Find the Fire: Ignite Your Inspiration—And Make Work Exciting Again

by Scott Mautz

Is the thrill gone? What to do when your mojo’s missing at work . . .

For many employees, feeling burned out and uninspired is nothing new. But going through the motions impairs more than just work performance — it affects your well-being. Wouldn’t it be better to feel as engaged and energized as you were on day one?

Fortunately, everyone has the ability to rekindle inspiration. The key is to quit waiting for it to happen and take control of the process yourself. Whether you’re wrestling with fear, disconnectedness, boredom, lack of creative outlets, overwhelm, or other issues, Find the Fire helps shake off the malaise and dial up the motivation.

Packed with insights, exercises, inspiring stories, checklists, and more, this potent self-help guide identifies nine forces that drain inspiration and delivers tips and advice for turning things around, including how to:

Start learning and growing again ● Reconnect with coworkers and your boss ● Stop procrastinating ● Empower yourself ● Stay in control during tough times ● Overcome fear and embrace risk ● Produce work you’re proud of ● Boost your self-confidence and personal presence ● Leave your mark ● And more

Instead of asking what inspires you, the deeper question is, how did you lose inspiration in the first place? Learn to find it again — and fuel greater fulfillment and success.

Genres: Business, Professional Development, Leadership

240 pages, Hardcover

Published October 12, 2017

About the author

● Scott Mautz is a popular business-inspirational keynote speaker who talks and trains internationally on leadership/self-
leadership, world-class teams, employee engagement, thriving in change, peak performance, and creating meaning at work
● He's a former Procter & Gamble senior executive who successfully ran four of the company's largest multi-billion dollar
businesses all while transforming organizational health scores along the way
● He's a multi award-winning author who's books include: Leading from the Middle, Find the Fire, and Make It Matter
● Scott is Faculty at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business for Executive Education, where he teaches others-oriented
leadership and the secret to sustaining motivation
● He's been named a "CEO Thought-leader" by The Chief Executives Guild and a "Top 50 Leadership Innovator" by Inc.com,
where he was a top columnist with well over 1 million monthly readers
● Scott's the CEO of Profound Performance™, a keynote, training, and coaching company that helps you ignite profound
performance
● He's a frequent guest across national media

Scott lives in San Diego, CA with his wife and daughter (who is growing up too fast)

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Review of:

Find the Fire:
Ignite Your Inspiration and Make Work Exciting Again

By Scott Mautz

A Remarkable Guide

I found Find the Fire: Ignite Your Inspiration and Make Work Exciting Again to be a remarkable book. It's full of ideas, inspiration, and strategies to rekindle passion and spark creativity that will make work a joy again.
While extremely useful for becoming and staying inspired in one's job and career, Find the Fire will be an encouraging guide for renewing inspiration, passion and creativity in any endeavor. Scott discusses the feelings, beliefs, and ways of thinking that discourage, defeat, and block the processes essential to growth, productivity, and enthusiasm. Scott then examines these disruptors on the positive side, providing solutions and ideas to move beyond just surviving to thriving.
I very highly recommend Find the Fire: Ignite Your Inspiration and Make Work Exciting Again. Anyone needing to reignite inspiration, passion, and creativity will find a wealth of information and hope within the pages of Find the Fire.

*Disclaimer: I am thankful to have been able to read and review Find the Fire: Ignite Your Inspiration and Make Work Exciting Again. I received a copy from Weaving Influence in exchange for my honest review. The opinion stated is my own. I have not been compensated in any way.*

[Dan Mingo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good concepts in here. How to get the drive you need.

[Leslie Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why, why, why do editors let writers get away with the stupid parenthetical joke in EVERY. SINGLE. SENTENCE???? I had a hard time actually reading the dang book because I had to skip over so many cringe-worthy parentheticals. Seriously... just stop it. You aren't charming or more "readable" with all these stupid insertions.

Okay, now that I've had a little rant, the book is actually interesting. He starts with an idea of the "anti-muses" that sap our energy and motivation and then offers useful strategies for combating them. When I could get over the silly writing, I kept thinking this would be one of those books that would be good to have on the shelf to read a chapter every now and then as appropriate.

[Tiffany Kummer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book should be an easy 5 stars. The content of the book is amazing, and it’s the most frustrating book I’ve ever tried to read. The author’s style is terrible - as soon as you’re deep in an introspective space, taking in the hard truth or question he’s provided he’s hitting you with some nonsense punny humor in parentheses. Every time. Almost every paragraph. It’s so distracting I quit at page 80.
I think the parts not in parentheses are so great that I may legitimately try to skim the book, black out the parentheses and then try to re-read. It truly has that much potential to be GREAT.

[VICTOR SIERRA MENDOZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, in my point of view the anti muses are real and recognize them is the best contribution in this reading I mean in the day-to-day activities it is very easy to lost our true North and with this reminder one could do something focused to avoid lost the fire.
Maybe what is annoying are the inesperate jokes the autor make in the book, definitely I dont like it.

[Lisa Kosak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Years ago I was in a job where I dragged myself to work every day. I lacked challenge, and I was bored. I was not growing and felt like I had no control over my life. What did I do? You guessed it – I stayed where I was. I didn’t know what I wanted to do or what next steps to take. It took a buyout of my company to wake me up and get me to move out. My situation would have been a lot different if I had the book Find the Fire by Scott Mautz at my fingertips. Scott’s new book is the tool that most of us need by our side to be motivated again by our jobs and to find our lost mojo.

