Luvvie Ajayi Jones Quotes

We will ruffle feathers. We might be the villains in a few people’s stories. We might even blow up a few bridges. But our worth is not based on how much we acquiesced to the people we knew. The goal is to betray ourselves less. So, be kind but take no shit.

A successful life is one lived on my own terms, not one where I end every day more tired than the last. And if everyone else around me is happy but I’m empty, then I have betrayed myself.

People have niceness and kindness mixed up. Niceness might mean saying positive things. But kindness is doing positive things: being thoughtful and considerate, prioritizing people’s humanity over everything else.

Don’t let people who can’t spell your name right tell you about who you are. Don’t let folks who only have courage behind a keyboard define your goodness or your worth as a person. Do not let people who are already rooting for you to falter insist on your value, because they will steer you wrong.

Fear can very concretely keep us from doing and saying the things that are our purpose.

Owning your dopeness is not about being liked by others. It’s really about being liked by you first. One of my favorite proverbs is “When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm.” If you are strong in yourself, the actions of everyone else are less likely to move you.

A professional troublemaker is someone who is committed to being authentically themselves while speaking the truth and doing some scary shit. Here is to us, daring to live boldly.

The goal is to betray ourselves less. So, be kind but take no shit.

When we want to say something and our voice shakes, we should take that to spur us forward, because that is when it is most necessary. Let your voice tremble, but say it anyway.

What matters is how I handle it and move forward. That is what I will truly be judged on,

Know that you have the right to have your preferences, your borders, your boundaries. Tell people outright that you prefer another type of behavior. Wear a T-shirt. Make PSAs. Use a hashtag. Feel no guilt about it. Prevent riffraffery and the enemies of progress from constantly piercing your territory. Build a wall to keep tomfoolery out. Draw your lines without guilt.

I’ve learned that the audacity to speak my dreams out loud, even if only to myself, has taken me far. I marvel at how many times the things I have dared to say have come true. The things I have let myself dream about. I ask, not with entitlement, but with hope, and magical things have happened.

Spend your privilege.” She got it from disability rights advocate Rebecca Cokley. It is the concept that the privilege we have in this world is endless. It doesn’t run out. You don’t use your voice today and have to re-up the next day. Power is limitless, and using ours for other people does not diminish it.

I am not fearless. But I’ve learned to start pushing past fear because oftentimes, the fear itself is scarier than whatever is on the other side. It’s like being afraid to walk through a dark hallway. If you close your eyes and run through it, you’ll be okay. And you’ll look back and say, “That wasn’t that bad.

The things we must do are more significant than the things we are afraid to do. It doesn’t mean we don’t realize there are consequences. It means we acknowledge that they may come but we insist on keeping on.

When we dream, we’re giving others permission to do the same. When our dreams are big, we’re telling the folks who know us that they don’t have to be small either. When our dreams come true, we’re expanding the worlds of others because now they know theirs can too. We must dream and dream boldly and unapologetically.

Being accused of TOO MUCHness is to be told to take up less space. Being TOO much is to be excessive. How do you combat that? By being less than you are. And that concept feels like nothing other than self-betrayal. The inverse of too much is too little. I’d rather be too big than too small any day.

Times of crisis and chaos present us with the opportunity to do the best work of our lives. People use words that they pull from the depths of their spirits. People paint with strokes that they summon from their souls. People sing notes that come from the cosmos. People innovate. We must keep doing that.

In all of these, your job is not to stop being this person you are accused of being. You aren’t supposed to constantly shape-shift to make those around you feel better about their own insecurities or failures. Your job is not to chameleon your way through life to the point where you forget what your true colors are. If you are too big, then it’s a reflection that the place you’re in is too small for you. It isn’t your job to get smaller to fit there, but to find a place that is bigger than you so you can take up all the space you want and grow infinitely. Anyplace that demands you shrink is a place that will suffocate your spirit and leave you gasping for air.

When we are afraid of having too much hope, we’re actually afraid of being disappointed. We are anxious about expecting the world to gift us and show us grace, because what if we end up on our asses? So we dream small or not at all. Because if we expect nothing or expect something small, we cannot be disappointed when the big things don’t happen.

