Armored Heart

Kara Thrace: "Momma, something's about to happen, you know that thing you were trying to prepare me for, I don't know if I can do it."

Socrata Thrace: "Oh yes you can, you can."

Kara Thrace: "How can you be sure?"

Socrata Thrace: "You're my daughter."

Leoben: "See, there's nothing terrible about death; when you finally face it, it's beautiful. You're free now, to become who you really are."

Kara Thrace: "You're not Leoben."

Your mistakes pave the way for your success by revealing when you’re on the wrong path. The biggest breakthroughs typically come when you’re feeling the most frustrated and the most stuck. It’s this frustration that forces you to think differently, to look outside the box and see the solution you’ve been missing.

If you do NOT see a solution, later in the article it essentially says that you give no fucks when you are successful. This is very true. 

You no longer care what other people think. You only worry about what other people think when you still feel like you have something to prove. Conversely, you know you’ve “made it” when you don’t worry about that anymore -- when you’re true to yourself and your principles, and satisfied with your life. You know you’ve made it when you understand that other people’s opinions are just that -- opinions. They have no effect on reality. They don’t change who or what you are.

Lastly, giving a shit about something/someone that does not give a shit about you is a waste of time. Successful people know the difference between what they can and can’t change.

Then a few weeks ago I heard a clip on the radio of a young man questioning Clinton at a town hall meeting in Iowa. “I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest,” he said. “But I’d like to hear from you on why you think the enthusiasm isn’t there.” It was subtle, but there was something in his tone I recognized. It was not a tone you would use to speak to someone who was a former secretary of state and senator. It was the tone you reserve for that dumb chick in your meeting who probably doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It was a tone I’d heard countless times over the course of my career, and in that moment I suddenly saw Hillary Clinton in an entirely different light. I played his comment back in my head, trying to pinpoint exactly what I found so irksome, and realized it was the phrasing “I’d like to hear from you.” The phrase has tiny flecks of condescension in it. It’s not the way you’d phrase a question to someone you believe deserves a place at the table. And then I thought back over the course of my career, and made a mental list of all the times someone had phrased something in a way that had just a soupçon of implied incompetence to it.  There was an initial phone call with a prospective client who, after I ran through a description of my company’s offerings asked me, “And you run the company all by yourself?” When I responded that I did, he cheered, “Good for you!” I didn’t get the business. At the time I’d shaken it off as a strange call, but then it happened again. Was it me, I wondered? Was there something about the way that I was presenting myself that made me seem insecure? When I was younger I might have chalked it up to age. I was young – I would grow into a mature way of conducting sales calls and pitch meetings. But at 43 I understand that what people mean when they ask if I run the business all by myself is “I’ve noticed you’re a woman and I’m confused by that because you don’t look or sound the way a technology business owner is supposed to, so I will discreetly take my business elsewhere.”

“We’ve kinda suspected it before, but President Obama genuinely gives no fucks at this point. He is fuck devoid. Fuck deficient. Fuck deprived. Fuck destitute. His cupboard of fucks is barren; his tank of fucks has been depleted. You know how, on cloudy nights, you might look up into the vast and endless sky and not find any stars? The same thing would happen if you looked at Obama and searched for fucks. And this, this total absence of fucks, is where pop off came from.”