For most of my life, I believed in a kind of “before and after.” There was the version of me working toward something—grades, leadership positions, college acceptances—and then, eventually, there would be a version of me who had made it. Everything I did felt like it belonged to the “before,” a necessary but temporary state on the way to something more meaningful. Watching Pixar's Soul challenged that idea. The film follows Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher who finally gets the opportunity he believes will define his life: performing as a professional jazz musician with Dorothea Williams. But after an unexpected accident, he finds himself separated from his body, forced to confront what it actually means to live. What struck me most was not the plot itself, but the quiet realization at its center: that Joe had mistaken his “spark” for a singular purpose, when in reality, life was never meant to hinge on one defining achievement. That realization felt uncomfortably familiar. As someone who has spent years chasing academic and extracurricular goals, I’ve often measured my life in milestones—test scores, competition wins, leadership roles. In that mindset, the present becomes transactional. Every late night, every weekend spent working, every commitment is justified not because it matters on its own, but because it contributes to an eventual outcome. Soul challenged that way of thinking. There is a moment in the film when Joe finally achieves the dream he has spent his entire life working toward. And then—nothing changes. The world does not transform. He is still himself. It’s a quiet, almost disappointing realization, but an important one: purpose is not something deferred until a single moment of arrival. It is something that exists in the accumulation of ordinary experiences. Since watching the film, I have started to notice those moments differently. Not as checkpoints, but as something closer to the point itself. Things I once treated as purely instrumental—studying late into the night, science competitions, long weekend orchestra rehearsals—used to feel like pieces of a larger equation, valuable only for what they would eventually produce. Now, they feel less like sacrifices and more like experiences in their own right. I find myself paying attention in a way I didn’t before: to the quiet satisfaction of finally understanding a concept, to the small moments of laughter with teammates during competitions, to the gradual way all the instrument parts finally meld together during rehearsals. Even my commute has changed. I used to spend it working—laptop open, trying to make every minute productive. Now, I let it be a space where nothing is being optimized or achieved. I watch the streets pass, notice things I would have ignored, and allow myself to exist in the in-between instead of constantly chasing the destination. This shift hasn’t made me any less ambitious. I still care deeply about my goals, about pursuing engineering, about contributing to meaningful problems. But I no longer see my life as something that will only begin once I reach them. And that, I think, is the difference between having a goal be your life and having a life with a goal.