I ask myself three questions before I say something that might shake the table. Do you mean it? Is this thing something I actually believe? Can you defend it? Being the challenger, I also have to be okay with being questioned and prodded. My ideas need to be explored deeper. Can I stand in it and justify it? Do I have receipts? Can you say it thoughtfully or with love? Is my intention good here? I might think I am righteous in my indignation or in my questioning, but am I saying it thoughtfully or with love? No matter how righteous it feels, no matter how true it might feel, if I say this thing in a way that’s hateful or that makes people feel demeaned or less than, the message will not land.

If the consequence is you get fired, is that an actual place you want to work? If you can get fired for challenging one idea in one meeting, is that company worth your time and energy? If the consequence is not that you’ll be fired or written up, then what is actually on the line if you speak up? Is it that you won’t be liked by whoever you challenged?

Who am I expecting to do this work, if not me?

But the audacity to ask. It was everything. Ask for what you want. The universe might surprise you and say YES.

To know ourselves is to write our values in cement even if our goals are in sand.

I’ve learned that gasping for air while volunteering to give others CPR is not heroic. It’s suffocation by resentment.

You don’t civil your way to justice.

OWE anyone your time, energy, or platform. Do not feel guilty about being protective of any of those things.

It’s that quote from an old dead Greek dude, Heraclitus of Ephesus, come to life: “Change is the only constant in life.” Nobody has proven this wrong yet.

we need to stop expecting fearlessness and acknowledge that we’re anxious but we aren’t letting fear be our deciding factor.

I realized then that one of my purposes is to make sure that I don’t have to see people behind me. If there are people behind me, I need to find a way to get them by my side.

Failure is life’s greatest teacher, and the only way we truly fail is to learn nothing from the valleys we experience.

A professional troublemaker is someone who critiques the world, the shoddy systems, and the people who refuse to do better.

This isn’t a life of sine metu (Latin for “without fear”). It is a life of “I might be afraid but I won’t let it stop me.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” It is time for our actions to start proving the truth of our words.

The things we must do are more significant than the things we are afraid to do.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

Do not let people make you feel bad for being successful, and for being you, and for being amazing, and for being accomplished. If people get upset at you for announcing something you did, those people are not your people. Those people do not deserve your dopeness. And those people serve no important role in your life. Anyone who is upset that I’m doing well is an enemy of progress, and I don’t need them around me.

As you evolve, you should not let people weaponize the old you against the new you. There are those who will hate your growth so much that they will remind you of your past in an attempt to piss on your future.

Know that grace and accountability can coexist. Grace makes you forgive yourself for your mistakes and accountability lets you know that the lesson learned must be remembered and those mistakes can’t be frequent.

Who we are should not be beholden to the moods of the people we are around, their insecurities, or their projections. Because when someone says you are too much, it is more of a statement on them than it is on you.

We are all fighting battles with the world, systems, ourselves. Battles that are easy to lose. It’s so much easier to keep doing what feels comfortable. What feels safe. But then we might look up one day and realize that we’ve safety-netted ourselves into lives that feel like cages. Cages can get comfortable, but comfort is overrated. Being quiet is comfortable. Keeping things the way they’ve been is comfortable. But all comfort does is maintain the status quo.

I reflect on the words of the world-changing GOOD troublemaker John Lewis: “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something, to say something, and not be quiet.” We have a moral obligation to tell the truth. Tell the truth, even when our voices shake. Tell the truth even when it might rock the boat. Tell the truth, even when there might be consequences. Because that in itself, makes us more courageous than most people in the world. Use the three questions, know your voice is necessary, and speak truth to power. Even a whisper of truth makes a difference in an echo chamber of lies.

Women create and work in nonprofits because, as the nurturers, we say, “We want to help the world.” No, help yourself first, sis. And then help the world. Put your mask on first and all that jazz. I preach the gospel of us leaving the world better than we found it, but we also have to be able to leave ourselves better for it, not worse.

If you’re living a life of color, of impact, of note, you will make mistakes. You will fuck up. You will show you are an everlasting fool who constantly needs to get their shit together. And that’s okay. Because failure is necessary. It’s essential for us to live loudly. It is painful, it is usually unexpected, and it can knock us on our asses.

Do not force yourself to want less to appease other people. Do not dumb down your needs so you won’t want to ask for more. You want what you want. Ask for it. A NO will not kill you. Ask for more, because if the fear of disappointment stops you from going for what you want, then you are choosing failure in advance. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we don’t think that we should ask for the thing we want, whether it’s a promotion from our boss, or more acts of service from our partner, or more attention from our friends, then we are opting for the NO, instead of trying for a YES. If we get the NO, we are still in the same place we are, losing nothing. But what if we got the YES, which would lead us closer to where we want to be?

