And I tell kids all the time, you can live in other people's negative impressions about your worth or you can chose to say, ok, however the door got open, it gets open a lot of different ways for a lot of different people: the legacy kids who have parents who are alumni, the athletic kids who get in through a different door as well, lots of people get in through a lot of different doors. The real bottom line is what do you do once you're there and if you do something good and prove yourself worthy, nobody can take that away from you."
3. You Don't Have to be the Smartest, But You Have to Persevere
"I tell [kids] something that President Calvin Coolridge said: 'There's a lot of talented people out there, a lot of people with high IQ's and big genius, a lot of well-educated people, but the people who succeed are the ones with perseverance.' And in some ways that's what I found."
4. Understand That Not All Relationships Will Survive
"[My ex-husband and I]started dating and we continued to date through high school and got married just as we were graduating. He decided to forego going to school immediately and to follow me to law school at Yale. He took a job. We lasted through that, through law school.
And then he went on to graduate school and I started working. It was during that work period where my hours were insane, I got up at something like 5:00 in the morning, Kevin drove me to the local train station and then I commuted sometimes close to an hour and forty-five minutes to work and at the end of the day I had to reverse that commute. So I wasn't getting home until 9:00, 9:30 at night. That didn't leave much time for intimacy, and I'm not talking about sexual intimacy.
As hard as he was working, I was having successes at work. My first year at work, I had been among the first group of prosecutors to be moved up to felonies and he was realizing, that for whatever reason, that it was going to be tough for him. He might succeed, but he might not catch up with me."
5. Know When to Step Outside Yourself
"I tell shy children all the time, it's really hard to overcome sometimes but you can use that shyness to your advantage if you can figure out the moments when you have to step out of it and that's really the key to success, which is you don't have to alter your style altogether. You just have to figure out when you need to step aside from it to get something done."
6. Compete Against Yourself
"I try to best me. I set goals…I set the bar. I went to college and in my first semester, I got three B's and an A. I'm not even sure I can remember why I got the A, it had to be because I took a course where I didn't have to do writing… The next semester I wanted two A's and two B's, and I did that. And then I kept increasing it every year so that by my junior year, I was getting all A's. That's how I've done it."
7. Be Patient
"I want to become a great justice. Justice Stevens said to me during my first year in one of our exchanges: 'Sonia, no one is born a Justice, you grow into it.' And I've only been on the court three and a half years. It will take me a long time to reach the goal of being a great justice but I am working at it."
8. Let Your Fear Drive You
"I am often asked, what's the greatest obstacle you ever experienced and I tell them it was my own fear. That's a thing that keeps most of us back is letting fear paralyze you instead of being stimulated by it. To face it, to accept it, to stare it in the face and say, ok, I may fail but it's alright to fail because I tried and I may learn something from it."
9. Don't Go it Alone
"It's alright to say I don't know and to go look around your life to see who knows better than you and go ask them for help."
10. Revel in Moments of Accomplishment
