Jennifer Lopez is one of the women chosen as People of The Year by People Magazine (and there are only women, which is cool), the others being Michelle Obama, Jennifer Aniston and Taylor Swift. It is truly Jennifer’s year, and she’s getting Oscar buzz for her superb performance in Hustlers, in which she showed incredible physicality along with some serious acting chops. She never overacted, she really embodied that character and she was mesmerizing on screen. In her interview with People, a clip of which is on their website, she explained her work philosophy and gave some of her mottos for living. This was both funny and inspiring to me, particularly because Kaiser and I talked on the podcast about Lopez’s outlook. If you’d like to listen to that, it’s at about 19 minutes in to episode 34. That part is only about a minute. We were talking about Duchess Meghan’s naivete when it came to her relationship with Prince Harry and how she lives an affirmation-based life. Kaiser brought up the fact that Jennifer Lopez is like that, that she has blinders on and only sees the positive. She comes across like that here too. In the excerpt below I’m combining some of People’s print interview with some of what she said in the video.

“It just shows you that dreams come true,” Lopez tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover, where she and three other stars are celebrated as PEOPLE’s People of the Year.

“But you have to work at it and not give up. The key is the not giving up part. For me, it’s not a choice. You can’t stop.”

“It’s been blessings on blessings on blessings,” she says.

“I feel more confident and at peace with who I am and more aware of what I bring to the table, but that was a huge journey,” says Lopez, who calls being mom to her 11-year-old twins, Emme and Max, her “number 1 job.”

“When you find you, really find you, that’s when everything starts falling into place.”

“I love what I do. Singing, dancing, performing, creating, producing. All the things that I do I love all it. If nobody ever said ‘hey you did good,’ I’d still do it. It’s nice when you get to that point where you feel like you’re seen in a way that you haven’t been seen before. I have had incredibly wonderful years throughout my life so far, but this year for sure is something extra special.

“I feel like I’ve been working towards something and I didn’t know what it was and maybe it was this year. All the hard work and all the heartbreak and all the things that I’ve been through personally and all the beautiful things too. All of it together has kind of come to this moment where people are kind of seeing me, not that they haven’t, they’re probably sick of me they’ve seen me so much over the years. They’re recognizing me. They’re looking and going ‘oh you’re doing good. We’re really proud of you and happy for you and we see it.’”

[From People]

This reminds me of a Ted talk I listened to recently about how we change throughout our lives. We often think, at every moment, that it all led up to this and that this is the person we were meant to be. In reality nothing is static in our lives and we’re constantly evolving. I feel that way too, that this was the person I was destined to become. I’m not shading Lopez for that, it’s just human nature, as is thinking that we’ll be happy when we reach that milestone, when we lose that weight, when we get that person to love us. In reality happiness is just a feeling and something we tell ourselves. We see that all the time when we look at famous, successful, rich-beyond-our-wildest-dreams people holding grudges, having addictions they can’t shake and still chasing that thing or person they’ll never find. Lopez isn’t like that, she has gratitude, a hard work ethic and strives to be down to earth while still openly loving luxury and nice things. That’s why we’re happy for her, she’s reached the stratosphere of success and she’s got that movie star quality while remaining the kind of person we’d like to be.

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Gotham awards….? #hustlersmovie

A post shared by Jennifer Lopez (@jlo) on Dec 2, 2019 at 4:29pm PST

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