Quotes

Okay, so Cher once said, “Until you’re ready to look foolish, you’ll never have the possibility of being great.” And honestly? That’s one of those quotes that just crawls under your skin, hangs out for a while, and then suddenly smacks you upside the head when you least expect it.

I mean, who hasn’t chickened out of doing something because we were terrified of looking like an idiot? Me, many times. Karaoke nights, new dance classes, even daring to post my first piece of writing online—each one was a battle between “this could be fun” and “oh no, what if people laugh at me?” Spoiler alert: sometimes they did laugh. And yet, that’s where the magic happens.

The Fear of Foolishness

The thing about looking foolish is that it’s wired deep into us, like a bad ringtone from the early 2000s we can’t uninstall. Nobody wakes up thinking, “Today, I hope I embarrass myself in front of strangers!” But here’s the rub—avoiding foolishness usually means avoiding growth. It’s like living life with the training wheels still on your bike when deep down you know you’re ready to coast down the street with no hands, hair blowing in the wind, yelling something ridiculous like “I’m king of the cul-de-sac!”

Looking foolish is the down payment for greatness. You can’t skip it.

Cher Knows Stuff

Let’s be real: Cher is not exactly someone you’d associate with playing it safe. This is a woman who wore a full-on feathered headdress and sequins on TV when everyone else was still ironing their collars. She’s reinvented herself more times than I’ve reorganized my desk (and trust me, my desk has moods). If she says you’ve got to risk looking foolish, I’m inclined to listen.

My Foolish Resume

Okay, confession time. My personal foolish résumé is long. Here are some highlights:

• First Zumba class I taught: forgot half the choreography and ended up improvising a move I now call “panicked grapevine.” The students laughed, but you know what? They came back.
• Trying to speak French in Paris once: I asked for “pain de chocolat” (bread of chocolate) instead of “pain au chocolat.” The baker gave me the side-eye of doom. But he also gave me the pastry. Worth it.
• Publishing my first book: I hit “publish” and immediately thought, “Oh no. Everyone’s going to think I’m full of myself.” Instead, people actually bought it. Some even liked it!

See? Foolishness didn’t kill me. In fact, every time I stumbled, it shoved me closer to being better.

Famous Fools Who Became Legends

Here’s the fun part: the greats didn’t start out looking polished. They looked, well… kinda foolish.

• She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named got rejected by twelve publishers before Harry Potter found a home. Can you imagine pitching a book about a boy wizard living under the stairs, and everyone’s like “nah, pass”? Bet that felt foolish. But without those nos, we wouldn’t have Hogwarts.
• Lady Gaga used to perform in dingy New York clubs wearing bizarre, handmade outfits that made people roll their eyes. People thought she was weird. She leaned into it. Now she’s got Grammys, Oscars, and a meat dress in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
• Steve Jobs got laughed at when he insisted on making computers “beautiful.” People said, “It’s a machine, Steve, not a piece of art.” Guess who’s holding iPhones right now? Yeah.
• Oprah was told she was “unfit for television.” Imagine if she had listened. We’d all be Oprah-less, and the world would be a little dimmer without her couch-jumping guests and book club picks.
• Albert Einstein—get this—was considered slow as a child and didn’t speak fluently until around age four. Teachers thought he was dull. Foolish? Maybe. Great? Definitely.

What ties them all together is that willingness to look silly, to be dismissed, to be underestimated. And instead of hiding from it, they carried on, head held high, even if their shoes were untied.

Why We Need Foolishness

Greatness doesn’t spring fully formed from our heads like Athena from Zeus’s forehead. (Imagine the headache.) It’s messy, clumsy, awkward. Looking foolish means you’re trying something new, stepping off the well-worn path, and planting your flag in unknown territory.

Think about it: babies look foolish trying to walk. Teens look foolish figuring out their style. Artists look foolish showing off their early sketches. But without those stumbles, nobody ever becomes graceful, stylish, or skilled.

How to Lean Into It

So, how do we actually do this whole “embrace foolishness” thing without curling up into a ball? A few tricks I’ve learned:

1. Laugh at yourself first. If you trip in public, make it part of the show. (Bonus points if you bow.)
2. Collect your bloopers. Keep a mental list of times you looked silly. Later, they become great stories—sometimes even icebreakers.
3. Remember nobody’s watching as closely as you think. Seriously. Most people are too busy worrying about their own foolishness.
4. Channel your inner Cher. If she can wear a naked illusion gown on the red carpet in 1988, you can probably handle fumbling a Zoom presentation.

