The Best Advice I Ever Got (16 page)

Madeleine K. Albright

Sixty-fourth Secretary of State of the United States, Chair of Albright Stonebridge Group

Never Play Hide-and-Seek with the Truth

I was born in Prague shortly before Germany invaded in what proved to be the opening act of World War II. My parents and I escaped to England and spent the war there. My father worked for the Czechoslovak government-in-exile while I attended a series of schools, including, at age six, the Ingomar School in Walton-on-Thames. My report cards were generally favorable but also indicated that I “took a little while to settle down” and needed to work harder to “avoid careless slips.” These admonishments reflected my state of mind. As a Czechoslovak girl in a foreign land and the eldest child of busy parents, I was full of energy and the desire to please.

During recreation periods at school, the entire student body divided into Harry Potter–like teams that earned points for various activities. When I first scored points for my team, I reported the accomplishment to my father, who praised me. Eager to elicit more signs of approval, I began to recount exploits for which I was supposedly awarded additional points; these heroics included, as I recall, pulling my teacher out of a rosebush. Pretty soon I had racked up such a high score that I decided to invent a special award. That evening I burst through the front door of my house saying that I had won the Egyptian Cup. My beaming parents asked me to bring the trophy home, which obviously I could not do. In desperation, I thought up a whole series of new lies to tell about how awful everyone was being to me. “They even make me sit on needles!” I exclaimed. My ever-protective mother insisted on rushing to school to find out what injustices were being inflicted upon her poor child. The appalling truth came out, and I was punished with appropriate severity. In later years, whenever a story I was telling seemed at odds with the truth my parents had only to say, “Egyptian Cup,” and I stopped.

The moral of the story is: Never play hide-and-seek with the truth, because those who try too hard to build themselves up will have no one else to blame when they come tumbling down.

Nia Vardalos

Academy Award-Nominated Writer and Actress

Be Polite

I don’t like conflict.

I’m a middle child and I’m Canadian.

So, to me, rudeness is a foreign language.

I’ve been very fortunate to work with wonderful actors, producers, directors, and crews.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
was my first film experience, and the producers treated me like gold before that movie made a dime. Perhaps that’s why I continue to make movies with them. Or maybe it’s simply because they’re polite. They have good manners.

I think good manners come from good parents.

I’m a parent now, and of course I want to be good at it, so one day I went to my daughter’s kindergarten class to observe. I was surprised to see that she and her classmates had already figured out that a temper tantrum doesn’t resolve anything.

Sometimes, on movie sets, people act like babies. I just want to pass out the diapers and pacifiers when a director yells at the crew, or producers shriek at underpaid assistants. I’ve heard cinematographers make snide remarks about actresses’ looks. And the thespian hissy fit makes me wonder if maybe someone was weaned off the breast a tad too soon.

The reason for this rude behavior is simply this: Making movies is a lot of pressure. And some people aren’t able to handle it. In tense circumstances, people act out. They forget their manners.

For me, filming a movie is like hosting a party. I like to see that everyone has a drink and a snack, is mingling, smiling, and then … let’s act.

Sure, I’ve seen conflict. Being passive on a film set is not the norm. Filmmakers are opinionated, passionate people. Disagreement, even loud, vehement arguing is fine, even healthy, and it usually leads to a better solution and a more original film. But that’s not what I mean here. I’m talking about the adult tantrum. I mean … that one strange person who’s not fun to be around.

The truth of the matter is, every time you start a new job, in any field, everyone sizes each other up. People wait to see who’s the chatty one, who’s the needy one, who’s high-maintenance, who’s moody. And usually one person will reveal him- or herself to be the Problem. That person is usually the one who can’t handle the pressure and who wasn’t given—or didn’t heed—the parental guidance on how to resolve conflict. And, inevitably, disputes do come up in most work environments. It’s how you deal with conflict that matters.

There are people who just need chaos. Perhaps it’s a way of trying to achieve power, or maybe it’s just emotional immaturity. Maybe it’s a deep psychological desire to re-create the environment they were raised in. Whatever the reason, some people need to be surrounded by angst. And these people get annoyed when they can’t create drama. It’s almost as if they want to pull others into that pit of bad behavior.

So my advice is this: Don’t let them.

