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.

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.

I've learned to separate my fears from my intuition and, at times, to follow my intuition through the fear.

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.

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.

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.

I've noticed that women who pursue recognition rather than attention have a different relationship with aging. They're not dropping tens of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery. When they have to choose between looking older - or looking odd - they'll go with older.

Recognition happens when you see yourself from the inside-out: as someone who can make an impact on the world instead of navigating the impact the world has on 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.

I don't believe that we - and this holds true for both genders - have as many choices as we seem to like to think.