Are You Here To Be A Successful Author? 133down the beach, and the experience of joy stops, then obviously you’re
being called to do something else in that moment like maybe go back
home and read or write, talk to your friends or pet your cat.
The idea is that normally we can trust that if we’re on track we’ll
be feeling excitement, enthusiasm and joy. There’s an opening or an
expansion that occurs. If we’re feeling a contraction or feeling less than
joy, then basically we’re off course.
For me when I look back on the times when I was teaching, when
I was coaching, when I was speaking, when I was creating products that
had to do with expanding human potential and growth, I was really happy.
When I’m doing other things, I’m not. So I can then say my purpose is to
engage in teaching and coaching and training.
Let me give you an example. In my book, The Success
Principles™, I write about a young woman named Julie Laipply, who
was selected as Miss Virginia in the Miss America competition. When
she was at Ohio State University, she was studying biology because as a
kid she loved animals. Everyone would say, “Oh, you love animals so
much you should be vet.” However, while she was studying microbiology
in England on a Rotary Fellowship, she realized she was miserable. So
she asked herself, When was I happy? She was looking for some clues,
and then she remembered. Whenever I was in a leadership role, when I
was a student leader, when I went to the state leadership conventions for
high school, and when I was at OSU and was chaperoning kids who had
come to the campus as part of their leadership retreats—that’s when I
was really happy. She realized that she experienced the most joy out
of leadership. So, she went back to OSU and said she wanted to create a
new major that didn’t yet exist. It would be a major in leadership by
combining classes in psychology, journalism, media, and speech. Well,
they let her do it, and it took an extra year for her to graduate. But by the
time she was 26, she was working at the Pentagon and coaching high-
ranking military officers in leadership. She had found her life purpose—
what the Buddhists call your “right livelihood” and the Hawaiians call
your “kuliana”—, which was teaching leadership.
In my own life, when I look back to where I experienced the
most joy, it was when I was learning about developing human potential
and when I was conducting seminars and trainings, speaking about, and
writing about what I had learned.
The other thing that people can do to discover their life purpose
is to do the exercise I mentioned above, in which you write down the
two words or qualities that you most enjoy expressing, the two ways that