Creating Personal Meaning
Purpose-Centered Life
Dr. Eric Maisel
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Episode 4 - Creating Personal Meaning

When our younger daughter came home from college one year she gave me a coffee mug as a present. The motto on the coffee mug read: "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." "Isn't that your philosophy in a nutshell?" she laughed. She was exactly right. "Anonymous" had captured the essence of thousands of years of existential thought: that life is as much a responsibility as a gift and that each of us is honor-bound to create ourselves in our own best image. I make my meaning—or else I don't. All that exists until I actively and mindfully make personal meaning is the possibility of meaning and, while I wait to get started, the experience of emptiness. There is the possibility that I will experience the next hour as meaningful, a possibility that turns into a reality only if I make a certain kind of decision and a certain kind of investment. If I don't make that decision and that investment, I experience myself as going through the motions and wasting my precious time. We've all had that experience—for many of us, far too much of the time. Enjoy this week's show on the subject of creating personal meaning. Good listening!