Instead, I think we should aspire to be kind. To be kind is to be generous, fair, honest, helpful, altruistic, gracious, tolerant, understanding, humble, giving, vulnerable, magnanimous, service-driven. To be nice is to smile a lot and be chatty with random strangers. Nice is talking about the weather. Kind is caring about whether someone has an umbrella in case it rains.

If we do not give ourselves permission to dream, how do we give ourselves permission to thrive? So give yourself the allowance to think about that thing that feels too big and too far to touch. Life’s adventures never promised a straight path, and that’s often what stops us. But we must dream. All we have, even in the worst moments, are the dreams of better things to come.

Facebook, for example, allows you to have five thousand friends. Just because that is the maximum doesn’t mean that is the number you should have. Just because your house can safely fit one hundred people in it doesn’t mean that is the number you should invite for dinner today. We don’t control a lot in life, but we can manage who we let into our physical and virtual spaces.

Above all, trust life. Yes, it’s a raving douchecanoe at times. But trust the universe/God. Sometimes I think half my reason for believing in a deity is so I don’t lose hope and think life is a random mixture of arbitrary instances and none of it has any structure. That might drive me mad. I choose to believe in a higher being as an anchor and a grounding. I don’t think I have a choice but to have a deep belief that it will work out. It lets me get out of bed even when I’m feeling low. If control is a mirage, trust that God will order your steps. Have faith that Allah will place the right people in your path: the helpers. One of my favorite prayers when I’m about to walk into a new room is: “Please let my helper find me. Let me not miss the right connection I am supposed to make. Let me not miss the reason I am here.

Oftentimes, when we want something that doesn’t come with a manual, we are afraid of it, because we could lose our way since there’s no map. Well, maybe WE are supposed to draw the map, so someone who comes behind us won’t get lost. Create the map you didn’t have. That’s what I did. We must give ourselves permission to be who we want to be, even if we don’t have the blueprint yet, and that starts with dreaming.

If we can’t put justice over niceness, what are we doing as a people? Where are we going to end up if we continue to turn the other cheek when somebody harms us? The people who harm us are not being told to be civil or nice or to take the high road. It’s always the person who’s been victimized in some way who is told to make that choice. Does that serve us? We’re going to be civil and we’re going to nice our way into bondage.

Even though people like to act fake-offended at the idea that they’re being judged, we know good and well that we are all judging each other. We just happen to critique each other on the wrong things, like what we look like, who we love, what deity we worship, if any. Instead, we should assess each other on how kind we are, how we’re showing up for other humans, and how we’re contributing to the world’s problems, large or small.

The communities we belong to are an important part of our identity. They TEACH us what is acceptable, respectable, or tolerable, from the way we dress to the music we listen to, to the things we consider our core beliefs. None of your friends smoke? Well, you’ll be less likely to. None of your friends have a master’s degree? Where do you even start if you want to get yours? All your friends dress like members of the Addams Family? Then your seersucker shorts will probably seem out of place.

I am not a fan of asking folks to turn the other cheek in situations where they shouldn’t feel obligated to do so. On certain occasions, the insistence on taking the high road is actually harming us more than it’s helping. Putting harmony over justice and civility over amends is a harmful practice if we are telling people to constantly bypass defending themselves or standing against what is awry. I’m not for the kumbaya of it all. People read that Jesus told us to turn the other cheek and love our neighbors, but that is the SAME person who also flipped tables in a temple when folks did too much.

Imagine this: You and another person both start on the first floor in a climb to the top. You are taking big steps and quickly find yourself on the seventh floor. But when you look down, the other person is only on floor three. Sure, it warrants comparison because you started at the same place. The distance is more clear. The thing is, though, we don’t go up the stairs at the same pace. Our journeys are different. The dragons we each have to slay are different. Instead of comparing, our job should be to cheer each other on and tell each other to keep going. Maybe we even warn them of the dragons that await and share how we beat ours.

