Flip The Script Quotes

Excellent. I've been told I have a lovely, melodic reading voice." He flipped the book open to the front page, where the title was printed in ornate script. Across from it was a long dedication, the ink faded now and barely legible, though Clary could make out the signature: With hope at last, William Herondale.

If you're adopted, you have rights. We tend not to share our stories because we've been taught that whatever problems we encounter are our fault. We've been the scapegoats for the 1%. If we want to flip the script, then we must share our stories and listen to others outside the scope of what was traditionally acceptable.

In the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in selfishness: selfies, self-absorbed people, superficiality, self-degradation, apathy, and self-destruction. So I challenge all of you to take initiative to change this programming. Instead of celebrating the ego, let's flip the script and celebrate the heart. Let's put the ego and celebrity culture to sleep, and awaken the conscience. This is the battle we must all fight together to win back our humanity. To save our future and our children.

You can think your way out of living. This is when I learned To flip the script— When you change your thoughts, you change your life.

For all I knew this was going to be just another in a string of fabulous cock-ups that seemed to be scripted for us by some unknown writer somwhere, some overweight forty-year old loafing in cargo shorts and flip-flops.

I am not the only one who sometimes thinks I came from the pages of a book my father wrote. Maybe it’s like that for all boys of a certain —or uncertain— age: We feel as though there are no choices we’d made through all those miles and miles behind us that hadn’t been scripted by our fathers, and that our futures are only a matter of flipping the next page that was written ahead of us. I am not the only one who’s ever been trapped inside a book.

ERIC: What are you always writin' in that book anyway? RODNEY: Poetry. TYRONE: Poetry? Rodney stops sketching and sentimentally flips through a few dozen pages of sketches and handwritten poems and notes. RODNEY: Poetry and pictures. Snapshots of our lives developed in the darkrooms of our souls." From CENTRAL PARK SONG -- a screenplay

the tale of the girl They told the young girl, “Be hasty, be wise. Choose a man who’d give you your best life.” The young girl grew into a woman so now they tell her: “Be careful, be smart. You can’t afford to refuse another heart.” When did the story change? Why do we flip the script when women age?

Gabe pulled the card from the envolope. I want to help you. He flipped the card over. You are the best thing to ever happen to Vernon. Then in the tiniest script were words that Gabe had to squint to read: PS. The dog's name is Guppy.

People see queerness as such an anomaly, as if there aren't that many of us. But what if we're actually the norm, and we're all just in hiding?

It might look like your enemies are winning, but be ready God is about to flip the script.

Don’t flip the script on semantics,” Celestial said.

Not having the knowledge just makes you teachable, not stupid. Not being in shape just makes you moldable, not lazy. Not having the experience just makes you eager, not ignorant. Flip the script and force yourself to see the positive where you’ve only seen negative. What are the advantages of not knowing, not understanding, not conquering, not having, not achieving your goals yet? The yet matters. The yet reminds us that we have a whole week, month, life ahead of us to become who we were made to be. You are enough. Today. As you are. Stop beating yourself up for being on the beginning side of yet, no matter what age you are. Yet is your potential. Yet is a promise. Yet is what keeps you moving forward. Yet is a gift, and you are enough to get to the other side of it.

Narcissists specialize in guilt. They do something wrong, you ask to talk about it. They flip the script into you not loving them, not trusting them or being cruel like your mother. Then you end up feeling guilty!

In fact, many people in the autistic community like to flip the script and point out how awful neurotypical culture and expectations are: think small talk, social niceties, herd mentality, compliance, and other unpleasant or taxing behaviors that are deemed “normal.

We should take the sheer improbability of our own existence as a kick in the butt to get out of bed in the morning. If you hear this fact as discouraging—that you’re only one in billions—then flip the script. You are one in billions! Someone has to succeed, so it might as well be you.

And then, when I’m ready, I call Sophia back.

Make people feel like the idea is coming from them and they will place more value on it, believe it more deeply, adopt it more quickly, and remember it more easily.

When i believe in everything, I could not see the actors semicircled around a studio microphone flipping the pages of scripts in unison. I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult, accusing each other of murder.

