Review of Purpose

[Jennifer Overhulse]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Purpose" by Gina Bianchini.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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Gina Bianchini’s new book, Purpose, takes the road less traveled in getting to the point. Bianchini’s education, career achievements, overall experience, and network should have given her enough street cred to skip much of the first half of the book, but perhaps she suffers from imposter syndrome just as much as the rest of us.

Purpose purports that the development of community is critical to the identification of one’s purpose, i.e., until an individual finds his or her “tribe” there is little hope of knowing what or why or how. Given the examples from Bianchini’s background that discuss her experience developing communities, which ultimately led to her identifying her own, personal purpose, one could hardly argue the importance of this approach. While the name dropping is prevalent, the examples illustrate valid ways that Bianchini has found of creating, building, engaging, and maintaining communities, such as Ning.com and Mighty Networks.

It is worth mentioning that this book highlights a single path, Bianchini’s, to identifying one’s purpose. It seems naïve to believe that because it worked for Bianchini that it will work for everyone. Purpose could ultimately have been more effective, in my opinion, by putting forth more than one method of purpose identification and relying less on Bianchini’s personal experience. However, full marks are due to Bianchini for not falling back on the old tropes which would have readers explore vision quests, yoga retreats to tropical locations, and tutelage by Jedi masters.

Notably, the book falls victim to less than stellar editing with critical words left out of many sentences and even editor’s notes still included within the text. I also found the section headings too numerous and slightly distracting. I don’t believe the reliance on section headings was necessary given the chapter structure of the book.

I gave the book three out of five possible stars because Bianchini’s experience does define a valid approach to how an individual might go about identifying their purpose, but it failed in being objective enough to recognize that there are other ways to get to purpose identification and discussing those paths as equally important. I was disappointed that the focus of the book fell largely on community building itself instead of community building as a means to an end (purpose identification).

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Purpose
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