The Payoff

Here’s the good part: once you get comfortable with looking foolish, you stop caring quite so much about what other people think. And that’s where real creativity starts kicking in. Suddenly, you’re singing louder, writing bolder, dancing wilder, loving harder. You’re not tiptoeing through life—you’re strutting.

Cher nailed it: foolishness is the toll booth you pass through on your way to greatness. And the best part? The toll’s usually just your ego, and honestly, that thing can afford to be downsized.

So, next time you’re about to shrink back because you think you’ll look ridiculous—remember Cher. Lean into the foolishness. Who knows? Greatness might be right around the corner, feathered headdress and all.

So Bruce Lee, in all his lean, lightning-fast glory, once said: “I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.” Every time I read that, I feel like he’s looking directly at me—probably side-eyeing me, actually—like, “Hey buddy, stop twisting yourself into a pretzel just to make everyone else happy.”

And honestly? That hits.

The Sticky Web of Expectations

I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent way too much of my life playing the expectation game. Family expects one thing, friends another, society a whole buffet of “shoulds.” You should get a certain job. You should date a certain type of person. You should buy the house with the lawn and the matching mailbox. (Meanwhile, my dream mailbox would probably have a gargoyle perched on top, glaring at the mailman, so yeah—expectations and I don’t really vibe.)

What Bruce is saying isn’t just about rebellion for rebellion’s sake—it’s about freedom. Living up to someone else’s expectations feels like carrying around a backpack full of bricks. At some point, you either collapse under the weight or you shrug the whole thing off and walk away lighter.

The Messy Business of Being Yourself

Of course, the fun part about living outside expectations is that it’s messy. You don’t get a tidy roadmap. People give you that look—you know the one, the mix of confusion and mild disappointment, like you just told them you prefer pineapple on pizza or that you never watched Game of Thrones.

When I first started writing, I worried so much about what people would think. Should I write something “marketable”? Should I tone down the queer characters? Should I make my stories a little less… weird? (Spoiler: no, no, and absolutely not.) And here’s the kicker—when I finally stopped caring about writing what people “expected,” my work actually started resonating with the people who mattered. The ones who got me.

Expectation Is a Two-Way Street

The second part of Bruce’s quote is sneaky important: “…and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.” That’s the part we sometimes forget. It’s so tempting to judge people when they don’t align with our script for them. I’ll admit it—I’ve caught myself thinking, “Why can’t so-and-so just do it this way? My way? The obviously right way?”

But Bruce is basically handing us a hall pass for humanity. He’s saying: cut people some slack. Don’t expect them to orbit around your little planet. They’re the star of their own weird, messy, beautiful show, just like you are.

A Life Less Scripted

I think about this every time I do something that feels a little off-script. Like, the day I decided I’d rather spend money on French lessons than a new gadget. Or the time I started a project everyone said wouldn’t sell, but I did it anyway because it made me happy. There’s a strange peace that comes with knowing: hey, I’m not here to meet your checklist, and you’re not here to tick boxes for me.

It’s kind of liberating when you realize the only person you really have to impress is yourself. And even that can be tricky—I’m a tough critic of my own stuff—but at least I’m playing by rules I set, not ones handed down by some invisible committee of “acceptable life choices.”

Why Bruce Was Right (and Why It Matters Now)

Bruce Lee was a martial artist, sure, but he was also a philosopher in a tank top. He understood something we’re all still grappling with: expectations are invisible chains. You can spend your whole life rattling against them, or you can just, you know, snap them and walk out the door.

The world’s loud with voices telling us what we should be, how we should act, who we should love, what success should look like. But when you strip all that noise away, you’re left with a quieter, more honest truth: we’re just here to live, not to perform.

And maybe that’s what Bruce was really getting at. Life isn’t about role-playing someone else’s script. It’s about writing your own—typos, detours, gargoyle mailboxes and all.

