Not To Be Read Alone
A purpose workbook for every age and life stage.
Built in the room, with people just like you.
Nobody has built the room
We spend fortunes on the first quarter of our lives: schools, colleges, universities. Then, at about 23, it stops. For the next seventy years there is almost nowhere built to help us with the questions that matter most. Who am I now? What matters most to me? How do I show what I’m capable of?
Too frequently, we meet those questions alone, at the worst moments: the redundancy letter, the empty house, the diagnosis, the leaving party where nobody asks what’s next.
Loneliness, stalled careers and wasted later lives are not separate problems. They are one problem. Nobody has built the room. This book is that room, in a form you can carry.
Built in the room, across the life course
Most books about purpose are written by people who study it. This one was built by people living it.
For fifteen years I’ve designed, tested and run real places where adults come together to work out what’s next: design labs, public debates, online workshops and now The Common Room, with Westminster City Council and the London Borough of Brent. Hundreds of people have sat at our tables: graduates, carers, executives, retirees, people starting again. Every exercise in this book was tried there first, stretched, argued over, rewritten and tried again.
How to use the book
1. Choose your people. One person from your own life, or a few: a partner, a friend, a colleague, a neighbour. That’s your purpose team.
2. Meet weekly or monthly or whenever, in person. Each of you does an exercise, then you talk it through.
3. Share what you learn in The Common Community, free for every reader, where readers and their purpose teams share their progress and support each other.
Is it for you? Are you...?
the school-leaver seeking more than the traditional careers advice
the graduate with a good degree and no replies to forty applications
the young person who didn’t get the grades, but has the ambition and the fire
the high-flyer with the title, the salary and a diary full for six weeks, who hasn’t asked what it’s all for in years
the lawyer who made partner and found the view from the top less than promised
the founder working eighty-hour weeks who can’t remember why they started
the manager who wants to become a great leader, not just a good one
the executive who will retire in five years and has never planned anything but work
the forty-something facing a longer second half than they ever planned for
the parent holding up their children and their parents at once, with nobody holding them up
the person whose job is being reshaped by AI and doesn’t yet know what comes next
the person made redundant at 52 and told they are overqualified
the empty-nester in a quiet house, wondering who they are now
the person rebuilding after divorce or separation
the retiree three months in who misses being needed
the seventy-something tired of being told they’re done
the grandparent with a lifetime of wisdom and nobody asking for it
the person who has lost someone and is learning to live differently
the person who has moved to a new city and knows nobody
the person who lives alone, or feels alone in a full house
the HR director who knows the wellbeing programme isn’t reaching the people who need it
the pension provider who knows a financial plan isn’t a life plan
the employer who wants people to stay, grow and bring their whole selves to work
the person with a nagging feeling that there must be more than this
the person who thinks they’re fine. Perhaps you are. But when did you last stop and ask yourself what really matters most? Am I all that I could be?
About the author
Dr Jonathan Collie is the founder of Lifework Lab and creator of The Common Room, a place-based model now running with Westminster City Council and the London Borough of Brent. A medical doctor with an MBA, he won the Design Council’s Living Well with Dementia challenge in 2011, went on to co-found The Age of No Retirement and The Purpose Xchange, and has spent fifteen years working on how we live, work and connect across longer lives.
"My hope for this book is not a small one. A purpose team in every street. A Common Room in every town. A new civic layer for the hundred-year life. I can’t be in every room, and I can’t reach everyone in person. But a book can."