You can't just sit around in leopard-print slippers and drink champagne all day and think everything's gonna work out somehow.

In a world where your interactions with humans are solely about rating one to five, two things happen: One is all humanity is lost in the name of fake pleasantries and also there's no nuance to that system. There's no room for complex interactions that are rich and meaningful.

I hate this phrase, but it's a "can do" attitude [that's important] that, whatever you do in life, you should have.

If the doors aren't open, just kick them in and keep walking.

People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.

You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.

A million years ago, when doing research about the world of municipal government, one thing that struck me is how often people's job titles changed - from one department to another, from the public to the private sector and back again. People move around a lot, everyone has her eye on some other, slightly better situation in some other corner of city hall. Plus governments are constantly shuffling and reorganizing and shuttering or condensing departments - they are often byzantine hodge-podges of fractured org charts lying atop a bed of shifting sand.