A Quote by Jackie Joyner-Kersee

It's important to me to try and expose young people to the things they believe are off-limits to them. I tell them, 'There are no walls, only the ones we put up.' My advice to young people looking at my life is not to follow my footprint but to go out there and make their own.
I always try to be a trend setter. That's what I always tell young people when I'm giving them advice. To go with their heart and don't follow the trends.
When you go home tonight, make a list of the people who are impediments, who don't believe in you, and call them up and tell them, 'Get the hell out of my life.' You don't need them. Writing is tough enough without having people around you who contribute to a writer's insecurity.
It's important for people to believe in themselves. It's important for young girls to have the opportunity to excel and promote themselves, and learn how to communicate and that they can be individuals, yet accomplish so much. The Girl Scouts and other organizations like them make that so important, so vital. Girls are given the opportunity very early in life to give them that confidence in themselves. It's crucial for organizations to support young women.
You put as much effort as you can when they're young into trying to teach them to be good people or make them the best they can be, and they're older now, my kids. I'm at that stage where I let them go, and you just hope that all that nurturing you did earlier on sticks, and you launched good people out there.
We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.
I really try to avoid, you know, rolling out the history. The people are so important to me, and what happens to them, how they react, how things happen to them, this is what is important. I feel that if I can tell THAT story well, then people will go and Google the rest and fill in what they need to know.
When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
The problem is, you can't tell people these things. They'll think you're crazy. And I say to myself: What can I do with this life inside me? I'd like to give it ... to make a present of it ... to go up to people and tell them: You need to be joyful! You know? You have to play at being pirates ... to build cities of marble ... to laugh ... to set off firecrackers
Superhero power... I probably would just want to fly. I definitely would not want to be able to see through walls. I think walls are there for a reason. People put them up for a reason. You don't want to be looking through them. That would only cause nothing but misery and angst to know what's happening behind people's walls.
This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. You're up for a promotion. If they go for a woman, it'll be between you and Barbara. Don't be fooled. You're not in competition with other women. You're in competition with everyone.
I try to encourage young people to follow their dreams. Even if you're born in an urban community it's always something available to you whether it be a dance class or whether you do really good in school and you can get a scholarship. So if you just put your mind to it and if you educate people enough and they know that they can find resources to help them get to where they need to go then that's really important.
A lot of the young people make beautiful films or big films or are able to finance them, but they can't get anyone to distribute them, they can't get anyone to see them, so they go to these thousands of film festivals. So I still believe that even though a young kid might be able to make a masterpiece or something that changes the direction of cinema, the issue of how to get it to people is still not solved.
When I do a cooking class now, I tell people that the most important part is to read the recipe many times so you know what you're doing. What I don't tell them, though, is that sometimes I do parties where I'm rushing so much I don't have time to follow my own advice.
I get a lot from all young people. I make movies for young people. If I made pictures for people my age, no one would see them. I hang with young people all the time.
There are young people having babies every day that cannot possibly take care of them, and, as people who believe that every life is beautiful, we need to make them aware of another choice - to give that beautiful life up for adoption.
I'm always thinking about young people first when I'm writing music. Whenever I can reach that young person and inspire them to go after their own dreams, start their own movement just like I did with Wondaland. Starting their own tribe and showing people that we are not all the same, we're not all monolithic. I think that's what it's all about for me.
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