What’s this one?” asked Gorm, picking up the only tome not locked within a glass case. “That’s perhaps the most powerful book never written,” said Jynn. “It’s all blank.” Gorm flipped through the empty pages. “No, wait, there’s a line at the front.” Gorm read the small, neat script on the page aloud. Imbalanced. Too powerful. Breaks mechanics.

With Circe, I wanted to take a woman’s life and set it at the center of an epic story. Ancient epic almost exclusively features male protagonists, and the few women who appear are there mostly as cameo helpmeets, breeding stock, or obstacles to be overcome; their stories matter only in how they touch the hero’s. I wanted to flip the script, to make Odysseus the cameo and Circe the epic hero. I also deliberately included things that have been shut out of epic because they are considered traditionally female, like parenting, crafts, and childbirth. As anyone who’s ever lived through or witnessed childbirth can tell you, it is one of life’s more epic experiences. "Meanwhile, with The Song of Achilles, I wanted to do the opposite: take a story that was famously epic and tell it from a personal and intimate perspective. I was inspired by Homer in subject matter, but in tone I wanted to come more out of the tradition of the ancient lyric poets, including Sappho and Catullus.

As part of the deal, Dylan appeared in a television ad for the iPod, featuring his new album, Modern Times. This was one of the most astonishing cases of flipping the script since Tom Sawyer persuaded his friends to whitewash the fence. In the past, getting celebrities to do an ad required paying them a lot of money. But by 2006 the tables were turned. Major artists wanted to appear in iPod ads; the exposure would guarantee success. James Vincent had predicted this a few years earlier, when Jobs had said he had contacts with many musicians and could pay them to appear in ads. "No, things are going to soon change,' Vincent replied. "Apple is a different kind of brand, and it's cooler than the brand of most artists. We should talk about the opportunity we offer the bands, not pay them.

They don’t rely on memorized conversational scripts, and they don’t have to carefully parse every single piece of data they encounter to make sense of it. They can wing it. Autistic people, on the flip side, don’t rely on knee-jerk assumptions or quick mental shortcuts to make our decisions. We process each element of our environment separately, and intentionally, taking very little for granted. If we’ve never been in a particular restaurant before, we may be slow to make sense of its layout or figure out how ordering works. We’ll need really clear-cut indications of whether it’s the kind of place where you sit down and get table service, or if you’re supposed to go to a counter to ask for what you like. (Many of us try to camouflage this fact by doing extensive research on a restaurant before setting foot inside.) Every single light, laugh, and smell in the place is taken in individually by our sensory system, rather than blended into a cohesive whole.

To flip the script on a flipped script; not to make waves, but notice the patterns and act accordingly.

It’s time to flip the script, reverse the curse, and stop giving all of your fucks to all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons.

felt as a teenager, but instead of playing the victim and letting negative emotions sap my energy and force me to the surface, a failure, it was as if a new light blazed in my brain that allowed me to flip the script.

Photographs were such powerful magic. It was a gift from the God of Immortality. I felt like both my mom and dad were on either side of my shoulder as I flipped through the album. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like an orphan. For the first time, I felt the warmth and love of a complete family through the album.

It didn’t feel like it was just knowing my parents as I flipped though the photos. It felt as though I was reminiscing old times with my mom and dad. I felt like they were alive – and they were. They were just dwelling in the photographs pretending to be dumb.

Maybe my fashion game wasn’t totally on par at that point, but I was on fire—that was the look. I’m sure I was killing it. I was killing the game, because I was coming up with something different. You know, I was flipping the script on ’em.

Someone attacking you for being you doesn’t have to be the last word. There are lots of ways to flip the script; find a way to make that negativity work for you. What is the flaw or weakness in what someone’s doing to you? How do you exploit that to turn the argument around and come out better for it, if still bruised and scarred? You may not get that opportunity often, and sometimes the hurt is real and there’s nothing much in the moment you can do to make it better, because punching someone in the face or burying them under a pile of bricks is, generally speaking, frowned upon. But how it governs your day-to-day actions afterward is, to an extent, up to you, through how you choose to process that information. Will you let it break you down? Or will you never let the bastards grind ya down?

When we allow our standards to be impacted by our past performance and negative perception of it, we are setting our systems up for failure as we allow them to drift toward low performance and take our goals and expectations right along with them. In order to combat this, we need to keep our standards steadfast despite dips in performance and expect that we will rise to meet them. If we do this, we can flip the script and start drifting toward better performance.

