Eric Maisel on Choosing Your Life Purposes
A Q&A and Review of our latest Book for Thriving Creatives
Dr. Eric Maisel doesn’t seem like a man who can get bored. “I’m just endlessly curious about human nature,” he says. “I find it easy to move from one project or area or idea to the next. I’ve been doing that for a long time.” And his new book, Choose Your Life Purposes, promotes all of us to embrace this same wellspring of curiosity.
This book leads us through bite-sized steps to find our own multiple life purposes and embrace them to become more self-aware and empowered. Dr. Maisel proposes that by choosing and embracing our life purposes, we can live fully even as meaning flows in and out of our existence. “It just seemed like a trap to believe that there was one purpose to life,” he says. “Once you get there, then it seems to be obvious that many things are important to us. And I'm just linguistically turning those many things important to us into the idea of multiple life purposes.”
Dr. Maisel masterfully guides us through this process of defining our life purposes with lists, points of contemplation, and imaginative ways to keep your selected life purposes at the forefront of your mind. One of the biggest differences between Maisel’s work and that of many authors who talk about “life purpose” is the rejection of the idea of doing “what you are meant to do” by a divine presence. Rather, he returns agency to us with the idea that we are the ones deciding, choosing our life purposes rather than finding them and making meaning rather that discovering it. This contemplation emphasizes self-awareness and empowerment to bring about a life filled with purpose aligned with our values.
As the song says, “Who could ask for anything more?”
Well, us, of course, because humans are greedy creatures. But from the very beginning of the process, I can feel how this system will help me create and support my own unique definition of a good life.
Dr. Maisel joined me to chat about the role of curiosity, what makes up his own daily practice, and how meaning is different from life purposes.
What do you feel is the role of curiosity in this process?
There's a collection of synonymous words that all connect: passion, curiosity, interest, probably intelligence and sensitivity. We're born with an appetite for knowing, and that's squashed in many people by what goes on in school, at the dinner table, at their religious functions and what have you. Every five year old is curious and creative in the sense that they can connect remote associates. That is, if you ask them to connect a salmon and a skyscraper, they'll draw you a salmon-shaped skyscraper, a skyscraper-shaped salmon, or they'll just have fun with it. The second they get into school and have to draw inside the lines, they need more information than that. They need to know what's the right answer to the salmon-shaped skyscraper.
We begin to lose our imagination over time. Curiosity is innate and natural, and gets lost and has to be reclaimed. That's one of the jobs of a creativity coach, to invite clients to be imaginative again and to break free of those lines that they were forced to draw within all through school.
Let's talk a minute about the benefits of discovering your multiple life purposes.
Well, we've got to connect it up with that other word that is so difficult for people to understand, and that's meaning. They get lumped together as a phrase, life purpose and meaning, but they're completely different things. From my point of view, life purposes are choices and meaning is a psychological experience. It's merely a certain kind of experience, nothing bigger than that. We don't like the experience of meaninglessness, but it's merely a psychological experience. It's not about some objective reality. You might attend a lecture and one person has a meaningful experience, another person is completely bored. It has nothing to do with the lecture. It has to do with the experience of it.
We need that second paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning, and the related idea that our life purposes are more important than our meaning-making activities. If we're doing what's important to us and we don't get the experience of meaning from it, that has to be okay. It's like doing something and hoping we'll feel joyful. Well, we may not. It may be that sending out 20 emails in support of a cause didn't make us feel joyful, but they were still the right thing to do. People are checking in on that meaning thing rather than focusing on just doing the work of their life purposes. Meaning comes and goes. There's no reason why life should feel meaningful all the time any more than it should feel joyful all the time. When people feel that life is meaningless, they don't know what that means or what to do. They don't understand how trivial it is that it's feeling meaningless. If they can turn away from that worry about why isn't life feeling meaningful to the realization that just living their life purposes is sufficient, that'll do the job.
That's a transformative shift, to go from feeling to doing.