We challenge each other because if I’m your keeper, your underskirt can’t be showing on my watch. Your mistake can’t go unchecked; otherwise I’m leaving your back wide-open, when I said I got it. It’s about holding each other accountable and calling each other in (not out) when we fall on our faces. If you’re making piss-poor decisions, your friends should be able to pull you by your collar and tell you to get your shit together. A friend group that does that is a gift, and will always ensure that we are being the version of ourselves that we’ll be proud of. Otherwise, we’ll have to answer to them, and we don’t want that smoke. There are so many rewards to building a proper village that the accompanying fear isn’t worth it. Throughout my life, I’ve felt betrayed and abandoned and rejected by people who I let into my life. We’ve all felt it. It’s knocked me on my ass a few times. But I also think about what others have done for me or said to me that has lifted me up or pushed me forward. Those moments beat any of the betrayals. Those times attest to the need to never harden myself completely.

When we are afraid of having too much hope, we’re actually afraid of being disappointed

We are anxious about expecting the world to gift us and show us grace, because what if we end up on our asses? So we dream small or not at all. Because if we expect nothing or expect something small, we cannot be disappointed when the big things don’t happen. We think it’s a great defense mechanism, but what it really is is a liability on our lives, because we are constantly bracing for impact. When we are afraid of thinking things can be too good, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy

This shows up in real life when we don’t go after jobs we want because we already expect the answer to be no. We might not apply to the school we wanna go to because we think we have no chance in hell of being admitted. But what if we would have met a life helper or the love of our life there, or landed that perfect internship that would have led to the job of our dreams?

Life can absolutely be a filth bucket, even for people who TRY and STRIVE and DREAM. The difference is that those people can go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning knowing that they at least tried. They can take some small solace that they did what they could. Life’s shenanigans can be off-the-chart levels for them. But they blame life, not themselves.

It’s that they know that when they show up in their full splendor, they will be judged for it. Being ordinary and unremarkable is hardly a life goal, but we are often scared into being that way.

am always taken aback when people ask me how I am so confident. I am confident because I am constantly doing work to ensure that I do not lose sight of me, so I never have to go looking for me.

You might be wondering, “What if people are right if they say I am TOO something? How do I know I’m not ignoring valid critique?” Good questions. I ask myself a few questions when it comes to determining what we should consider credible and what we should consider compost. Is this thing hindering my personal growth? Is this thing harming someone else? Is this critique coming from someone who loves and respects me? If the answer to all three is no, then wipe your shoulders off, pick your head up, and keep it moving. Otherwise, let’s dig deeper on those questions.

A lot of fear fighting and professional troublemaking is confronting things that will knock us off our square. Things that will slap us into dizziness and make us forget everything we know is real. We need solid feet, rooted in something strong, to continue to stand. Knowing

It’s a great lesson in knowing your worth, standing in it, and demanding it, even in the face of people telling you you’re supposed to accept less. She knew her value. DO. NOT. ACCEPT. PICKLE. JUICE. Because again, people will do and give us the minimum that we accept. We’d love to think they will be virtuous, but people are selfish.

We’re so afraid of charging what we’re really worth because we fear that people will walk away. I say good riddance to bad rubbish. People who want to pay us pickle juice for champagne work have to get used to hearing no. Don’t come to undergrad with elementary expectations. Don’t come to this rice party with a kale dish. I’ve bent over backward for the opportunity to work with some companies before. I’ve charged what I knew was less than my value just to “build relationships,” and in the end all I felt was cheated. And THAT is the greatest suck of all. When you realize that you were taken advantage of and you let it happen, that’s also when you decide you don’t want it to happen again.

Friendship isn’t about keeping score for who is a better friend to who, or who has done the other more favors. It’s about showing up as needed, to the best of your ability and capacity. It’s about the action of it all. Friendship by word alone is empty and pointless. Simply be willing to show up, especially in times of need.

When we talk about friendship, it has to be reciprocal, right? You can’t just be expecting good friendships when you’re not a good friend yourself.

Our friends are part of the fabric of our lives. Pick the best people you know and hold on to them. Curate a crew of people who cheer you on, challenge you, check on you, and are committed to creating an awesome life with you. Recognize the people who are great at gassing you up, not watering you down. Find your people. Hold them close. And know you belong somewhere. While you do that, rise together.

What people see as you changing is really you doing what is necessary to meet your goals. It is you doing what is needed to honor your own boundaries. It is actually you trying to ensure that you aren’t placing everyone’s needs over your own like you used to.