The minute you become comfortable with other people's disapproval is the minute you go from prey to predator, allowing you to flip the script in most situations.

Luke sure flipped the script. But the movie still ended the same. And I didn't even get an orgasm out of this version.

Dealing with Rejection Of course, success won’t always be so immediate when you use direct preselling to validate—in fact, you’ll get rejected a whole lot—and this is another instance where the technique shines. That’s because every rejection is an opportunity; you can use it to take a deep dive into customer problems. Remember the Rejection Goals from chapter 2. Rejections are TREASURE. When I get shot down while validating, I have a simple four-question script that flips the no into new knowledge, new ideas, and maybe even new customers. “Why not?” It’s really easy to get scared from attacking this one head-on, because what happens if their criticism is right? But that’s exactly what you want to know! “Who is one person you know who would really like this?” Always, always, always ask for a referral! Be specific about what kind of referral and use a number; this makes it highly effective. “What would make this a no-brainer for you?” If they don’t want your product, maybe they’d want something related to it. If they don’t want to pay for your dog care app, what about dog walking? A dog hotel? Dog dating? “What would you pay for that?” One of the hardest things in a startup is setting prices. Getting potential customers to say what they’d pay is pure gold!

God is the one who is going to make us into the women that He’s called us to be. I’ve been studying about Jesus, women, and Jesus’s heart for women. Women weren’t treated well in Jesus’s day. They were second-class citizens and couldn’t study the Word of God; they weren’t always allowed to participate in religious practices.[2] But Jesus flipped the script on all of this. He honored, defended, and spoke up for women. He fought for the woman accused of adultery and protected her from being stoned.[3] He stopped in the middle of a crowd to speak to the woman who had suffered for years from an issue of blood. He knew the moment she touched Him, even in a crowd.[4] He then healed a little girl.[5] He also found a woman in a synagogue, healed her on the Sabbath, which was unheard of, and called her “a daughter of Abraham.”[6] I love how He performed many miracles and defended the value of women not just in private locations but also in public. When Jesus died on the cross and then rose again, He appeared for the first time to women.[7]

Even though the victims of spiritual abuse have suffered greatly (more on this topic in the next chapter), one tactic of abusive leaders is to talk about how much they’ve suffered. They will go to great lengths to describe how much pain they are in because of the unresolved “conflict” with those accusing them. They will tell how they have lost sleep, been wracked with anxiety, and are “deeply saddened” by the whole affair.28 Even Saruman wanted to talk about the “injuries that have been done to me.”29 This move is designed to engender sympathy not for the victims but for the abuser. Again, it is designed to flip the script. To produce even more sympathy, some abusive leaders then appeal to how the whole situation has affected their spouse or their family. They might point out how much their wife has suffered or how their kids are heartbroken and disillusioned.30 This tactic is effective precisely because we ought to feel sympathy for the family members harmed by the scandal. Often the spouses and children are unaware of how the pastor has mistreated others (though some spouses enable and defend their husband’s abusive behavior and sometimes even participate in his deceptions). Indeed, some church courts feel less inclined to prosecute such a pastor because they feel sorry for his family, which “has suffered enough.

To turn yourself inside out to impress another human being, you will become a stranger in your own skin. Twisting oneself into knots on behalf of someone else will do two things. It will make you a scattered soul ripped to shreds with stress. And, just make the other person hungry for pretzels. Strength is marrow born. Flip the script and let that opposing force choke on the crushing mound of their own disbelief. " - A.H. Scott 4/8/16

If Ginger could just be a good enough person for long enough, she could flip the script for Willa, though.

The prize frame is the window through which you look at the world that allows you to see yourself as the prize: The money has to earn you, not the other way around. You’re flipping the script. Why

Too many people these days actively seek out reasons to be unhappy. Even the happiest of us can find something to be miserable about if we look for it. So, why not flip the script? Focus on the good stuff, practice gratitude, and see how your life changes.

