Eric Maisel stands, depending on your experience of him, as just another How-to-Create self-help guru or as a deep-thinking treasure. I am definitely in the second camp and over decades have read and benefitted from most of his many books. Lately his interests have slid sideways from mine and I have paid little attention, until this sparkling recent release: Choose Your Life Purposes: A Step by Step Guide to Self Awareness, Empowerment, and Success. In one sense there is little new here: his central existential notion, that one makes (rather than discovers) one’s meaning in life, is here presented in much the same form as it was in Deep Writing, the book that set me off on a writing path. But what looms large in Choose Your Life Purposes is Maisel’s intoxicating style and spirit. I had grown stale with my own foundations. Now, with the help of this life-refreshing tonic, I’m recasting my entire approach to work, life, grief, and the universe. I am recharging at a fundamental level. So … this “review” is scarcely a review in the normal sense. If you are skeptical of the book’s title and the broad-brush description I sketch above, nothing I tell you will entice you toward Choose Your Life Purposes. But if you’re in the market for a brilliantly expressed guide to replenishing the underlying wellspring of your life, look no further.
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