We’ve all heard that if you end up with two or three people in this category, consider yourself blessed, which is a word. The besties are an important subgroup and everyone ain’t that. The True Blues are the people who know where all the bodies are buried, because they were probably right there with the shovel next to us. We can be our truest selves with them, without pretense or angst. They’ve seen us at our worst but hold space for us to make it back to our best selves. They will fight for us, even without our permission. They will come to our house and open our fridge like they live there. Your mom probably asks you how they’re doing once a month, and sometimes she doesn’t because they’ve called her already. The inside jokes are aplenty, and they’ve seen you in the morning when you still had eye crusties. Our True Blues aren’t automatically people we’ve known the longest. They are people who showed up somehow, at some point, and barreled their way into our hearts. We don’t know how to NOT trust them, because they’ve shown us over and over again that they are here to stay. Sometimes they’ll disappoint us and upset us, because we are all flawed. But friendship isn’t about perfection.

Conflicts will arise, but friendship doesn’t mean zero discord. Commitment through thick and thin doesn’t just apply to marriage but to friendships too. You will drop the ball and disappear from time to time because life happens to you, but one mistake or missed birthday does not mean you are disposable. Similarly, your friends will do the same. But when things arise that don’t work, talk through them, even if it means a tough conversation. Sometimes you can move forward, and other times you might not be able to.

It is always tempting to wanna take my friendship ball, lock the park, and go home. But if I had done that in 2006 when a close friend sent me an email to end our friendship, I wouldn’t have been emotionally available to meet the friend who would later become a True Blue, who moved mountains for me at a time when I truly needed it.

The best-case scenario is to find friends to cleave to and rise with together. Compare notes, be sounding boards and sometimes jumping boards. If or when you fall, be buffers for each other. People can be everlasting buffoons at their worst, but at their best, they are the soft place for us to land. So how do you do this? How do you build this community of people? Be intentional with building a squad that will ride for you, challenge you, hold you accountable, and pick you up in the valley moments.

As we are going through life, and people who know one version of us see us grow, we might hear them say, “You’ve changed.” Sometimes, it will hurt our feelings to hear, because that’s the intention behind the statement. They’re saying that we are no longer the old us and that they don’t recognize who we are. But what they’re really saying is THEY haven’t changed. They might be thinking we aren’t on the same level as them anymore and are projecting that onto us. And yeah, it’s really easy to be offended by it. We might be tempted to make somebody else feel better and say, “No, I haven’t changed. I’m still the same person.” We are wrong. We did change. We tried something new. We got new results. We changed our worlds. Maybe we’re not on the same level anymore, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean I’m better than you. It only means I’m different. Not changing is a detriment. What if we are supposed to spur positive change in everyone else? What if we are supposed to push everyone else out of their box? Instead of taking affront to the notion that we’ve changed, we should simply say, “Thank you for noticing. I’ve been working hard at being better.” Because to change is to adapt to challenges we’ve faced. It means we are adjusting to what life has thrown us and doing things differently. If the change they see is us being more cruel, hateful, and thoughtless, then maybe we can say, “Hmmm . . . I should adjust.” Otherwise, NAH.

In the meantime, I hope you shed the guilt of not being able to get everything done all the time. I hope you are gentle on yourself when you drop a ball. I hope you give yourself grace when you cannot handle everything facing you. Fire yourself from the expectation that you should be Superwoman or Thor.

Why do people prioritize civility over justice? Justice does not come just because you’re begging for it. Justice does not come because you’re being nice about the other person who’s not giving you justice. So I don’t understand the insistence on this high road. When you are in a fight for your life, when you’re in a fight for the world, when you’re in a fight against something like white supremacy, how sweet your tone is won’t be a factor in getting basic rights. You don’t civil your way to justice. And when we talk about folks protesting in the streets, people get mad because “Well it’s not orderly how people protest.” When half of the country is wishing for immigrants to be separated from their family members and we’re being told to be civil about it, what is civility doing for us? What is this niceness doing? We’re prioritizing the wrong thing.

It means in the times when it’s called for, and you will know those times, do not feel bad for meeting someone in the basement. This doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or you’re immature. It means you made a decision to engage with someone as they asked for it. Sometimes a good “BITCH WHO DO YOU THINK YOU’RE TALKING TO?” is warranted. Sometimes you gotta remind people that messing with you comes with a cost. It be like that, and folks gotta deal. And sometimes, taking no shit might even look like silence to the person who is trying to force you to pay attention to them.

Rape culture does not mean every man is a rapist. It does mean that we’re surrounded by a cultural atmosphere that perpetuates and enables the harming and violation of girls and women physically, emotionally, and sexually. (Men are also victims of this toxic mind-set.) Rape culture makes it easy for people who are abusive to injure women and makes it hard for women to feel safe.

