“The thing women have yet to learn,” Roseanne Barr once said, “is that no one gives you the power. You just take it.” I thought of those words the other day, reading about the memoir Donna Karan will publish this week. Karan set up her own label in 1984, after being fired from a job at Anne Klein; she says what she mostly remembers of that time is terror, not excitement. She sold the company 27 years later for $643m, although she almost lost her nerve and backed out of signing the papers at the 11th hour. In other words, Karan achieved what she did not because she possessed the supreme self-confidence that usually marks the alpha overachievers, but while having self-doubt as well as self-belief. She was a normal person and she took the power anyway.
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