“The Purpose of Life”

Without purpose as the compass to guide you, your goals and action plans may not ultimately fulfill you. You don’t want to get to the top of the ladder only to find out you had it leaning up against the wrong wall.



When Julie Laipply was a child, she was a very big fan of animals. As a result, all she ever heard growing up was “Julie, you should be a vet. You’re going to be a great vet. That’s what you should do.” So when she got to Ohio State University, she took biology, anatomy, and chemistry, and started studying to be a vet.



A Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship allowed her to spend her senior year studying abroad in Manchester, England. Away from the family and faculty pressures back home, she found herself one dreary day sitting at her desk, surrounded by biology books and staring out the window, when it suddenly hit her: You know what? I’m totally miserable. Why am I so miserable? What am I doing? I don’t want to be a vet!



Julie then asked herself, What is a job I would love so much that I’d do it for free but that I could actually get paid for? It’s not being a vet. That’s not the right job. Then she thought back over all the things she’d done in her life and what had made her the most happy.



And then it hit her—it was all of the youth leadership conferences that she had volunteered at, and the communications and leadership courses she had taken as elective courses back at Ohio State. How could I have been so ignorant? Here I am at my fourth year at school and just finally realizing I’m on the wrong path and not doing the right thing. But it’s been here in front of me the whole time. I just never took the time to acknowledge it until now.



Buoyed by her new insight, Julie spent the rest of her year in England taking courses in communications and media performance. When she returned to Ohio State, she was eventually able to convince the administration to let her create her own program in “leadership studies,” and while it took her 2 years longer to finally graduate, she went on to become a senior management consultant in leadership training and development for the Pentagon.



She also won the Miss Virginia USA 2002 contest, which allowed her to spend much of 2002 speaking to kids all across Virginia, and she has also created the Role Models and Mentors for Youth Foundation, which teaches kids how to be better role models for one another. She also founded a drug-prevention organization that promotes the message "Lead your own life with the skill and the will to say no". By the way, Julie was all by age 26 years old and an Award Winning National Speaker, Author and Positive Role Model— a testament to the power that clarity of purpose can create in your life.



Lessons to Learn from This Story:



You don’t have to go for a year abroad to get away from the daily pressures of your life long enough to create the space to discover what you are really here to do. All you need to make sure is not to live someone else’s dreams and stop settling for less than you want. If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.