't the journaling and abstract ideas of the first section, of just endless notes about my purpose and figuring out what I wanted, but ways to make things into a reality. If more of this could be brought into the first part of the book, this would be a stellar book from beginning to end. With the book's formatting, the soul of the book is buried under the pages of the first section, but it's definitely worth the slog to get there.
The final section, "Take Your Purpose Digital", shows a lot of what the rest of the book was talking about in solid examples. Bianchini uses real-life examples, such as the yoga network from YouTuber Adriene Mishler transferring their community from Facebook to the Mighty Network and how much it benefited them. This was the kind of thing I wish we saw since part one. Maybe it was there and I missed it because of the lack of connection I felt to part one.
If part two of the book was the soul, this is definitely the heart of the book. There's so much life and practical applications in this section of how to find your ideal community member, what patterns to expect from your community before growth happens, and pages and pages of examples of other communities, how they worked out, the goals they have, and things like monthly themes or weekly schedules. For the first time in this book, Bianchini also includes some visuals. I was thrilled to see a few graphics outlining community agreements and designing your plan. It made me realize how much I missed them in the rest of the book.
As a whole, I really loved this book, which is why I would rate it 4/4 or 4/5. It's well-written, has a lot of valuable information I wouldn't want other creatives and community builders to miss out on, and I feel more empowered and informed after reading it. But, the first part of the book was a challenge for me to get through and almost made me miss out on all the rich information hidden behind parts two and three. This is the main reason that it was knocked down from a 5/5 to a 4/5, but I could it wasn't enough to rate it a 3/4 because it was an excellent book overall.
Seeing graphics included in the final part, even if they were brief, made me realize how much the rest of the book could benefit from a graphic here or there. Give me a Venn Diagram or a flow chart or a word web to further accentuate your ideas. Another of the more major criticisms I have is I still don't quite get the differentiation between digital communities and social media, at least through the author's lens. More elaboration on that could have made the "social media bad" messaging Bianchini sometimes conveyed more impactful, rather than it sometimes coming across as a tactic to promote her own paid digital platform, the Mighty Network.
Overall, a great read. I would recommend it to anyone looking to build communities or connect their life more fully with their passions. Those who have enjoyed books from Austin Kleon such as Steal Like An Artist or listen to the Creative Pep Talk will thoroughly enjoy this book.
******
Purpose
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Latest Review: Purpose by Gina Bianchini
