By: Andrea Rocchino
There is a version of this kind of book that gets published often. Successful people write polished chapters about how they overcame something and arrived somewhere better. The stories may be real. The lessons may be valid. And somehow, despite all of that, the book can sit on a shelf feeling familiar before you’ve even opened it.
M Teresa Lawrence knew that version existed. She built something different on purpose.
Wings of Purpose: How Vision and Intention Propel Success brings together 21 co-authors from across the globe, but the selection process was not centered on résumés, follower counts, or decorated professional histories. M Teresa Lawrence was looking for something harder to quantify and harder to fake. She was looking for people who had spent time with the question of purpose and had something real to say.
The Dinner Table, Not the Stage
M Teresa Lawrence describes the book she wanted to create with a single image. She wanted it to feel like a conversation at a dinner table where everyone has lived something, not a stage where everyone is performing something.
That distinction reflects the editorial philosophy of the book. And it shaped decisions she made from the moment she began curating contributors to the moment the manuscript was complete.
She knew she had the right voices assembled when she stopped reading as an editor and started reading as a human being. When something in a chapter hit close enough to home that she had to put the manuscript down. When she picked up the phone to call one of the authors just to say thank you for writing that.
Twenty-one voices, she says. One heartbeat.
Why Authenticity Was a Credential That Mattered
The selection process for contributors was deeply intuitive. M Teresa Lawrence describes being able to spot the difference between someone who has integrated their experience and someone who is still performing it. She wanted the former.
The question she asked herself when considering each potential contributor was simple and searching: does this person know who they are? Not perfectly. Not without doubt. But do they know? The ones who made it into this book, she says, all answered yes with their whole lives.
That standard excluded some impressive people. It included the people she believed were right for the project.
The Incomplete Journey as a Credential
One contributor, Benvictor Makau, initially hesitated to join the project because he felt he had not yet achieved enough to share his story. Teresa’s response to that hesitation is one of the book’s quieter ideas.
The reader is not waiting for your trophy, she told him. They are waiting for your truth. The person who needs this book may not be looking for someone who has everything figured out. They may be looking for someone who does not have it figured out and kept going anyway.
We live in a culture that often values arrival, she says. Wings of Purpose is a book about the flight.
Some of the more transformative chapters in the anthology are written by contributors who were not sure they were ready to write them. That uncertainty, M Teresa Lawrence argues, is not a disqualifier. It can be a credential.
Writing With the Reader, Not To Them
The editorial instruction M Teresa Lawrence gave every contributor captures the philosophy of the book in a single distinction. Do not write to your reader. Write with them.
There is a difference between a teacher who stands at the front of the room and a companion who sits beside you and says I have been where you are. M Teresa Lawrence wanted every chapter to feel like the latter. She asked contributors to lead with story rather than lesson, and to resist wrapping everything up neatly at the end.
Life does not come with tidy resolutions. Neither should the chapters in this book.
The reader’s transformation, she believes, can happen in the space between what the author admits and what the reader recognizes about themselves. She asked every contributor to protect that space. And in reading the responses from people who have encountered the book, it appears some readers felt they did.
Readers interested in a book that aims to offer grounded inspiration through personal stories can find Wings of Purpose: How Vision and Intention Propel Success on Amazon. Twenty-one people shared their experiences at once. The question is whether readers are ready to receive them.