I suggest that, when encountering rudeness, you respond with politeness. Take the high road and invite that person to join you. If he or she persists—well, then the game is on.

I’ll let you in on a little secret here. We middle-child Canadians are nice. But we’re not idiots. So the ruder people get, the nicer I become.

It drives them nuts.

If someone yells, just laugh at the fun, loud noise the person’s making. If he or she makes sarcastic comments, act as if you don’t get it. The more the person boils, just break into song, hug other co-workers, treat everyone to pizza and drinks. Simply refuse to let the energy vampire suck the life out of the room.

In most work environments, there will be that one person. In fact, if you can’t spot the problem person everyone’s talking about, it might be you.

And, yes, when you’re that person people do talk about you. People do make fun of you. And they do have a nickname for you that rhymes with basshole.

But mostly we just shake our heads and wonder what kind of parents you had.

So be polite.

Even if people are being rude to you.

In that case, be extra polite.

Because, let’s be honest … it is sort of satisfying to watch them implode.

Suze Orman

Internationally Acclaimed Personal-Finance Expert

Do What Is Right, Not What Is Easy

Something a lot of people don’t know about me is that I was a waitress until I was about thirty years old, and I really had no plans to be anything other than a waitress. After four years of working my way through school at the University of Illinois—I didn’t even graduate until a few years later—I got into my Ford Econoline van, which my brother Bobby helped me buy for fifteen hundred dollars, and headed out west to California with three friends. I’d never been anywhere or seen anything in my life, and I was going for it. When we got to California, I lived on the streets of Berkeley for three months in the van because I had no money to my name. Then I landed my dream job as a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery. This was 1973 and I was twenty-two years old. I worked as a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery for seven years, making four hundred dollars a month. In 1980, I decided that I wanted to be more than a waitress. I wanted to own my own restaurant, so I called my mom and dad and asked for twenty thousand dollars to open up my own place. My mom said, “Suze, honey, that’s more money than we have to our name,” and I said, “Mom, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

I went to work the next morning feeling depressed. A customer named Fred Hasbrook, whom I’d been waiting on for many years, came in—I made him a Jack-cheese-and-ham omelet every morning for seven years—and he said, “What’s wrong, Sunshine? You don’t look happy.” I told Fred the story about how I wished I could open up my own restaurant and how it wasn’t going to happen. Fred sat back down with the other gentlemen I’d been waiting on, a group that met every morning at seven o’clock to eat breakfast before work, and told them my story. Before he left, Fred came up and handed me personal checks and commitments on little scraps of paper totaling fifty thousand dollars, with a note written on a little napkin that said:

This is for people like you, so that your dreams can come true. To be paid back in ten years, if you can, with no interest.

I looked at him in disbelief and said, “Fred, I have two questions: Are these checks going to bounce like all of mine do?” He laughed, and then I said, “Fred, I have no idea what to do with this money. Where do I even put it?” It was more money than I had ever seen in my life! Fred said to me, “Go down to your local Merrill Lynch office and put it in a money-market account for now until I can help you.” And I said, “I have another question for you. What’s a Merrill Lynch money-market account?” I had never heard of such a thing. Fred told me what I needed to know, and the next day I went to the Oakland office of Merrill Lynch intending to put my cash into a money market, paying eighteen percent interest.

When I walked in, I was given to what’s called the “broker of the day,” the one financial adviser who gets every new person walking in the door, and his name was Randy. Well, I walked in and Randy sat me down and I told him that this money was going to help me open up my new restaurant. He looked at me and asked, “While it’s sitting there, how would you like to make a hundred dollars a week on it?” I said, “Are you kidding? That’s what I make in a whole week as a waitress,” and he told me to sign on the dotted line. I signed the papers. They were blank, and I didn’t even think about it. Here was this impressive guy in a pin-striped suit, and I just went along and said, “Okay.”

What I found out later is that the papers Randy had me sign were called option agreements, which if correctly filled out and signed allow you to invest in one of the most speculative strategies of all: buying options. At that time nearly ninety percent of all people who bought only options lost their money; they are very high-commission, very fast, and very speculative. But to be able to qualify to invest in options you have to have the money to do so. Randy had filled out the paperwork as if I were a very sophisticated investor, and Merrill Lynch had given its stamp of approval, so Randy was able to take my fifty thousand dollars and invest it in options. Well, the first week or two I made five thousand dollars, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I couldn’t believe my luck. Very shortly after that, I lost the entire fifty thousand.

