“When we commemorate, we aren’t capturing our accomplishments and putting them behind glass; we’re relating to our own capabilities. We’re gathering ourselves together in a kind of kinship, acknowledging: yes, this happened, and I did good work, and that matters to me.”

“For a long time, I struggled to describe what I do—especially in the context of small talk, where nuance gets flattened. But if you asked me right now what I do, I’d simply say: I help people with their creativity.”

“The more my self-belief depends on an external, inflexible circumstance, the more anxiously I remain attached to it.”

“It is in direct relationship where you will build your most reliable self-trust, where things that are hard to believe will slowly start to feel less pretend and more apparent.”

“Discipline: the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience. From Middle English, carrying the sense of mortification by scourging oneself.

Um, is this what we really want to be?”