Your TOO MUCHness is a superpower, and haters don’t wanna see you don your cape. So what do you do? Be so much. Be the full totality of you. Add some extra to the you-ness. Be TOO MUCH because no matter what you do and how hard you try, someone somewhere will still think you are TOO something. You #minuswell (might as well) give them real reason to think so. Be the Youest You That Ever Youed.

Toddlers are couthless. LORD. They are so couth-deficient. They'll tell you "those shoes look like my nightmares" without a second thought because your feelings don't matter to them. Yes, they might save you from embarrassing yourself when you go out in public by pointing out that you look like the radioactive stick they saw on their favorite TV show. But still.

It happens like this: Something fantastic happens, and you pick up the phone to tell The Competitor. They applaud you momentarily and then they remind you of something they did that was similar, but at a higher level. Every single time. They're so used to doing it that they don't even realize it, and you start telling them your good news less and less. If you tell them that you just got a new job, they'll tell you they've been promoted to Topflight Job Haver of the World. If you say you got an A on your paper, they'll retort that their paper was considered the best in the class. Their superpower is being able to make any good news you have into something about them, and you will eventually realize that they really do not wish you well. Your joy is an ever-present reminder of their failures, and nobody needs that in their life.

When your empire grows out of soil fertilized with the blood of a people, it must sustain its power with their continued bloodshed. The United States of America was built on the backs of Black and brown people, and it still stands on our necks.

Being quiet about race or not wanting to acknowledge it is being a part of the problem, no matter how nonracist you personally are.

am confident because I am constantly doing work to ensure that I do not lose sight of me, so I never have to go looking for me.

A lot of people think they have no platform. You do. Your platform is your kin, squad, colleagues. Do the work close to home so you can have far-reaching consequences. We are most easily moved by the words that come out of the mouths of our loved ones. —

A lot of fear fighting and professional troublemaking is confronting things that will knock us off our square. Things that will slap us into dizziness and make us forget everything we know is real. We need solid feet, rooted in something strong, to continue to stand. Knowing ourselves is important because it provides that foundation for us. It doesn’t allow anyone or anything to tell us who we are. Because when people tell us how amazing we are, that’s good to absorb. But what about when someone tells us we aren’t worthy? Or we don’t have value? Or we don’t deserve kindness and love? Or that we deserve paper cuts? To know thyself is to not take all the praise to head or take all the shaming to heart. To know ourselves is to write our values in cement even if our goals are in sand.

A lot of fear fighting and professional troublemaking is confronting things that will knock us off our square. Things that will slap us into dizziness and make us forget everything we know is real. We need solid feet, rooted in something strong, to continue to stand.

Knowing ourselves is important because it provides that foundation for us. It doesn’t allow anyone or anything to tell us who we are. Because when people tell us how amazing we are, that’s good to absorb. But what about when someone tells us we aren’t worthy? Or we don’t have value? Or we don’t deserve kindness and love? Or that we deserve paper cuts? To know thyself is to not take all the praise to head or take all the shaming to heart. To know ourselves is to write our values in cement even if our goals are in sand.

But my mother knew her mother’s gratitude, because she heard it herself. This lifelong soldier had dropped the reins and allowed herself to be fully in the hands of someone else. It was a show of strength, in her moment of weakness, to surrender herself to someone she knew would not let her fall. If love is a verb, is there a greater show of love than to abdicate your very being to the person you raised well enough to hold you up? What is pride when we can have love shown to us instead? I hope that one day we are surrounded by people who we trust enough that we can let go of our control. I pray that I’ll have lived a life that’s so good, I’ll be blessed with people who are a reflection of it. And those people, if needed, can be entrusted with my very life. I aspire to live in a way that I attract that favor.

When I wrote I’m Judging You, some people said: “You wrote a book admitting that you’re judging people?” And I said, “Yes, because I am.” We’re all actually judging each other. The problem is we’re judging each other on the things that make no sense: what we look like, who we love, the religion we practice, the color of our skin, the gender we say we are. Instead, we should be judging on other things: Are we showing up in the world in the best way possible? Are we being kind? Are we making sure that we’re holding ourselves accountable for other people too? When I say I’m judging you, I’m not judging you because of what you look like; I’m judging you by who you actually are.

