Justine Musk

The world doesn't throw a billion dollars at a person because the person wants it or works so hard they feel they deserve it.

What is it that you're not doing - in your work, in your life - because you feel you need permission? If someone had given you that permission as a youngster, what do you think you'd be doing now?

I don't believe that we - and this holds true for both genders - have as many choices as we seem to like to think.

From childhood on, both males and females learn to do whatever we need to do to get the attention we need to survive. We fashion ourselves accordingly. And then, should that attention ever go away, it's only natural to do the same things we've always done, rely on what we've always relied on, in order to make it come back.

Artemis women often have difficult childhoods. She's the kid who seeks comfort in the woods, or animals, or books. If trapped in an authoritarian family, she blends in to get by - but keeps a fierce autonomy inside her head and heart, looking to the day she breaks free.

Every time a confident, successful woman like Marissa Meyer distances herself from feminism, I think of Athena. Athena women, with all their brilliance and strategy, are the ones smashing up through layers of glass. They tend to identify with men, keeping femininity at a distance.

I've learned to separate my fears from my intuition and, at times, to follow my intuition through the fear.

We live in a culture that celebrates determination and hard work, but understand, these are the qualities that keep you in the game after most everybody else has left - or until somebody bigger and stronger picks you up and hurls you back out to sea.

Extreme people combine brilliance and talent with an insane work ethic.

Extreme success is not like other kinds of success; what has worked for someone else probably won't work for you.

A lot of people work extremely hard and through no fault of their own - bad luck, the wrong environment, unfortunate circumstances - struggle to survive.

We live in a culture that does not encourage women to be epic heroes of their own Big Stories but the mothers and lovers and wives and mistresses and muses and personal assistants, the femme fatales and fantasies and manic pixie dream girls, in someone else's Big Story, and this someone else is usually a dude.