Raw

There may be more failures than victories. I've been blessed to have 24 Grammys, but I've lost 46 times. That meant rejection 46 times. Please don't ever feel entitled to win — just keep working harder.

My father spent the equivalent of a year's salary on my plane ticket to the US so I could attend Stanford. It was my first time ever on a plane.

We lose the freedom to be human.

When I asked if I had a future as a partner, I was told no. And when I asked why, they looked at me with a smile and said: because you're a woman.

The real version of this was that I was heartbroken, and I was scared, and I had no idea if I was doing the right thing.

The most traditionally successful people I know were divorced and they told me sacrificing their families wasn't worth it. Hold your children up high as your greatest inventions because they are.

When a grown man says he wants a cookie, he wants a cookie. The art of doctoring is negotiating with hope.

I was not someone who should have the life I have now, and yet I do. I was sitting in the chair you are literally sitting in right now and I just whispered, 'Why not me?' And I kept whispering it for seventeen years.

Real success requires step after step after step after step. It requires choice after choice.

Persist. Be patient. Be well.

When I was five or six years old, I remember watching TV and I would see these commercials... 'you can give 25 cents, save a child's life.' And I would think to myself, I wonder how many 25 cents I could save up to save all the kids in Africa. And I would say to myself, 'when I grow up, when I can get rich, I'mma save kids all over the world.'

My fear of failure never approached in magnitude my fear of what if. What if I never tried at all?