A life well lived is not one where you made sure the rooms you were in didn’t have friction. A life well lived isn’t about plastering a fake smile on your face. A life well lived is not about how many people you did not upset. A life well lived is one where you commit to being kind. Where you connect your humanity to that of others, and it shows in the way you move through the world. And that’s what we gotta do. We will ruffle feathers. We might be the villains in a few people’s stories. We might even blow up a few bridges. But our worth is not based on how much we acquiesced to the people we knew. The goal is to betray ourselves less. So, be kind but take no shit.

To squad up is to form community with people who aren’t our blood. It is to create bonds and friendships and acquaintanceships with others, allowing them access to us. That access is tied by nothing but free will, and it can be revoked at will. THAT scares us. Our family? Well, they’re kinda obligated to stick around through our bullshit, but no one else is. That means we’re beholden to the whims of other humans who we’ve grown attached to.

Bold women rock with other bold women because we create space for each other and affirm identities society is usually so quick to denounce. We normalize each other’s bravado, which allows us to step into the world with confidence. It’s almost to the point where if you don’t stand up with your head tall, you’ll feel slightly out of place. The badassery of my friends usually reminds me who the hell I am and why I need to keep my chin square, and that is a gift I’ve gratefully received and will continue to.

You also need a strong village to hold you up in the times when you can’t. If people demean you or make you feel like you aren’t worth loving or defending, your squad will remind you of who you are. If you doubt everything you know about you, they bring you back to what you stand for. The real ones don’t go running after you fall on your ass. Who is there taking your hand and pulling you back on your feet? Remember them. My accomplishments might be half because of my drive and the other half because I don’t come from half-stepping people. The people who I love do amazing shit, so that’s also my job. If they were slackers, maybe I’d feel less pressure to always GO. Without competition or envy, we can compare ourselves to them with the lens of “Well if it’s possible for her, it’s possible for me.” My crew normalizes winning.

Mentors are the business version of “not your little friends.” They are essential because even though they aren’t your peers, they can be life rafts. Mentors might take the form of a college professor who became your favorite thought leader, an old boss who championed your work and made sure you got your next position, or someone you met at a conference, had great conversation with, and now have access to. Because mentors care about your life even outside of the business (because your personal life absolutely affects your career), you confide in them. They’re friends as well as guides. Mentors are incredible, because they can unlock doors in our lives. They can make our dreams more tangible, because they are invested in our success. We need a new job? Well, they might be able to make a phone call to someone who then makes a phone call to get us the interview we need to be considered. They actively ask, “How can I help?” without necessarily expecting anything.

When we go out of our way to people-please, it feels like a trauma response. It’s as if we are placing our value on being as agreeable as we can be in order to be loved or accepted. It is often self-betrayal. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be “nice,” but I don’t think that should be our goal. Granted, I’m not saying walk around with the intent of being an asshole. Nah. But being seen as cordial should not be the main motivator of our behavior. Instead, I think we should aspire to be kind. To be kind is to be generous, fair, honest, helpful, altruistic, gracious, tolerant, understanding, humble, giving, vulnerable, magnanimous, service-driven. To be nice is to smile a lot and be chatty with random strangers. Nice is talking about the weather. Kind is caring about whether someone has an umbrella in case it rains. People have niceness and kindness mixed up. Niceness might mean saying positive things. But kindness is doing positive things: being thoughtful and considerate, prioritizing people’s humanity over everything else.

I aspire to be kind, and I hope my actions are kind. I hope when I’m gone, someone somewhere describes me as such, because my life is a journey in giving as much as I’ve received. Kind is compassionate. And we can be kind and generous, but we need to take no shit. The first person we need to be kind to is ourselves.

There’s me getting married and realizing that I have to be less selfish and less me-me-me, and that I also have to work through my own trauma to make sure I’m not passing it on and projecting it onto my partner. Each one of these cataclysmic moments was deeply uncomfortable, agonizing, with tears (snot bubbles included), and shrouded by struggle. They had me doubting everything I knew to be true. I could feel my emotional bones stretching, and the growing pains felt physical at times. But each one of these incidents also led me to becoming the person that I am now. Even if I didn’t understand it in the moment, change always leads me to something greater. My life is a testimony to the instances when I’ve been forced to change, and the lessons that I’ve learned have always been greater than anything I could have imagined. And those lessons were stairs to the person I am now, and who I am now is another step to the person I’m going to be.