The entire expanse of my body is flattened against the wall, and once more, I’m faced with the unbending fact that I can’t walk through solid objects. He’s always using his body against me. Using it to intimidate me, to distract me, to get what he wants. Flip the script, dumbass. Right. Easier said than done when there might as well be a Minotaur in my face, huffing down at me.

A future where disability justice won looks like queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, folks of colour, and women, girls, and nonbinary humans are living in a world where disability is the norm, and where access is no longer a question but a fait accompli. Gone are the days where our disabled bodies and minds are compared to the able-bodied and able-minded. We’ve flipped the script. We still like our non-queer, non–people of colour, non-disabled friends and we’ll have them at our fully accessible dance parties (which include comfy chairs and couches for our aches and pains, subwoofers that make you feel the vibrations, active listeners, and personal support workers, so we can fully enjoy our time out, and plenty of room as well as fully accessible bathrooms for wheelchair-users to dance, dance, and dance as well as pee with ease, and no stairs in sight and clear paths to sway or rest as we please). Because, please, did you really think this could go on, this able-bodied and -minded domination? It’s not that we’ve flipped the script to exert power and replicate oppressions on our able-bodied and able-minded friends, they just over time learned to not take up so much space and not be offended or feel left out if we don’t organize with them in mind. Actually, in our accessible/disabled future, binaries are broken. We fully live on and in the spectrum of possibilities of non-stigmatized minds and bodies. In this spectrum, we are fully connected to one another, which means that decolonization has happened and is still happening and that patriarchy has been toppled and much more. This interconnectedness that we now live daily means that sometimes our able-bodied and able-minded friends are learning every day, including from their mistakes, and are understanding in how many ways our differences and disabilities manifest. This also means that we have collectively built this future and thus have learned and understood differences and disabilities, and all of us are still doing that important work even when it is hard because this future world is ours! -KARINE MYRGIANIE JEAN-FRANÇOIS AND NELLY BASSILY, DAWN (DISABLED WOMEN’S NETWORK) CANADA

On an early morning scouting trip in the foothills north of Los Angeles, two van-loads of crew people fan out over an area that the production designer wants to make into a guerrilla army encampment. I stay close to the vans, keeping an overview of the area and waiting for the director to emerge. It’s a warm sunny day. Most of the crew is wearing shorts and running shoes. The director is another story. He climbs out of his van wearing a location-specific hunter-outdoorsman khaki outfit complete with an impressive pair of lug-sole hiking boots and walks off in the general direction the crew has taken, thumbing through some script notes. A few seconds later he steps squarely into a pile of dog-doo that everyone else has successfully navigated. I watch, transfixed, as he leaps back in horror and freezes. He does not spot me as he quickly looks around to see if anyone has noticed his predicament. No one else has. He hurriedly examines the bottom of his now-disgusting hiking boot. I take a deep breath and step from beside the van, pretending I am deeply involved in a conversation on my walkie-talkie. As I walk toward him, I pull a little folding penknife from my pocket and flip the blade open. I hand it to him without a word as I pass and continue on toward the location, still pretending to be talking into the radio. I round the corner of a building and find a vantage point. The director is hopping up and down on one foot, hurriedly scraping the bottom of his boot with the tiny knife. He finishes the messy job, pulls himself together, and strides purposefully around the building and toward a clearing where the crew has gathered, waiting for his comments. I quickly take my place as the director approaches. He walks briskly past me and without looking, hands the little knife back to me with the dog-doo-covered blade still open. He continues on to the front of the group and with complete authority runs through his ideas for the scene. Over the next few months of filming, neither of us ever mentions the incident.

The smart one?” Rosie asks, looking between us. “You know that boy, always out gallivanting with someone new. They’re all starry-eyed over him until they’re teary-eyed over him. This one, though…she flipped the script on him. About time.

Take, for instance, a parody project that begins by subverting the anti-Black logics embedded in new high-tech approaches to crime prevention (Figure 5.2). Instead of using predictive policing techniques to forecast street crime, the White-Collar Early Warning System flips the script by creating a heat map that flags city blocks where financial crimes are likely to occur.

To thrive in a world in flux, we need to radically reshape our relationship to uncertainty and flip the script to sustain a healthy and productive outlook.

The more set you are on your idealized future, the more susceptible to cynicism and despair you are during times of uncertainty.

