Today's Initiative for Tomorrow's Dreams...Because Today is Almost Over.

Initiative represents the passionate courage and the determined leadership to start and finish a plan of action when no one else will. I firmly believe ‘initiative’ is defined by how every individual has the capacity to make a positive impact, to make opportunities instead of waiting for the opportunities to arise. There can be various situations where initiative can be demonstrated: a person volunteering to do something first when no one else steps up to the plate, when a person takes ownership of their own life/work and doesn't wait to be told from someone else do to something. Initiative makes for a good Area of Focus because taking initiative is a skill and quality that can separate the leaders and the followers. Being able to take initiative represents a sense of confidence and bravery because initiative most often times connotes change. With change is evolution and growth. We have to make our own evolution.

A great example of initiative would be my very good friend's founding of the Her Campus chapter here at Ohio State. Her Campus is a collegiate blog catered for females, and when my friend realized that our campus didn't have one, she took it upon herself to start one. So she applied which consequently led to the founding chapter of Her Campus at OSU. I said her accomplishment in one sentence, but don't underestimate the hours of hard work and determination it took for her to make the site successful. Her 'baby', as she likes to call it, is now fully staffed with writers and has a successful number of readers!

Listening to the Young Alumni panel, I was astounded, inspired and impressed by how they knew what they wanted and so fearlessly sought after it, even if it wasn't on their original path. One changed paths and some just created a new path altogether! It is that bravery and honesty with ones own passions that I want to instill in everything I do in life. As a junior, I am becoming more and more panicked (deep breathes!!) and stressed about what it is that I want to do. I'm excited for my summer internship, but what if I don't like it? What if I do? What if it doesn't work out? (Breathe!!) I know all these hypotheticals are meaningless and should not be stressed over, but there will come a time when I have to evaluate what I want out of life and I'm scared worried that what I want is no longer what I've been working for these past years. What then? With the down economy and the fiscal cliff and global warming and climate change all that, how could I leave a sure thing? How could I leave the safety of a good job for something that has a bigger chance for failure than success? I want to live life hungry in the figurative sense, not literally starving. I'm all for being adventurous, but I don't want to be adventurous and broke.

A takeaway I've learned from all this is that life with passions is about taking those chances. It's about being honest with myself with what I truly want out of life and what I want to achieve. Something I've learned from one of my favorite books of all time, Coelho's The Alchemist, is that the whole world will conspire to help me achieve my truest dream if only I take that chance. And so I will learn to live life not so much without fear, but knowing that fear of failure is better than fear of living a life without passion. Because in the end, everything will be alright. If it's not alright, then it's not the end.