The difference is, if you live your life purposes, that doesn't mean that life will feel purposeful. Attaching to a certain outcome harms people. If we understand what's important to do, we have to let go of craving a feeling from doing it. We're getting a result from doing it. If I've helped a child today and written 3000 words on my novel and worked in the garden, that's a perfect day, irrespective of how it all felt. That's the day of my choice. That's the day of my dream. And if I'm also not happy, too bad.
What is your daily life purposes practice?
I start working at about 5:30am and work until 1:30pm which is an eight hour day. I just do the next right thing, whatever that is.
I start out by working on whatever book I'm writing, because I think there are reasons to turn to our creative work first thing. It's not that that work is higher than other work, but if you turn to your creative work first thing, you get to make use of your sleep thinking, which is an unused resource. Most people don't understand that they can work on their book, painting or symphony while they're sleeping and then just take dictation if they turn to their work first thing. They don't make use of those hours of creative thinking that go on during the night during non-REM sleep.
How do you define being a thriving creative?
A thriving creative is someone who's bought into the idea of a body of work, who doesn't get too attached to the thing in front of her. It's easy to spend 19 years on your memoir, but that's really not spending 19 years on your memoir. That's spending 18 years not writing your memoir. Thriving to me, is productivity. Process comes before productivity, but it is about productivity. It's creating a body of work over time, some of which is ordinary, some of which is terrible, some of which is excellent, buying those notions of the differences among one's own work and how that is the reality, the truth of that having some successes.
Thriving does mean having some successes. Now we get to play with that word and self-define what success means. Success for a poet is not going to mean retirement income, so success is going to have to mean something else. Maybe it means three chapbooks published and you're in 17 journals. Maybe that's what success looks like, but it's good for us to get a vision for ourselves of what what we mean by success. Thriving is having some successes.
Thriving also means doing some excellent work. We can't have 100% excellent work. That's not a possibility. That's not the nature of the creative process, but we do want some excellent work, and I'm not sure we would feel that we are thriving as a creative if none of our work reached that high bar place of excellence. There's productivity, there's excellence, there's consistency, the idea of daily or regular practice. I'm big on daily practice, but if a person can't pull that off, then at least regular practice.
And then, you'd have to throw in financial reward, or the whole combination of what it means if your art isn't making you money, and what that does to you with regard to day jobs and second careers, and how many hours you then have to spend doing things you don't want to do. One face of thriving is that you get to actually work on your art sufficiently, that you have given yourself enough hours of the week to work on it. Because I wouldn't say you're thriving if you're doing a 60 hour a week day job, and you're getting to the studio only 30 minutes a week. Even if those are good 30 minutes, that's not going to feel like thriving. So there's the whole financial independence that goes into what thriving is. I think I'll put a period there.
A big THANK YOU to Dr. Maisel for taking the time to share his thoughts with us!
If you haven’t read it yet, pick up a copy of Choose Your Life Purposes: A Step-by-Step Guide to Self-Awareness, Empowerment and Success by visiting your local library or bookstore (or order online).
The next book in our Books for Thriving Creatives series is The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition by Jane Friedman.
While it is essential reading for anyone who wants to make a living as a professional writer, anyone who wishes to be published to market or publicize their business will find it helpful as well. Plus, the business tips will serve any creative entrepreneur. This tome is dense with information and long, so we’ll be taking a little extra time with it.
Pick up a copy at your local independent bookshop, online bookstore, or library and begin reading today!
*All book links are affiliate links at Bookshop.org. Make sure to select your favorite local bookstore to make it a win-Win-WIN for the author, indie bookstores and me.
I’m LA (as in tra-la-la) Bourgeois, a writer and KMCC-certified creativity coach dedicated to walking with you through any transition! Whether you’re looking to deepen your relationship with your art or patrons, explore a new possibility, or ignite the passion for creativity again, I’ve got your back. Click here to explore becoming a member of the Coaching Cohort or contact me at la@labourgeois.biz to ask questions and schedule an exploratory call.
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