Self-love is an act of holy disruption. To love yourself in a world that profits directly from your self-loathing is the ultimate subversion of all that seeks to keep you tame. We've been taught to hate all that we are (our softness, our fierceness, our not-enoughness, our too-muchness, our tender flesh, our hard bones, our voices, our insatiable hunger, our yearning for more, our aging, our youth, our ugly, our beauty, our all) so that we can be packaged into a commodity that sells us back to ourselves. Our self-hatred is, in many ways, one of the pillars that capitalism and the patriarchy rely on to keep us small and contained, caged and corralled, safe and quietly in place. To fall headfirst into a lifelong love affair with our purpose, our passion, our capacity, for pleasure, with the sound of our yes and the tenor of our no. With the reflection in the mirror. With the rich inner landscape of our fumbling and messy aliveness - this threatens the status quo. As Naomi Wolf said, "Our appetites DO need to be controlled if things are to stay in place." I don't know about you, but I'm at all not interested or invested in keeping things in place, in maintaining the status quo, in propping up a paradigm that's been trembling on its last legs for far too long. I don't want to have to tamp down my desire, to contain the embers of my fire, to minimize the heat of my burn. I want to love myself enough to always ask for more, and then I want to love myself harder so that I can expand wide enough to receive it when it comes. And no, I don’t think this is easy. Or simple. Or even always gentle. But you loving you? Like really, really loving you? It subverts the whole damn thing. It disrupts the narrative. It flips the script. It’s a way to reclaim all that has been taken. To demand your seat at the table. To call your wholeness home.

Instead of souring on life, flip your script. Tell yourself you intend to do good and to serve. That you intend to create a thriving business and have money in the bank. You intend to treat the people around you with care and are worthy of a loving and caring relationship. Apply good intentions to all parts of your life, and then watch what happens.

Why does it matter? As long as I have her with me, why do I care how she feels? It’s bullshit—God or whatever flipping the script on me this late in life. Why her? Why is she the only person out of billions who matters? If we had children, would I care about them?

I think you can’t stand that I flipped the script. You threw me away, and then you changed your mind, but I was gone. You’re butt hurt that the trash took itself out.

t wasn’t until she was getting undressed for bed that Julie realized there was something rectangular in her pocket. She reached in curiously and pulled out the thin object, stopping cold when she realized what it was. It was a business card that was blank except for an address. Julie flipped it over, her heart pounding out of her chest as she saw the simple, curling script on that side which said only one thing. Caleb Covington.

You know what decision you want the buyer to make, but the more you push in that direction, the more they dig in, slow down, and change the agenda. They want to make their own decision on their own timeline. Buyers buy how they want to buy, not how you want to sell.

Inception relies on a completely new set of tools: the Status Tip-Off, the Flash Roll, Pre-Wired Ideas, Plain Vanilla, being Compelling, and the Buyer’s Formula. I’ll show you all of these later.

causing people to do the opposite of what you’re asking, just to prove that you aren’t controlling them—a phenomenon known as psychological reactance.

That eureka moment has been carefully planned and programmed to deliver an insight at exactly the right time. When you put the pieces together before the detectives do, you feel smart, happy, powerful, and in control (exactly the emotions needed to motivate you to buy some canned beer, frozen pizza, and extra-soft toilet tissue). And you tune in next week so you can feel that way again.

But still, the thought of potentially being with one person for the remainder of his life was as equally nauseating as it was intriguing. He couldn’t remember when the script had flipped or when bachelor life suddenly wasn’t enough for him anymore.

We need to find a way to flip the script and stop measuring ourselves solely by how far we are from the finish line. We need to start giving ourselves more credit for how far we are from where we started.

I was watching myself fall back onto the classic sales approach, with its tired old script: First become likable and build rapport, then explain “features and benefits,” next do a trial close, and then fight like an alley cat to overcome all the objections the buyer has come up with.

In modern Western culture, we are primed to think of friendship as a nice-to-have, while sexual and romantic love and parent-child love are vital to our thriving. But Jesus flips this script. Instead of telling His disciples that they must get married and have children, Jesus tells His followers that they must love each other, even to the point of death. When Jesus said there was no greater love than laying down one’s life for one’s friends, He wasn’t being hyperbolic or naïve. Instead, He was inscribing the good news of His unfathomable love for us onto Christian friendship with indelible ink.

