What I found is, really, you always have to begin by nailing what is true about you, because something that works very well for someone else might not work for you at all.
I do what works best for me, but it might not work for somebody else.
Nothing is true unless it works. And it has to work for you, not for someone else.
We also have a team that works really well together, that knows whose turn it is to pick up what someone else can't continue-the five of us work really well together and if someone says, "My plate is too full, I can't handle this," then someone else will always grab onto it.
Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.
You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.
When people do things to make your dream come true, you owe them in one way or another. Everyone understands that for every dream that comes true for you, there might not be a dream coming true for someone else. When we trade one wish for another, there's a price to pay. It works like that
We are actors who show up for work in our sloppy gear, and we've got this extraordinary tailor. It's someone else who's done the design; someone else who's cut the suit; someone else who's measured it. Basically, your job is to just wear it.
You never work for somebody else. Someone else might sign your check, but you're the one who fills in the amount.
You might be someone's favorite, but you might not be someone else's favorite. I will tell you that there was a [casting notice] that said "Tracee Ellis Ross type," but [the producers] didn't want to see me. I've been in this industry long enough to know that even if someone wants to promise me something, it doesn't mean that it's going to happen. There are so many things at play. But it was flattering and exciting.
When something works for you, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope that it will work for someone else.
You know, songs often have a very coloured past. They might have something about them but it still doesn't work, so someone else adds a bit, and someone else adds a bit so perhaps one day I'll know its full history.
Marches work, rallies work, civil disobedience works, direct action works, voting works, writing letters works, speaking to churches and schools works, rioting works.
If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.
Activism, to me, I don't know if it really works. It may work for somebody else, but it does not work for me.
The problem is there are so many stories out there where I can pull that superhero out, put any other superhero in, and the story works the same. For me, that's broken. I have to write a story that no one else but Aquaman or Shazam can be in, and as soon as you pull that character out and out someone else in, it doesn't work.