Authentic: How to Make a Living By Being Yourself: How to Make a Living by Being True to Yourself [Kindle Edition]

I have slightly mixed feelings about this book.

Certainly I agreed with virtually all the content. Neil gives an excellent summary of the state of society at the moment, and how a very competitive business model only ensures a constant succession of losers if there are to be winners. His proposal of being true to yourself, and honest about what you want to do (being authentic as he calls it), rather than the pigeon holes society wants to fit you into, is a valid way of having a less stressful and more fulfilling life.

While his recommendations for actions are no doubt good, they are rather vague. Kind of 'decide what you want to do, organise it, then do it'. He even ends up giving specific diet and fitness recommendations, in the middle of a book about how you should be changing the job you have and work you do each day.

In fact, the book is more about setting up an authentic company employing people and so on, than it is about being an authentic individual yourself. So his solution for 'making a living' is to set up your own company employing people and grow it to a large size.

Also, I found it slightly curious that 4 out of the 6 reference cases he gives for authentic companies are organic food companies. Was he lazy? Or is this a reflection that truly authentic companies can only occupy niches in the marketplace.

The biggest warning though is for the author himself. He is just peddling ideas here, nothing more substantial. He was in an internet consultancy company, and clearly decided he needed a major career change after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. So he reinvents himself as a new 'authentic' person, but still just doing consultancy work. His company doesn't actually do anything itself, it will just talk to you about how your company could change itself. So the leopard hasn't really changed his spots. His new company doesn't have any real products, it is just peddling ideas, and wants companies to pay money just to hear them. What he has really invented is a 'brand' that he can sell on to other companies and people.

And this company was set up with assistance from between 250 and 400 other people, which he freely admits within the book. He states that he prepared a full business plan, and had it reviewed by a number of business experts to validate it, and paid outside marketing companies to gather his initial target contact list. How many people are really going to go to these lengths, just to be 'authentic'? I for one want to step down the pace, and do simpler, more direct work. Not build up an empire with many people reporting to me, and a family of related companies.

While I really did like the book and the ideas it was putting forward, I found it quite short (only just over 100 pages), and kept finding myself being reminded that really this was written by someone who's only ability seemed to be to peddle ideas to other people and make them pay for it. All the author had done himself was move his consultancy work from one marketplace (the internet) to another (authentic business). But he was still doing the same type of consultancy work.

This book has 4 sections: 1) outline of the way our society currently functions, 2) taking control of our lives, 3) making a living by being yourself, 4) case studies of authentic businesses.

Section 1 describes how we have evolved from independent tribal social structures to the highly dependent structure we have today and how our educational systems are designed to make students conform rather than express individuality; as we are made to conform, our personality, individuality and self-confidence is driven out of us. Once we are sufficiently lacking in self- confidence we have to demean others to give ourselves a sense of importance.

This lack of self-confidence as children leads us to become adults willing to sell ourselves into a lifetime of indentured servitude often choosing to work a job we dislike in order to pay for a lifestyle we cannot afford - debts are the shackles of our slavery. To compensate for our suffering we become addicted to short term hits of happiness - there is a continuum that runs from Christ to cocaine for externalising responsibility for our own happiness to others, be they products or people.
Section 1 contains a chilling reminder one of the frequent factors in the fall of civilisations is that the people become distracted by decadence and are not able to resolve the terminal issues that face them. This section ends with the acknowledgement that we need to find a new way of doing things, a new way of making our lives and our businesses more authentic.

In section 2 our natural language is the term he uses to describe our unique talents and point is the term used for Life Purpose or Mission (please see the Conclusion). This section also contains advice on finding your natural language
and your point and feeding your mind and body. The topics of Avoiding distractions and Making your plan (I like the idea of sticking Post-It notes on a wall!) are particularly helpful.
The last part of this section is titled Coming out and being yourself, this is about putting it all together and presenting your authentic self to the world.

Being the Change is the title of section 3 and covers the topics of Getting started and Working for yourself. Bearing in mind the sub-title of the book, I found these topics to be a bit thin on advice and no reference was made to any further reading in this area, for someone just starting out on this journey this was not as helpful as it could have been. The advice that is given under the topic of Designing your organisation and Finding collaborators (for the big project) appears to be geared towards those people who aspire to having a medium size business, nothing wrong with that but for me this was a big leap from Coming out and being yourself only a few pages before! (maybe this is a limiting belief I should be working on!).

Those who are already doing it is the final section 4, two of these; Yeo Valley and innocent (with a small i) I really enjoyed.

Conclusion
This book is worth reading. It contains some useful information about making your Mission (or point!) your business. The inclusion of more information about getting started and a more complete reading list for those people with less business experience would be helpful. Also my impression is the non use of terms such as Lifes Purpose and Mission may be an attempt to make the book more appealing to those for whom the inclusion of a spiritual element in the book may be off-putting.

The author has a new book, soon to be released called; Authentic
Business: How to create and run your perfect business. This new book may well fill in the gaps in the reviewed book.

As background reading for a Mission Coach or for someone who is having Mission Coaching this book is helpful.

Paul Beeston - Mission Coach

I wanted to like this book and I agree with Croft's basic premise, that it is important to identify a career that nourishes the self, relationships and, more broadly, society. The book has some value as an inspirational reminder that we all are in control of our lives and can choose our own path, but many other books do it much better.

Croft's view of the world is very similar to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World -- a view I sympathise with: we are distracted and entertained into an apathetic short-term consumerism that keeps us from realising how wide our options are. Unfortunately Crofts describes the world in almost religious good-evil language and bases his whole argument on an extreme version of liberal humanism. According to this book, every person has an essential truth inside and just has to build a career around it. As children we apparently have it crushed out of us so all you have to do is figure out what has been suppressed in you.

If you are not already sure what your own "one true purpose" is, Authentic is unlikely to help you, except to recommend that you spend some time meditating. The case studies of "authentic" businesses are interesting, but overall the book is extremely flimsy. There is nothing different here from any of the other self-help career books or occupational therapy guides.

The whole book takes less than an hour to read, so if you want to spend a very expensive hour, pick it up. Otherwise, take a look at the many similar books available and compare before you buy.