20 One Sentence Reminders For Ambitious Young Women Starting Their Careers

1. If you’re capable of doing something when you feel like it, you’re capable of doing it when you don’t.

2. As Marcus Aurelius says, “it can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.”

3. No place will be better than where you are now, unless you learn how to appreciate where you are now.

4. People assume the key determinant of success is talent, but it is actually prolificness, and that’s what you should use as your gauge of how “right” something is for you – whether or not you can do it every single day.

5. Trust the feelings that guide you toward actions that make you the person you want to become.

6. Do not trust your feelings blindly, and certainly not just on the basis of them being “strong” – learning to override some compulsions, fears, and false beliefs is the essence of healing, achievement and personal development.

7. There will be a difference between the life you think you want, and the life you actually want – embrace it.

8. Slipping into career addiction is the easy way to avoid the harder things in life – like love, and friendship, and enjoying a Sunday afternoon – so don’t let it be your story.

9. You are not the sum of what you aspire to, you are the sum of what you do each day.

10. The more you talk about how accomplished you are tends to be proportionate to how unaccomplished you feel.

11. If you can’t communicate your goals in a sentence or two, you’re not clear enough to achieve them.

12. No one opportunity is the entryway to the life you think you want – what you do with every opportunity, every step of the way, determines your success.

13. Being “busy” or constantly overwhelmed doesn’t make you look like you’re important, it makes you look like you can’t manage your time or your life.

14. Treat the intern the same way you do the CEO.

15. Assume you are entitled to nothing, work as though you are capable of anything.

16. Your fears can tell you much more about what you do want than they tell you what you don’t.

17. Be cautious about how many people you share your ambitions with, and how frequently you speak of them – you will condition yourself to being applauded for talking, not doing.

18. Anything you say can work for or against you, and what will determine that is your tone.

19. Genuinely successful people don’t have to convince other people that they are very successful.

20. No, your career will not wake up and tell you it doesn’t love you one day, but your job, and the people in it, are under absolutely no obligation to love you in the first place – you are the only person responsible for that.