All of us at one time or another have lost the spark that gets us up and going to work every day. Remember when you first started your job? You were inspired, motivated, and excited to get out there and make a difference. You had new ideas and planned to have an impact. Then, something happened. Perhaps you feel like that now as you drive to work. What happened to the excitement? Passion? Confident attitude? Scott challenges us to ask “How did I lose my inspiration in the first place.” Better yet, he has some answers, strategies, and ideas to get us back on track to the days when our careers and lives were stimulating, challenging, and we had that fire underneath us.

Before discovering how to reignite your life you need to understand what doused your fire in the first place. You need to address what brings you down and win back control. Find The Fire introduces us to nine factors, called anti-muses, that steal our motivation and spark every single day. Here they are:

Fear: We need to learn how to overcome our fear of change, failure, and criticism

Settling and boredom: Learn how to find an open mindset, set new experiences, start learning and growing again, and make your own opportunities

Inundation: We are busy and inundated by too much every day from all angles. We need to control how things are coming at us and push progress forward. Start learning again, procrastinating, and learn how to ask for help

Loss of control: When we have control we have inspiration. Scott shows us how to take back our sense of power and how to emit it

Dwindling self-belief: When we are inspired we produce more, have self-esteem and are optimistic. You can increase your confidence and learn how to persevere

Disconnectedness: Feeling connected is what being human all is about. Learn how to reconnect with your peers, your career, and your boss to make change

Dearth of Creating: Inspiration requires creativity. If you lack creativity, then you can’t produce at your best or share it with the world. Learn how to find and unleash your creativity

Insignificance: Feeling insignificant is our most deep-seated human fear. This anti-muse tries to convince us that we can’t make a difference and that what we do is meaningless. Learn how to have an impact

Lack of Evocation: We need to search for an external stimulus to dial up our inspiration. Sometimes we find our best inspiration from “external sources.” Have a draining boss or coworkers? Scott shows us how to change the dynamics to bring back our fire.

Find The Fire is truly a book that we all need to keep at our side. Better yet, if you know someone who is struggling and their fire has become mere coals, light them up with this book. Once you recognize that the nine muses are not your friends and you see how they detract from your life, Scott puts your life back on track. This book has humor, stories, shares the journey of others and will build you up with tools and strategies. You can find your magic again and become the excited and inspired newbie that you once were when starting a new career or stage in your life. This book speaks to both your professional and personal life. Your power will restore, and you will gain better control of you.

Find The Fire offers actionable tools to use at every stage of your ignition. The last chapter spells out how to fight the nine anti-muses in detail. Concepts like “Give, Resist, Exude,” the “Arc of Perseverance,” and self-empowerment tactics may become your best friends. You CAN get your spark back. However, you need to be willing to work at it because the nine muses are lurking around us all every day trying to pacify and control us. Take back your power, build confidence, and light that fire underneath you for lifelong change.

[Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think a lot of this book was giving me advice I was already wrestling with, but better written. It helped me process a lot of what I've been thinking in terms of my current job, what I want out of work (in general), and how to get there. That might be treating my current job different or looking for a job I can feel inspired in. It helped me as this was something I was already processing on my own time, and I can see how some of the "Anti-Muses" affect me more than others (and some not at all).

[Alyssa Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Agree with many of the other comments on here regarding the throw away humor lines...kinda killed some of the stronger moments of the book and didn't add anything to the piece. That said, these are great pain points Mautz identifies and a good general resource on basics to help address them.

Would recommend attacking pieces of this book one at time, or focusing on a select few to apply. While reading the book during a time where my career was in a dark place, I found it overwhelming to read it cover to cover and hard to know exactly where to start.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit long winded at times. Summaries at the end of chapters would have helped with processing the information along with lists. For example: If there are 9 anti-muses having them in a list then going into deeper detail about each would have been better. In the format that it was written the anti-muses where spread across 6 pages and by the time I reached the last one I forgot the first one. Other then those points it was a great book with lots of interesting points.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable and often lighthearted view of how to find your passion at work again. in this dog-eat-dog world regaining one's passion or fire at work is key and Scott Mautz lays out a roadmap to do just that.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book on finding inspiration again at a job that you have come to dislike. Great perspectives and talk about what I can do to control and improve the situation. Great for just life in general as well. I highly recommend this book.

[Ed Schaefer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a 4 or 5 star book, but there is a lot of out of place parenthetical humor that I found really distracting and cheesy to the point that I'm taking an entire star off and nearly rated this a 3.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author tries a bit too hard to be funny. Having said that the content is still good and an interesting take on inspiration.

[Scott Woodard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scott Mautz says that asking ourselves the basic question of "what inspires us?" is the wrong question. As over 70% of us have "lost that loving feeling" a more insightful question is "how did I lose my inspiration?"

In "Find the Fire: Ignite Your Inspiration and Make Work Exciting Again" Mautz takes a strong look at the difference between inspiration--an idea that takes hold of us, and motivation--an idea that we take and run with. Mautz argues that while inspiration is elusive, we can create the conditions where it is likely to occur. He refers to this as the "art and science of inspiring."

Mautz goes on to list nine anti-muses that work to kill inspiration. Forces such as fear, settling and boredom, loss of control, dwindling self-belief and others. He then offers antidotes to overcome them with real-life examples of how folks have done so.

Scott Mautz offers a practical approach to overcome the anti-muses that kill our inspiration and to reframe how we can regain our inspiration to be more effective in our work.