People say to me, 'Has being a woman helped or hindered your career?' And the answer is yes.
I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
It wasn't until I had a platform and an opportunity like 'Being the Elite' to show people that I'm a real human being. Show people I have a personality. I think that's helped more than anything in my career.
When a man is forced into early retirement, he is often being 'given up for a younger man.' Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being 'given up for a younger woman' is for a woman... Why do many men get more upset by retirement than women do from the empty nest when their children leave home? When females retire from children, they can try a career; when a man retires from a career, his children are gone.
I'm a very stubborn person. I think it has helped me over my career. I'm sure it has hindered me at times as well, but not too many times. I know that if I set my mind to do something, even if people are saying I can't do it, I will achieve it.
It's challenging being a woman. There are other kinds of obstacles that come your way, but there are many times that being Latin has actually helped me, being a Cuban-American has helped me.
Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.
I cannot say that I have been hindered all my life by the permutation of genes that resulted in me being born a woman.
A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.
I loved being a student more than being in school. I was kind of the nerd type; I was more into my career and my studies than the dances and being popular.
I always think about my lifestyle when designing, so that's being a mother, being a career woman, being a wife, and being a woman who loves to entertain.
More than the hits, flops will have an impact on my career. In fact, flops helped me shape my career. They made me look at things from a different angle.
Both creatively and organizationally, being medicated has helped me immensely. My career did not start until I was medicated. And then I can track - the years I was off medication, things dipped. And the years I went back on medication is when things started to get good for me again career wise. It is 100 percent in my case undeniable that being medicated helped my creativity.
Being a woman in a male-dominated industry sort of sucks, but it doesn't suck any more than being a woman in the world. My advice? Be terrifying.
A faithful woman can become a devoted daughter of God - more concerned with being righteous than with being selfish, more anxious to exercise compassion than to exercise dominion, more committed to integrity than to notoriety. And she knows of her own infinite worth.
For me, that was a defining moment in my career, being at Chelsea, going through what has made me become a man in terms of my career. Even playing on the right wing helped my right foot, making me use it more, making me improve.