The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

And she knew that most likely the vote would not come in her lifetime. “Not in our day,” she wrote, “but we must work on for future generations.”

“No man can know what power he can rightly call his own unless he presses a little,” he wrote. It was time to press.

The more successful she was, the more she had to face men’s rage, and this routinely brought to her doorstep withering moments of public excoriation and every form of low personal attack.

Susan’s diaries revealed the secret to her composure: She had early on learned not to take any of these public excoriations personally. She understood that they were not about her in any personal sense, but about social and economic issues far larger than herself.

Mastery is almost never the result of mere talent. It is, rather, the blending of The Gift with a certain quality of sustained and intensive effort—a quality of effort that has now come to be called “deliberate practice.”

You know that if you don’t go into training and suit up and show up every morning at your writing desk, these wonderful moments will in fact never happen. So you train as religiously as you can. Now you are hooked by dharma—by the magic of inaction in action.

In order to fulfill her dharma, she would have to master the art of public speaking, she would have to learn how to unleash her power in full view of halls of angry men and skeptical women.

Alas, it turns out that the process of unification requires saying “no” to actions that do not support dharma—saying “no” to detours, and to side channels of all kinds, even to some pretty terrific side channels. It requires snipping off all manner of “other options.” The root of the word “decide” means, literally, “to cut off.”

Frost’s early years were spent finding out who he was. But his later years were spent increasingly being who he was on purpose