To tell you the truth

You have never known the real me

You always thought you did

But I am really as wide as an ocean

And you only saw one end

I let you go on believing it because you liked it

Why show you more if you already found

What you were looking for and risk losing your love?

I liked the part of me you liked

But I liked, even more, the fact that you liked me

Starved for attention, flattered to be cherished by you

This was me when we courted

I wanted above all

To know that I was worthy of the affection of someone like…

Since late March I have been to my family’s mountain home in the French Alps. I came here to spend the lockdown with my dad. Unfortunately, my dad got Covid-19 and died. Now it is just me and my toddler. My three older kids stayed in San Francisco with my ex-husband. I miss them terribly. I don’t know how much longer I will need to stay here. There are many things to deal with for my dad’s estate and back-and-forth travel from the USA isn’t a good idea right now. Six months prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, I had given up my house in San Francisco and put many things in storage. I moved to San Diego into short-term rentals. It wasn’t hard to pack up and come to France. But, with one suitcase, I did not plan on staying this long. I thought Covid would be over by the Summer. …

People who achieve success definitely don’t practice work-life balance. Talent, luck, timing, and connections can contribute but one thing is certain: they work a lot. I don’t mean forty-hour workweeks. Try more like sixty or more hours.

Let’s look at the work habits of some of the greatest achievers in different areas: Elon Musk, Oprah, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Kobe Bryant, Jeff Bezos, Lady Gaga, Vanessa Williams, and Meryl Streep. What do they all have in common? …

Do you roll your eyes at social media influencers and think they are mostly pathetic, attention-grabbing fake people? While clearly, some are cringe-worthy, times are changing. Building a personal brand is becoming mandatory in the modern world for EVERYONE. People without one will regret it.

Now I am suspicious of anyone under fifty who says they don’t have social profiles. What are they hiding? Are they anti-social, in general? What is wrong with them?

Let me set it straight for the record: I am a Gen Xer. My generation did not grow up with the Internet. It may feel like a different time period altogether because it was. My parents had a rotary phone (Millennials, you can google that) and I listened to cassette tapes in my bedroom as a teenager. We learned DOS computer systems in school. …

What is holding you back? It may just be all in your head. What starts off as a minor detail can become a life-long stigma if you allow it to. “I am (insert limiting belief).” Whether you are conscious of it or not, we all do this to ourselves our entire lives. What is your limiting belief and are you willing to challenge or even dare to eliminate it?

“The only limits you have are the limits you believe.” — Wayne Dyer

These limiting beliefs don’t show up on their own. The catalyst comes from treatment by someone else: parents, relatives, friends, or even teachers. The younger we are, the more influenced we are by others’ opinions. Words are weapons. …

I was raised to believe that hard work was the path to success. Born in America to immigrant grandparents, it is no surprise that a strong work ethic was instilled upon me at birth. It wasn’t until college when I studied Economics that I realized that wealthy people didn’t work harder. In fact, sometimes they worked a lot less than poorer people. Ironically it even seems that some may have spent more time on golf courses or at charity galas than behind a desk. It seemed they simply made smarter decisions, especially how to make more money with money, and built strategic business relationships that paid off. While my grandparents were living paycheck-to-paycheck and trying to get overtime hours to pay for things, I studied businesspeople who did not go to work every day but had learned how to generate passive income. They made money whether they worked or not. …

Sometimes we sincerely feel lucky or unlucky.

“You are just pulling one bad thing upon another onto yourself!” a Facebook acquaintance commented upon hearing about my dad’s death of Covid-19 in 2020. Anger flashed and I blocked him. But I couldn’t help but feel deep down that maybe he was right. Luck had not been on my side for quite a while.

What is Luck?

Some people seem lucky: they have so many things go right for them. …

First, the Facts That We Know

Johnny Depp met Amber Heard on the film set of the movie, Rum Diary, in 2009. The two married in 2015. Their marriage only lasted fifteen months. Not only that but when Amber filed for divorce in 2016, she claimed physical violence. The drama continued when she publicly wrote about domestic violence in the Washington Post in 2018. While she didn’t name him directly, the article was very damning for Depp. Depp sued the British tabloid, The Sun, for calling him a wife-beater. He lost. Depp was at first defended by but then later asked to resign from his role in the series, Fantastic Beasts. He was also fired from The Pirates of the Caribbean movies just days after Heard’s public domestic violence claims. He claimed following the libel suit loss that he had lost 650 million dollars made from his Pirates of the Caribbean movies. He was also denied the request to appeal to the UK libel loss. …