I stayed on the path out of fear, not of being eaten by a wolf, but of being cut, being benched, losing my paycheck. If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing it would be this: "Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood; you were always the wolf."

The first thing to recommend is that they don’t work in some place that they don’t like, that they don’t do things that they don’t like. That they look for what they really want to do and what kind of thing they want to be involved in, or if they want to go it alone by themselves, to find that.

You must find a way to get in the way, you must find a way to get into trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble.

Invent your own game and that way you can always be a winner.

I feel that because I challenge myself so often, sometimes I will fail. This is, to me, the essence of competition — that there will be both winners and losers. But I have great faith in myself that I will turn this loss into something positive.

One of my favorite lessons is best summed up in the words of an old Athabascan Indian who told me, “There are many hard things in life, but there is only one sad thing, and that is giving up.”