Now I didn’t know what to do. I kept remembering my father at this moment in time; he never gave up, no matter what. So I picked myself up and I thought, Hey, if people like Randy can be a broker, I can be a broker, too—after all, they just make you broker! I got dressed in my red-and-white striped Sassoon pants, tucked into my white cowboy boots, with a blue silk shirt on top—it was the only fancy outfit I had (or what I thought was fancy)—and I walked into Merrill Lynch to apply for a job. Nobody knew what to do with me. They’d never had a woman stockbroker before in the Oakland office.

I wound up sitting in the manager’s office, and he said to me, “Listen, I personally believe women belong barefoot and pregnant. But I’m going to hire you.” He never said it outright, but I assume he had to hire me in order to fulfill the women’s quota, because right after that he also said, “But you will be out of here in six months—trust me on that one.” So I looked at him and said, “How much are you going to pay me to get me pregnant?” And he answered, “Fifteen hundred dollars a month.” I said, “I’ll take it.” As I left the office, his secretary, Lori, gave me a book on how to dress for success. I was in shock at landing the job and I had no clothes whatsoever, so I went down to Macy’s in San Francisco. The store gave me a credit card with a three-thousand-dollar limit after verifying that I did, in fact, have a job with Merrill Lynch for fifteen hundred dollars a month. I bought my new clothes and was ready to go.

I went to work every single day at Merrill Lynch scared to death because I felt like I didn’t belong there. I was driving a 1967 Volvo station wagon while everybody else drove a brand-new Mercedes or a BMW. They all parked in the parking lot, but I parked in the street and risked getting tickets (knowing I could go to court and pay off the fines with community service) because I didn’t have money for the lot. I ate lunch by myself at Taco Bell for two years straight, while all the other brokers went out to fancy places. They invited female strippers in for the men’s birthday parties, and I guess they expected me to be fine with it, or else they didn’t really care. I had never hidden the fact that I was gay, so maybe they thought I would enjoy the performance as well.

A few months into the job, while I was studying for my Series 7 exam, a test that all brokers have to pass, I realized that what Randy had done with my fifty thousand dollars was illegal. There is a rule that a stockbroker cannot invest a client’s money in a way that is inappropriate for that client. Randy knew that I couldn’t afford to lose my money, and that I had plans to open a business, so my money should have been kept in the money-market fund. I got up all my courage and marched into the manager’s office and told him that he had a crook working for him. The manager told me, “Suze, that crook makes us a lot of money. You need to go sit down in your little cubicle and say nothing.” And I said, “Yes, sir.”

I sat down at my desk and thought to myself,
Oh my God. I’m young, I’m only thirty years old. Fred told me I didn’t have to pay back the loan unless I could, and at no interest, so I could just sit here and do nothing. But what if it wasn’t me, what if it was my mother, or grandmother, or somebody who didn’t have time to recover?
I would look over at Randy and see older people in his office, and imagine that he was doing the same thing to them that he had done to me. This was the turning point in my life, because at that moment I had to decide if I was going to do what was right or what was easy. It was easy to sit there and do absolutely nothing, but it wasn’t right. So I did the only thing that I could think to do: I found the name of a lawyer who took on securities cases. I went to see him and told him my story. He accepted the case on a contingency basis, and we ended up suing Merrill Lynch.

Now, what I didn’t know at the time was that because I had sued Merrill Lynch, I couldn’t be fired. During the two years that the case was under investigation, I became one of the top-producing brokers in the Oakland office, and it was all by doing what was right for people. Eventually, the manager who had originally given me six months on the job was moved to another position, and a new manager came in who settled the suit immediately because he saw that it was wrong. Randy had been let go shortly after I brought the suit. Merrill Lynch paid me back all of my money plus interest, which allowed me to pay back Fred Hasbrook and my friends from the Buttercup Bakery. And the rest is history.

Through it all, two of the greatest lessons of my life emerged: First, you must always do what is right, not what is easy. And second, every no leads you that much closer to a yes. Every loss leads to a gain. I would not be the person I am today if I had not lost it all, kept the belief in myself, and done what was right rather than what was easy by always putting people first, before money.