Too old at 72? Careful. Ageism is out. We'll have the law on you!
Didn't Lionel Richie just make a country album? No one is giving him a hard time... and God bless him - I love Lionel and should be able to do what he wants to do, like Madonna should, too. Both are having success and I applaud them. If you don't like it, don't buy it. The ageism criticism is getting old.
'Ageism,' or whatever you want to call it, is a very English phenomenon. You don't get it too much in many other cultures. And no one says it about authors or poets or filmmakers. 'Oh, they're too old to make films or write books.'
In the music world, ageism is a big issue. It's about youth and youth culture. There's no other art form that I know that requires you to be a certain age.
Don't program yourself to break down as you age with thoughts that decline is inevitable. Time may be passing for our bodies, but because they house our ageless souls, we never need to see ourselves as old and infirm.
Movies make you immortal and ageless.
Flaws make us all human, and you're rooting for characters because of those flaws. It's ageless if you're interested in relationships and the way people can or can't relate to each other.
When modeling agencies were saying that I was too big and gaining weight, my mom said, 'OK, we're going to discuss what they're saying over pizza, and we're going to plan the future of your career which doesn't involve you having to be skinny.'
You can't fall back on the private sector and say, 'You take care of the nation's banking system.' That's a fundamental function of the government, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC, etc. All of those agencies have a major role to play there.
You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.
Democrats fought to get health insurance for more Americans. Democrats fought for a strong consumer agency so big banks can't cheat people. We fought, we won, and we improved the lives of millions of people - thank you, President Obama!
All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.
If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.
Agency is a divine gift to you. You are free to choose what you will be and what you will do.
You're not just voting for an individual, in my judgment, you're voting for an agenda. You're voting for a platform. You're voting for a political philosophy.
My voting rights agenda is not that different from what you'd see in H.R. 1.
Others have said it before me. If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu. And so it is important that we have women in the United States Senate - strong women, women who are there to help advance an agenda that is important to women.
So, I'm lying on the couch and Laura walks in and I say, 'Free at last,' and she says 'You're free all right, you're free to do the dishes.' So I say, 'You're talking to the former president, baby,' and she said, 'consider this your new domestic policy agenda.'
Approach the game with no preset agendas and you'll probably come away surprised at your overall efforts.
It's all about tuning out the noise, tuning out all the stuff that simply doesn't move the game forward - the doubt, the personal agendas, the often deafening fear of judgment and the need to please - so that you can ultimately get to that place of quiet, of calm, where you can focus on what really matters.
