Chinua Achebe Quotes

I never had a strategy about my life. I didn't have enough information to have a strategy. I'm the first person in my family to go to college. I had no family mentors.

i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

I've never known what I've wanted to do. I've never planned anything in my life.

Nobodys life ever goes according to plan. So why do we keep on planning? Because that's how we know who we are. By what we intend to be. By what we try to become. And fail. I don't say 'fail'. I saw we aim and miss. But we still hit something.

My life hasn't been conventional and it hasn't been linear. I've had to make it up as I've gone along, which has taught me a lot. If you don't accept the obvious options that are laid out for you, it's up to you to work out where you're going and to create your own specific rules and goals.

Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

It's important that people are open. Some people say, 'I'm going to be a doctor,' and they're a really good doctor. But for the rest of us, it's a big question mark. Just giving yourself a break, letting yourself try new things, and when something doesn't work out, moving along... it's all we can really do.

I didn't really chart things out, career-wise.

Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage. But we're less prepared for our Second Adulthood as we approach life after retirement, where there are no fixed entrances or exits, and lots of sand into which it is easy to bury our heads.

A lot of my time was spent searching, thinking and planning my life.

I don't really know how to build a career or what to do. But I have the instinct to keep doing different things so people can see different things.

I have always said that after sport, I wanted a life, I wanted an opportunity, I wanted to be able to do something. And if something happens - the economy falls out or the dollar is worthless, anything could happen - you have to be ready to work. And I'm ready.

When we go out to the university, the professors always say, 'Tell these students about your five-year plan and your 10-year plan,' and I say, 'Gee, we're lucky if we have a year plan.'

I love the idea of college, but I first need to figure out how to transition to being an adult because we honestly never thought I would make it to this point.

I grew up military but have met very few women that have a mission plan for when things don't work out. I attack everything like that.

I'm so jealous of people who in second grade knew what they wanted to do.

I never had planned for my life and my career.

For no reason I can think of, I've wandered far astray. And that is how I got to where I find myself today.

Sometimes it takes a partner to say, "What is it you want?" because I think we operate in life and sometimes we don't know. We're all in some kind of maze going after the cheese at the end, and we get it and we go, "What is it that we want?"

I'm not a big believer in linear paths. I would always have these sort of five-year plans and think, 'Ok, I wouldn't mind to try to get here in five years.'

First you must find your trajectory, and then comes the social coordination.

He did not know that the child who had asked for yesterday was now seeking to own tomorrow.

You've gotta have a path [in your life]. And then, within that path, you have to be flexible. When things aren't working, you've gotta cut bait and find something else, but if you don't have a path, you're just dead.

Have a baby, and you realize: The second you think you got sh-t figured out, you don't. It's the greatest wake-up call.

I don’t know what I’m doing in the next five minutes and she has the next ten years figured out. I’ll worry about making it out of ninth grade alive. Then I’ll think about a career path.