Be Useful

• You can explain that governors don’t have control over a global financial disaster-but the truth is, you get credit when the economy’s on the way up even though you have very little to do with it, so it’s only fair that you get the blame on the way down.

• If I bring this back to my constituents, they’d say, I am going to lose my next election to someone from my own party, because they’re going to say my support of this bill is proof that I’m either not liberal or not conservative enough. I’m in a “safe seat,” they’d say, and by supporting this bill I’d be making the seat unsafe…for me.

• They were talking about the impact of being from a gerrymandered district. I was blown away when I learned how extensive gerrymandering was, not just in California but with electoral maps all over the country, at every level. And that it has been going on this way for two hundred years! When it became clear to me that one of the big reasons no meaningful legislation got done was the way electoral districts were being drawn-every ten years by the same politicians who would benefit from redrawn boundariesI knew right then that we had to fix these It became a huge goal of mine as governor.
• You would think I was trying to take away their free supply of American flag lapel pins, judging by the reaction of people from both parties when I introduced a redistricting reform measure to the ballot in 2005. No one was happy about it. A lot of politicians were pissed off.

• Everyone said it wasn’t possible, it won’t happen, I couldn’t do it.

• Let me tell you something: Nothing good has ever come from having a plan B. Nothing important or life changing, anyway. Plan B is dangerous to every big dream.
• It is a plan for failure. If plan A is the road less traveled, if it’s you carving your own path toward the vision you’ve created for your life, then plan B is the path of least resistance. And once you know that path is there, once you’ve accepted that it’s an option, it becomes so, so easy to take it whenever things get difficult. Fuck plan B! The second you create a backup plan, not only are you giving a voice to all the naysayers, but you are shrinking your own dream by acknowledging the validity of their doubts.

• Worse, you become your own naysayer. There are enough of them out there already; you don’t need to add to their ranks.

• There’s a story about Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to summit Mount Everest. When he came back down to base camp, he was met by reporters who asked him what the view was like at the top of the world. He said it was incredible, because while he was up there he saw another mountain in the Himalayan range that he hadn’t climbed yet, and he was already thinking about the route he would take to summit that peak next.

• Fulfilling a dream gives you the power to see further and deeperfurther out into the world toward what is possible, and deeper into yourself to what you are capable of. It’s why there are so few stories about people who have done something big then just packed their bags and moved to a private island never to be heard from again. People who think big and succeed almost always continue to push and to strive and to dream bigger.

• Not surprisingly, the people who complain the most about not having enough time do the least amount of work.

• Let me put it another way: busyness is bullshit. We’re all “busy.” We all have things to do every day. Obligations and responsibilities. We all have to eat, sleep, pay the bills. What does that have to do with putting in the work to reach your vision? If it matters to you, make the time.

• When a couple or a group comes in,” he said, “you need to figure out who is in charge, who is passionate about whatever it is you’re selling, who is the one who engages the most with you. You need to know who is the customer, who is the boss, and who is making the decisions.”

• This is the missing piece of the equation. Purpose. Vi sion. We aren’t giving young people the time and space to discover a purpose or to create a vision for themselves. We aren’t allowing the world to show them what is possible for their lives. Instead, right at the point where they have the least to lose and the most to gain from spending time out in the world, we’re plucking them out of it and sticking them in four-year universities, which are the exact opposite of the real world.