#442: SPOTLIGHT: Leonore Nielsen

#442: Leonore Nielsen

Oct 7, 2025

A Backbeat of Community

Question for Leonore:

What is one thing that is small and perhaps nuanced or surprising and perhaps typically sub conscious that you can tell drives you each day ?

Leonore's Response: 

What drives me each day isn’t a noble calling or a laminated vision board with Amalfi sunsets, but something smaller and less photogenic: spite. Not the fiery, Bond-villain kind — though I’d take the swivel chair — but the subtler, more useful kind. The memory of being underestimated or told I couldn’t do something. That’s the stuff. It lodges in my subconscious like a popcorn kernel, and years later, I leap out of bed just to prove that person wrong. I’m running a marathon purely because my cousin once said I “don’t seem very outdoorsy.” Call it petty — I call it renewable energy. The unkillable satisfaction of denying my enemies even a small victory.

People call it ambition, but really it’s that tiny subconscious itch: the refusal to let some smug comment become prophecy. It’s like a private gym, only instead of weights I’m lifting invisible expectations — and getting the satisfaction of proving them wrong.

Spite doesn’t wilt with bad Wi-Fi. It just hums along, patient and alert. Kale rots. Affirmations sour. Spite? Spite is forever.

It doesn’t need sunrise journaling or life coaches named “The Goal Whisperer.” Just a long memory, a faint grudge, and the exquisite pleasure of proving people wrong — again and again.