Customer Reviews

To Be of Use: The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work

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I kept reading Smith's "To Be of Use" hoping for some nugget of truth or new spin on an idea, but somehow the book didn't just come together for me. I find his writing style to be more of a grocery list of his personal accomplishments and readings, rather than a thoughtful analysis and synthesis of experience. We need more business leaders that share Smith's value-system, but this book just wasn't compelling for this reader.

Dave Smith is the true unsung hero of his remarkably inspiring book.For business people to walk-the-walk and maintain their professional and private life with true sustainable comittment is noble. Dave's book will inspire those who are on the path of considering healthy models of entrepenearship and also rekindle many who are searching for soulful innovation. This book ignites thinking for the long term...it is good, and kind, and genuine.

Perhaps the most powerful message I got from this book was that we humans are capable of great and noble acts. It is so easy to become cynical and depressed in the world today, with so-called leaders from all walks of life being exposed for wrongdoing. The author, a business leader for over 30 years, I'd guess, has certainly not been blind to the stark realities of the contemporary world. And yet, he has clearly found his own heroes, some from the distant past, some from more current life, who have helped him find a life path filled with meaning and purpose. For me he offers living proof that there are emotional, spiritual, and even material rewards in searching for truths beyond "just going along with the pack." This is a book I'll be recommending to all of my friends. Dave Smith is a fine writer with a message that nobody should miss.

Dave Smith's book on finding meaningful work reminds me to strive to lead a meaningful life based on my own values. The author's honesty and humility in telling his own story from preacher's son to assistant to Cesar Chavez to founding meaningful businesses kept me engaged throughout. I found his spiritual beliefs reassuring and inspiring. Anyone searching for meaningful work or a meaningful life should find this book most helpful.

Dave Smith is a man of vision who walks his talk. He's brought values and conscience to his business ventures, and has rubbed elbows with many others who've done the same. He's unassuming and down-to-earth as he shares not only his experiences but the meaning behind them, and the impact a host of fellow Creative Action Heroes have had on their small communities and the world at large. "To Be of Use" entertains with Dave's characteristic easy, familiar voice, and it inspires those of us who hope to put our visions into action, and be truly useful in our work and in all the choices we make each day.

This book is a joy to read because it is so well written, it pulls you in, and it is profound. I can't tell you how many copies I have sent to friends and family who are newly unemployed, underemployed, just feeling stuck. It is the perfect gift: thoughtful, challenging, and showing the reader how to provide meaning in their life and how to build community. Dave Smith provides a personal account of how he expanded his definition of community from a spiritually rich, narrowly defined evangelical Christian household to a radical 60s community organizer who never stopped growing. Along the way, he has made major contributions to social justice for farm workers, co-operatives, local food businesses, sustainable energy businesses, and especially to organic farming.

You will recognize the names of businesses the author has founded and managed; he is a very creative, successful entrepreneur. His critique of the dominant business culture is scathing but he also identifies the potential of businesses to transform the world and become part of the solution rather than the problem. Masterfully weaving the seven values (seeds) common to ancient traditions, he demonstrates their application in the modern world.

Read this book, and pass it on as a bridge to the future. Without bridges from what is to what can be, we will lose the unique opportunity we have been given to make positive, fundamental changes now. to be of use is strikingly relevant for our future and for the occupy movement. The slogan 99% is not only a protest against corporate takeover and corruption; it is also a call to create something better in its place.

The worldview expressed in this book is built on a foundation of ethics, decency, and humanism. Smith speaks to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" in outlining not only a culture of work but an overall sensibility that can transform our productivity and relationships. What the author does exceedingly well is to show how the transformative values of the Sixties have been manifested in the new world of business and work. The cynics, of course, write off that decade as an era of excess and hypocrisy. Smith demonstrates that those values are alive and well and growing in the very institutions that define our lives. Idealism can generate change, and it's time we acknowledge it.

Since the majority of middle-class American's spend most their waking lives at work, it makes sense to think about what work is, and what it means to you.

If your determined to find work you can put your heart into, then your hours will be full of meaning, and you will feel energetic and alive. If you settle for doing work you don't much care about, your hours will likely lack meaning, and you will harbor the sensation that life is missing something.

Henry David Thoreau is often quoted as that "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation..." Most men don't honestly contemplate what makes life worth living, makes it bearable, makes it joyful even, so they "...go to the grave with the song still in them".

The best years of the rest of your life will be spent working. There's a right way, and a wrong way to do it. With a groan, or with a song.