Please call me Enrique. When you say Señor Montez, I think of my dad." "I'll call you Joseph tomorrow." Enrique raised his eyebrow at her. "Oh yeah? What will you call me on Wednesday?" She licked her lower lip. "Nothing. Because after Las Posadas ends, I'll never lay eyes on you again." Enrique laughed. He reached out his hand to her, and she offered it up in a shake, but he flipped the script and kissed it. "We'll see about that. Good night, mi amor." She glared at him. "Mi amor?" His hand grazed hers. "Yeah. You're my wife, right?" "For one night only. And then I'll never be anyone's wife again.

Influence, and particularly Inception, is most effective when the person you are speaking to feels like he or she is on the same level of the hierarchy as you. This is where Inception is strongest and works the best.

Use Specific Industry Lingo Describe a Recent Action You Have Taken Mention a Real Situation Everyone in the Industry Cares About

The human brain is thus wired by evolution to distrust any information from the outside world and to greatly favor that which originates inside us.

Narcissists specialize in guilt. They do something wrong; you ask to talk about it. They flip the script into you not loving them, not trusting them or being cruel like your mother. Then you end up feeling guilty!

growth mindset is the belief that capabilities can be cultivated, regardless of circumstances. It’s nurture over nature. It’s mind over matter. It’s the belief that almost anyone can accomplish almost anything if they work at it long enough, hard enough, and smart enough! Your failure doesn’t own you if you own it. How? You leverage it by learning from it. Nine times out of ten, failure is the result of poorly managed success. But let me flip that script—success is the result of well-managed failure.

Pre-Wired Idea

Instilling certainty is different from creating Status Alignment. With Alignment, your goal is to show the buyer you’re similar to them and make them instantly feel like you “get” them—whether you’re talking to a coal miner or a Fortune 500 CEO.

The best way to find a Status Tip-Off is to interview three people who are the same level as the person you are trying to influence. What would they say to each other, to catch up on each other’s business, peer-to-peer?

stage for seduction, but Torie had quickly flipped the script on him. She was in charge and he became a willing participant in her show. She leaned forward and kissed his face more than a dozen times, her soft lips brushing against his forehead, his nose, his cheeks—each one in turn—his

We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with over the years,” said Jeff Bezos. “Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” Another favorite Bezos quote: “I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.” The Amazon versus Walmart battle has been framed as ecommerce versus traditional retail, but that’s always been a false dichotomy. It’s about starting with the customer instead of the product. It’s about establishing ongoing relationships. It’s about flipping the script—starting with the digital experience, and then building the store.

As it turns out, stores are still incredibly valuable, and brick and mortar retail is far from dead—traditional retail just needs to flip the script.

Ojih Odutola’s radical visual reversals function like thought experiments that take us beyond the merely hierarchical. By positioning the unexpected figure of the black woman as master, as oppressor, she suspends, for a moment, our focus on the individual sins of people—the Mississippi overseer, the British slave merchant, the West African slave raider—and turns it back upon enabling systems. It was a racist global system of capital and exploitation—coupled with a perverse and asymmetric understanding of human resource and value—that allowed the trade in humans to occur, and although that trade no longer exists in its previous form, many of its habits of mind persist. In “A Countervailing Theory,” the habit of thought that recognizes some beings and ignores others is presented to us as an element of a physical landscape, the better to emphasize its all-encompassing nature. That system is the air Akanke and Aldo breathe, the bodies they’re in, the land they walk on. For Ojih Odutola, it is expressed by one unending, unfurling charcoal line: The purpose of beginning the story from the perspective of Aldo, one who is subjugated, is intentional: to show how easily one can be indoctrinated into a systemic predicament. Between Aldo and Akanke, there isn’t a clear demarcation of good or bad with regard to their respective worlds and who they are. The system in which they coexist is illustrated through the striated systems in place—with literal motifs of lines throughout the pictures—representing how the system is ever present and felt, but not explicitly stated. The system is fact. How can such systems be dismantled? Surely, as Audre Lorde knew, it is not by using the master’s tools. “A Countervailing Theory” offers some alternative possibilities. Here love is radical—between women, between men, between women and men, between human and nonhuman—because it forces us into a fuller recognition of the other. And cunnilingus is radical, and seeing is radical, and listening is radical, for the same reason. We know we don’t want to be victims of history. We know we refuse to be slaves. But do we want to be masters—to behave like masters? To expect as they expect? To be as tranquil and entitled as they are? To claim as righteous our decision not to include them in our human considerations? Are we content that all our attacks on them be ad hominem, as they once spoke of us? If our first response to these portraits of black, female masters is some variation on #bowdownbitches or #girlboss, well, no one can deny the profound pleasures of role reversal, of the flipped script, but when we speak thus we must acknowledge that we can make no simultaneous claim to having put down the master’s tools. Akanke is in these images—but so is Aldo. He must be recognized. The dream of Frantz Fanon was not the replacement of one unjust power with another unjust power; it was a revolutionary humanism, neither assimilationist nor supremacist, in which the Manichaean logic of dominant/submissive as it applies to people is finally and completely dismantled, and the right of every being to its dignity is recognized. That is decolonization. - from "Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Visions of Power

