The truth was I felt ugly growing up. I only really started feeling comfortable in myself when I was 40.

I suffer from low self-esteem. I had horrible self-esteem growing up. You really have to save yourself because the critic within you will eat you up. It's not the outside world - it's your interior life, that critic within you, that you have to silence.

Intelligence is sexy. Don't play dumb, especially young girls. Don't play dumb. And let people see that you are intelligent.

On a Friday night in 1983, I was in a taxi in New York riding home from dinner with friends. A drunk driver ran a red light and hit the cab, and I was thrown toward the glass partition. I tried to duck, but my face hit the glass, and the impact fractured my cheekbone, my eye socket, my collarbone and several ribs.

When I was 17 years old, I was given the opportunity to be trained as a wrestler. At the time, I never really thought about making it a career. I only saw it as a chance to do something that I always wanted to do.

I was cast in commercials, music videos, and booked a lot of modeling jobs. But my acting career never took off because I was holding myself back. I was acting across from male partners who didn't know that I am trans. I was being taught by teachers who didn't know.

If I would have planned it, I would have had what Gosling has, that kind of art-house career.

I'm not here to tell you what your average needs to be, but it would seem to me that one way to protect yourself, as an entrepreneur, from the dreaded average is to understand what that looks like in your industry, your business, and your personal life and take the steps to be above average.