Authentic: How to Make a Living by Being Yourself [Paperback]

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

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.