Already thirty-six, and to have a younger sister married first? What ever happened to that nice boy Jesse? Did she scare him off? She is not too old yet, nah? My cousin’s nephew has a job now. I will make the arrangements!

Not only had Mark proven to be a great buffer at tense family dinners, but ever since he entered the picture, Mom had stopped hounding me about the fact that I wasn’t married.

Just a few years ago, I could count on scores of dynamic, caring women in my life, from school or college or whom I’d met at work. But one by one, they’d gotten married and had families. And one by one, their commitments to our friendship took a backseat. Our movie nights, weekly phone calls, or Saturday dinners became less and less frequent, morphed into forty-five-minute catch-ups at a Starbucks

I shook my head. Why was I trying to justify Deborah’s decision to pick me over Ginger Spice? Why did I care so much what some spiteful person thought about me? I deserved to be here, and everyone damn well knew it. Still, I couldn’t stop ruminating. Ginger thought I was just some “middle manager.” She thought I was . . . “lonely.” It hurt when the aunties said it, but it hurt more when it came from the mouth of one of my own peers. And maybe it cut so deep because they were right.

I’d been so obsessed with proving myself to her and my team that I hadn’t even considered that she was going through a difficult time transitioning away from being the company’s creative face, taking a backseat to, well, me.

What a fucker.” She gripped the steering wheel. “Do you know, when I worked with him in the nineties, he used to call me the ‘office geisha.’” I gasped. “Notwithstanding the fact that I’m Korean, not Japanese, yes, the implication was that our director had brought me on to ‘please’ the clients.

She’d enjoy doting on a young man, which wasn’t to say she hadn’t relished having two little girls to raise. In fact, daughters were what she had preferred. She despised that in their village, the birth of boys had been celebrated and the arrival of girls mourned.

Family kept you grounded, but they’d all been uprooted, scattered, and were now like tumbleweeds blowing recklessly around the globe. Sandeep had done everything in her power to change that, to build anew. She cleaned houses, despite the upturned noses of some her friends, so they could save more quickly,

If she told her every little thing—a harmless argument with Veer, a bill they hadn’t yet managed to pay, a blood pressure reading that was slightly higher than what her doctor felt comfortable with—it would only cause worry.

Seriously, what did he say this time?” Ainsley interrupted. “Did he say I was too old for you again? Used goods?” She ran her hands through her hair. “I heard the word ‘Greek.’ Does he still want me to learn make to daal? You can cook daal. Did you tell him that? So why do I have to fucking learn how to make it?

You’re right,” he said finally. “This wasn’t meant to be. I mean, the truth is I don’t even know you that well.” What he said was true, but it didn’t feel good to hear those words out loud. Six months and he didn’t know me, but it wasn’t his fault. I’d never let him in.

Mom was right. I would never understand or agree with her decision to stay, but I knew I was judging her from a place of privilege. I grew up in a different country, a different time, and the choices available to me were ones that my mother, and

No, I didn’t fucking know that. He didn’t tell me, nor had he ever expressed any emotion toward me beyond apathy unless I’d disappointed him. He was proud of me? Really? All this time, I thought he hated me, too.