Thanks for hanging out with me for this little ramble on Bruce Lee wisdom. Now I kind of want to tape that quote to my fridge, just to remind myself every time I reach for leftovers that I’m not on this planet to meet anyone else’s standards. (Unless the standard is not eating the last donut without offering it to someone first. That’s just basic manners.)

Full transparency—when I first read the quote “Having a dream you don’t pursue is like buying an ice-cream cone and watching it melt all over your hand” (thanks, Frank Papasso, for the messy visual), I immediately flashed back to one very traumatizing July afternoon when I bought a double-scoop mint chip cone and tried to “walk and eat” while wearing white shorts. Spoiler: the mint chip won. And it definitely melted all over my hand. And knee. And…ugh, let’s not relive that any further.

But honestly, it’s the perfect metaphor. We all do this. We get excited about something—we read an inspiring book, get hit with a genius idea in the shower, or watch a movie and think, “Yep, I’m gonna do that”—and then? Nothing. The dream sits there. Melting. Slowly turning into sticky regret syrup.

Dreams Aren’t Decorative

Dreams aren’t meant to be displayed on a shelf like those dusty Funko Pops we bought during lockdown. They’re meant to be used. Eaten. Savored. (Ideally before they drip down your arm and you end up crying in public.)

I have a friend who’s been talking about starting a podcast for, no joke, six years. SIX. He even bought a mic. He bought two mics just to be extra serious. He has episode outlines. He has a name. He even designed a logo—which honestly looks pretty legit. But the podcast? Still a dream. Still sitting in the “someday” drawer. And every time we talk about it, I can practically hear the theme music of lost opportunities playing in the background.

That’s a melted ice-cream cone moment.

You Gotta Eat It Before It Gets Ugly

You know that feeling when you first get a brilliant idea? It’s like opening the freezer and seeing your favorite ice-cream flavor waiting for you. You’re excited. You’re pumped. But if you just stare at it and never actually… grab a spoon… you’re basically just torturing yourself.

Want to write a novel but “don’t have time”? Same thing. You’ve bought the cone, you’re holding it, and then you keep scrolling TikTok while it drips onto your shoes. Yikes.

Want to travel the world “someday”? Travel doesn’t magically happen. You don’t wake up on an alpaca farm in Peru by accident (although wow, what a plot twist that would be). You plan it. You save. You book the ticket. You EAT THE CONE.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Fancy

Here’s the thing—I used to think that pursuing dreams meant you had to go big. “If I can’t write the perfect novel draft in one sitting, why bother?” That mentality made me stall for months. Meanwhile, other people were posting messy drafts and celebrating tiny milestones like, “Wrote 300 words today!” And I’d be like… “300 words? Psh.”

But guess who finished a book? THEM. Because they took little bites of their ice-cream every day while I was waiting for the “perfect moment” to enjoy mine (which never came, by the way—because life doesn’t come with perfect moments, it comes with sticky, half-melted ones).

A Little Melting is Okay (Just Don’t Let It Go to Waste)

Look—sometimes life gets messy. Sometimes the sun is beating down and the dream gets a little soft around the edges. That’s okay. Honestly, melted ice-cream is still ice-cream. It still tastes good. You just have to act before it disappears completely.

Start the business even if you’re not 100% ready. Write the first chapter even if it’s kind of bad. Sign up for the dance class even if you’re “not in shape yet.” You will literally never be fully ready. You just have to take the scoop and go.

Quick Reality Check Examples (a.k.a Little Bite-Sized Scoops)

• Want to learn French? Ten minutes a day on Duolingo is better than waiting for “when I have time for formal classes.” (though there are much better options out there than Duolingo)
• Want to start a blog? Write one post. Just one. Post it. Stare at it proudly.
• Want to run a marathon? Walk around the block today. Seriously. That counts.
• Want to start a YouTube channel? Record a goofy 30-second intro video. It doesn’t have to be Spielberg-level.
• Want to open a bakery someday? Start by baking muffins for your neighbors this weekend. Boom. First customer feedback.

Final Scoop

If Frank Papasso taught me anything (other than to carry napkins), it’s that dreams are fragile. They don’t wait around forever. And watching them melt without ever taking a bite? That’s not just sad—it’s kind of tragic. Don’t do that to yourself.

Go grab a spoon. Take one messy, imperfect, glorious bite right now.

Thanks for coming to my sticky TED Talk.