Purpose Statement

YOUR KINDLE NOTES FOR:

Becoming by Michelle Obama

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41 Highlights | 1 Note

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So far in my life, I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a vice president at a hospital and the director of a nonprofit that

helps young people build meaningful careers. I’ve been a working-class black student at a fancy mostly white

college. I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms. I’ve been a bride, a

stressed-out new mother, a daughter torn up by grief. And until recently, I was the First Lady of the United

States of America—a

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Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth,

they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

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aimless drive.

Sp

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Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.

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meekness I found perplexing,

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fearmongering

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inoculated

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vexation,

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surreptitiously

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ether,

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floundered

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gossamer

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Georgetown accent, which sits between a Low Country drawl and a Gullah lilt.

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pragmatic

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ambler.

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It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the

place itself unstuck.

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“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”

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idiosyncrasies,

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How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

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He steered himself with a certainty I found astounding.

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inborn confidence

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ephemeral:

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It hurts to live after someone has died.

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obscene

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sullen

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ruefully.

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eviscerate

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cronyism.

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strikingly serene,

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stuck to your principles, things would work out.

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felt Nairobi’s foreignness—or really, my own foreignness in relation to it—immediately,

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abysmal,

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I referred to lovingly as the Hole.

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my heart, I just believed there were better ways for a good person to have an impact.

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We live by the paradigms we know.

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catapulting

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bigotry,

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too, was from a working-class neighborhood, raised by a family of modest means and loving spirit, that I’d

realized early on that school was where I could start defining myself—that an education was a thing worth

working for, that it would help spring them forward in the world.

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But for me, they formed a meaningful constellation. These

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you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

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forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self.