Fear is a powerful beast. But we can learn to ride it.
I love how feminism is often blamed for giving women too many choices. Like this is a bad thing.
Extreme people combine brilliance and talent with an insane work ethic.
I had turned into a trophy wife - and I sucked at it. I wasn't detail-oriented enough to maintain a perfect house or be a perfect hostess. I could no longer hide my boredom when the men talked and the women smiled and listened. I wasn't interested in Botox or makeup or reducing the appearance of the scars from my C-sections.
'Obsession' has a bad rap.
Money is rarely just money. Sometimes it stands in for love or self-esteem or freedom or a sense of control over your destiny (especially if you lacked these things in childhood).
Every time a confident, successful woman like Marissa Meyer distances herself from feminism, I think of Athena. Athena women, with all their brilliance and strategy, are the ones smashing up through layers of glass. They tend to identify with men, keeping femininity at a distance.
A lot of people work extremely hard and through no fault of their own - bad luck, the wrong environment, unfortunate circumstances - struggle to survive.
I don't believe that we - and this holds true for both genders - have as many choices as we seem to like to think.
I don't think it's that difficult to distinguish between people with narcissistic disorders and people with high self-esteem.
We are born into a particular place and time with a particular set of gifts and limitations. The challenge isn't to pluck the best career out of the air, but to learn yourself from the inside out: to know your gifts and accept your limitations and shape your life accordingly.
I have struggled with self-esteem issues since my teens, but it's clear in my first long-ago diary that I didn't start out that way. I acquired my low self-esteem. I learned it.
Don't pursue something because you 'want to be great.' Pursue something because it fascinates you, because the pursuit itself engages and compels you.
From childhood on, both males and females learn to do whatever we need to do to get the attention we need to survive. We fashion ourselves accordingly. And then, should that attention ever go away, it's only natural to do the same things we've always done, rely on what we've always relied on, in order to make it come back.
As a girlchild in the early-to-mid 1980s, I wasn't expected to like math. So I stopped liking math. As a young woman, I wasn't expected to have high self-esteem.
Why strive to be 'elite'? Because it infuses your life with purpose and meaning that does not depend on anyone or anything that can ever be taken away from you.
We live in a culture that does not encourage women to be epic heroes of their own Big Stories but the mothers and lovers and wives and mistresses and muses and personal assistants, the femme fatales and fantasies and manic pixie dream girls, in someone else's Big Story, and this someone else is usually a dude.
You have to have a spirit of courage and adventure, or else you're going to find it tough to get up in the morning sometimes.
Extreme success is not like other kinds of success; what has worked for someone else probably won't work for you.
When we dare to hope for a certain outcome and take action after action toward that outcome, we're dealing with nothing less than the spirit of creativity itself.
