What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
What inspired me to work so hard and to maintain my determination was seeing my mother. She was an immigrant and was struggling in America to make it by; that inspired me to work hard.
The main reason I wanted to be successful was to get out of the ghetto. My parents helped direct my path.
Poverty was the greatest motivating factor in my life.
I was a girl and became a woman. Something about having the freedom at home to be in the position I wanted, to have the people I wanted, was empowering.
My ambition didn't grow out of nowhere. It was planted in me by a community that nurtured me.
My desire, my passion, was to help moms with practical encouragement.
My mother helped me to be who I am: to have strength and not to let people run all over me and yet to be humble; to realise that all of this that I have today could be gone.
My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.
My mother was a housewife. My father was a garment worker.
What got me motivated was my dad's idea that I go to Morehouse College in Atlanta. It's an all-black, all-male school. Martin Luther King went there. The most famous person in my class was Spike Lee. And I really caught fire. I was so inspired by the people around me that I went from C's and D's to straight A's by the time I left.