At talks, I often say that the why is greater than the how, and the how is greater than the what. The why (purpose) builds more psychological and emotional commitment to an organization or movement than the how and the what combined. With that in mind, flip the script.

For example: “I can’t believe you don’t watch Game of Thrones. We can’t be friends anymore,” and then turn your back and pretend to walk away for a few steps. Accuse Her of Hitting on You This is funny, but also reverses the roles. She’s used to being the prize, but when you accuse her of hitting on you, you flip the script. Now she’s the one trying to seduce you.

Fionn eased away from a sunbeam lest it bestir the glamour that hid him from human eyes—and promptly flinched as his hand came down on something burning hot. He squinted at the small round object embedded in the mould. A thumbbone’s length across, the object was—an inch, to use the Quick Folks term Silver had drilled into them—and fluted along the edge like a crown. A perfect circle. He flipped it over cautiously, with a twig. Letters showed on top: white on red. “Coke” it read, in the script Silver had also made them learn. “Top of one of their bottles,” he growled. “Amusing, if you think of it: how they leave such dangers about, not knowing.

Trump’s gaslighting of Director Comey was his way of gaining control over a story he had no control over. If the press was going to write damaging stories about his campaign’s connections to Russia, he would do whatever it would take to flip the script and create more favorable headlines for himself. Russia was, he loved to say, “fake news.” He gaslit Comey to convince his supporters that the real crimes were being committed by the people inside the government who were telling the media about those connections. Trump turned reality on its head.

clearly. I’d been searching out all these ways to meet new, like-minded people, but I couldn’t just expect a new friend to appear out of nowhere. It took work. It took effort.

Friendships ran their course all the time.

Since childhood, others have been trying to smuggle their ideas into your mind. So naturally your mental defenses have gotten really good. It’s as if you have a small team of cognitive security guards and bouncers who are trained to keep unfamiliar and confusing ideas away.

At the end of every feeling is nothing, but at the end of every principle is a promise.” - Eric Thomas Remember, if you want to be successful, look at what everybody else is doing and do the opposite. So here’s what the 5% do. These are the people who are energized, have clarity, enjoy life, are experiencing financial freedom, and are living at a level ten. They flip the script and drive the decision train in reverse. While unsuccessful people base everything off their feelings, the 5% make decisions first, regardless of how they feel. When they decide something, that’s what they do, and it doesn’t matter how they feel. So from their definite decision, they take that action, and they feel amazing afterwards. One of the biggest ways to build your self-esteem is to do what you say you’re going to do. And every time you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, your confidence lowers. So what successful people do is they

She might have rolled her eyes had she not seen what lay before her. Sheet music. For the performance she’d seen last night. For the notes she couldn’t get out of her mind, even a day later. She glanced again at the note. It wasn’t Arobynn’s elegant script, but Sam’s hurried scrawl. When in hell had he found the time today to get these? He must have gone out right after they’d returned. She sank onto the bed, flipping through the pages. The show had only debuted a few weeks ago; sheet music for it wasn’t even in circulation yet. Nor would it be, until it proved itself to be a success. That could be months, even years, from now. She couldn’t help her smile.

Growing up, she always ate last, making sure everyone else had hot roti throughout their meal, hovering over us, insisting we eat more while I begged her to come sit down at the table. Finally, when the rest of us were nearly done, she’d shovel down her cold food before bolting off to start on the dishes, the laundry, some endless task or another.

rubbed my eyes as it dawned on me. Natasha was selfish. Plain and simple, she was a spoiled brat. Maybe she always had been. And I was done making excuses for her.

Excluding her from her life and her pregnancy, acting like she was ashamed of where she came from. According to Mom, Natasha wouldn’t even let her bring a dish to the gender reveal party. (Just let the woman make you samosas, you brat! Everyone likes them.)

I’d taken pains to avoid. It didn’t matter how hard we tried to be the perfect woman or daughter or daughter-in-law; it would never be good enough. Our rotis would never be round enough, and I was very tempted to tell her she shouldn’t even bother to try.

As I gave him a brief recap on the past twelve years, all I could think about was the new knowledge that Natasha and Jesse were Facebook friends. She’d never told me, and I didn’t know whether to feel gratitude for the secrecy, or betrayal.