"Instead of letting your hardships and failures discourage or exhaust you, let them inspire you. Let them make you even hungrier to succeed," Michelle Obama
Susan dropped out of high school twice believing the lies teachers told her, that she wasn't smart enough to succeed.
Michelle Obama was lied to similarly by her high school counsellor who told her she wasn't Princeton material when Obama asked for assistance in applying.
Michelle graduated from Princeton University and then Harvard Law School!
Susan completed high school promising herself she would never set foot in a school again.
She obtained a minimum wage job and as she matured the teachers' comments continued to annoy her so she went to night school and found that she wasn't incapable of learning. Her first semester she received straight A's.
Susan is now an elementary teacher, attempting to give back to children what was taken from her.
"If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to accomplish the big things."
"You can't change the world yourself."
"If you want to succeed, don't back down from the sharks."
Listen to this TED delivery. This is what we learned as Marines. Thank you Admiral McRaven.
Be a Susan. Be a Michelle or a Gloria but whatever you do DO NOT BELIEVE THE LIES!
Michelle Obama, as the First Lady, was in London, UK with Barack who was attending a G-20 Summit meeting. Ms. Obama visited the Elisabeth Garrett Anderson School. 90% of the 900 students were black with 20% children of immigrants or asylum seekers.
She watched a Shakespeare performance then addressed the students;
"I, too, am from a working-class neighborhood, raised by a family of modest means and loving spirit, that I'd realized early on that school was where I could start defining myself, that an education was a thing worth working for, that it would help spring you forward."
"I knew these teenagers would have to work hard to be seen. They would have to push back against the stereotypes that would get put on them, all the ways they'd be defined. They'd have to work to find their voices and not be diminished, to keep themselves from getting beaten down." Michelle Obama
Ms. Steinem has been my mentor for decades. I remember as a little girl reading Ms. magazine and telling my Dad that I wanted to be a cowgirl version of Gloria.
Now I'm reading Michelle Obama's "Becoming" and thoroughly enjoying her story. Here is one of her many philosophies with which I agree.
"Instead of letting your hardships and failures discourage or exhaust you, let them inspire you. Let them make you even hungrier to succeed," Michelle Obama