Book Review| This Thing Called Purpose

Purpose is why you do something or why something exists. It is a person’s sense of resolve or determination. Everyone talks about it, many people seek it and few people find it. There are many books about why finding it is necessary to have a meaningful life and I’ve read a fair share of them.

I had been following Adaora on Instagram for a couple of months last year before I watched her perform her song, Light Of The World at Bogobri in September, which made me fall in love with her more. I’m also subscribed to her newsletter and I cherish her words so much when I receive them. She writes meaningful captions/messages that linger in your mind long after you have read them. So I wasn’t surprised when she announced that she was writing a book. It was about time!!!!

Do you ever feel like you shouldn’t do what you want to do because you don’t know how people will react? Do you ever feel like you’re incapable of doing some things because you aren’t very knowledgeable in that field, even though you want to? Do you ever talk down on yourself or feel like you are not enough? Do you ever feel like there’s nothing special about you and you have no gift(s)? Do you ever struggle with all your gifts thinking that you can’t pursue all your heart desires because one person cannot do them all? Then This Thing Called Purpose is for you.

Like she said “most books motivate you to fly and be successful, but they don’t tell you that in order to achieve all of that greatness, you have to first strip the layers you are carrying. This book is designed to help you unlearn some of the things you have allowed into your heart and mind, strip yourself fully of the junk then move confidently in your purpose.” From the title, you automatically believe it’s another book about finding your purpose, no. It’s about accepting and living your purpose which does not have to be equated to something new which is the mistake most people make.

Adaora uses her book to tell us not to disregard the gift we have been given by God to help people around us. And she does this by making references to her own life experiences, stories from the bible and also life experiences of other people, some of whom we all know.  She touches different topics such as embracing your uniqueness, abandoning comparison, letting go of perfectionism, unlearning, how to react to negative feedback, amongst others.

It’s not a long read and when I was done, I went back to the first page and started reading again. There’s a lot of powerful information in this book of only 160 pages. It’s the kind of book that makes you happy while reading it because you will be able to relate to most of it. It motivates, it inspires, it hits the right spots. There’s a whole chapter that you are supposed to fill the words in yourself. It’s about being the light of the world. It’s to remind yourself that you are light and you have the capacity to do anything you have ever thought of. Isn’t that so cool?

There were some words/quotes I hung on to after reading and I will share a few of them here;

“Focus on what you can do instead of what you can’t do.”

“All the dreams in the world mean nothing if you don’t have the energy to pursue them.”

“Your goals should be things you want to achieve, not things you need in order to feel complete”

“Do more than is expected. Be the type of person that sorts out other people’s problems whether anyone is watching or not.”

“Self-talk is crucial to capacity building because it starts with your mind first. If your mind doesn’t believe the possibilities, then you cannot move forward.”

“Life is improvisation, one minute it’s a comedy, the next minute it’s a drama, the next minute it’s a tragedy. Regardless of what comes, you have to be ready to deal with it.”

“You have to take what the world has given you and figure out how to make it work. You may have no money, no resources, no experience but you should choose to start anyway.”

The only thing I didn’t like about the book is that there’s a lot of information about different topics and you can easily forget about one when reading about something else. I feel like she could have written different books about some of the topics in this one book and stretched the chapters a lot more.

Thanks, Adaora for sharing your thoughts with the world.

Have you ever read a book that made you love yourself more? that’s what This Thing Called Purpose did for me.

Stay inspired!

Mariam Shittu