Passion and Purpose: How to Identify and Leverage the Powerful Patterns That Shape Your Work/Life

Rating:
Summary: What Will You Be When You Grow Up?
Review: Are you having a hard time deciding what you want to be when you grow up? Are you 43 and still wondering? Or maybe you're 53 and considering your second career. For those of us who have ever had such thoughts, Marlys Hanson's "Passion and Purpose" is the solution.

In this excellent work you will learn about Motivated Abilities, and why you should work to your strengths more than always trying to improve your weaknesses. You will understand why you are particularly good at some activities, and perhaps a bit less so at others.

After you have read the book, help with understanding your Motivated Abilities is available from Marlys' company, Marlys Hanson and Associates. While the book teaches the method of doing this analysis oneself, the experience of Marlys and her team will help you learn even more about yourself for a modest additional cost.

I wish I had found Marlys sooner, but am thrilled that I found her at all.

Rating:
Summary: Very Useful Resource, Highly Recommended
Review: I read Arthur Miller's books and thought them to be excellent. His view of "giftedness" and design really made sense to me looking at my personal history.

As much as I enjoyed Miller's books, I needed something practical to accompany it. I found "Passion and Purpose" to be just that. It gave me a superb framework to map out the necessary data and analyse it. One result: understanding my motivation payoff, a major "ah-ha" for me, and something I doubt I would have come to on my own.

The section pertaining to analysis I found to be particularly helpful. It assisted me to be both throrough and quick. Several subseqent sections that help work through a "Best-Fit" scenario and team design I also found extremely useful.

I would say that "Passion and Purpose" is a wonderful companion to Miller's books and/or as a stand alone work on giftedness. It believe it will really help you to identify and maximize your natural design, motivations and abilities, and ultimatley lead to a more impactful and fulfilling work life.

Rating:
Summary: Perspective of a psychologist
Review: Unlike many books about passion and purpose, this book has direct and meaningful applications to the lives of the reader. The authors have taken a concept - that of understanding the underlying motivational patterns we each possess - and shown us how to identify and then leverage these patterns.

As a psychologist, I am constantly reminded that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Many times in life, this statement is regarded as a negative, that we all fall into patterns of behavior that are not productive or even destructive. The focus here, however, is quite the opposite: by paying attention to our successes in life - in the sense of what we have been good at and what we have found pleasurable - we can craft our lives to increase passion and purpose.

The Hansons make the book easy to use by targeting chapters to specific needs or interests. For example separate chapters are recommended for readers who are concerned about their job "fit" and managing career direction. Other chapters are recommended for team leaders, supervisors, managers and parents, all of whom aid in the recognition, nurture, and use of the talents of others. An especially interesting chapter provides guidance to readers beginning to think about retirement years, encouraging the reader to begin the management of retirement long before retirement age. This chapter is of special importance to us aging "baby boomers" who for so many years have focused our attention on careers and family.

The authors include a step by step process on how to go about identifying motivational patterns. By following these steps, the reader is provided with "answers" and a greater sense of direction. This makes "Passion and Purpose: How to Identify and Leverage the Powerful Patterns that Shape your Work/Life" a resource with the real potential to change lives.

Rating:
Summary: Best Resource...
Review: Well, if you're job-hunting or career-searching or mission-anguishing, this is the best resource to work with the Miller Motivated Abilities model. I've worked with Marlys in person twice, once as corporate-employed and once as self-employed. So you can tell I like the model which is a great balance to the Myers Briggs approach. How do you REALLY like to operate verus how do you THINK you're supposed to operate? Once you see that, things go "clunk" and you say OHHH! so THAT'S what happened with that job / that boss / that person / that project etc.

The book gives you the complete method and context, all that's missing is Marlys' personal read, but hey you'll have to email her for that. She has a web site but what I liked most about the book was I could work through the whole process sitting at Starbuck's.

There are several other books detailing Miller's model with him as contributing author. Marlys' treatment is the most complete, self-contained, and usable.