The Best Advice I Ever Got (18 page)

Whoopi Goldberg

Oscar, Grammy, Tony, and Emmy Award Winner

Do Unto Others

My code—the one I try to live by but don’t always succeed—is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This applies anywhere. If you’re walking down the street and hear someone’s cellphone conversation and you’re annoyed because she’s talking way too loudly, or if you’re in a restaurant and you hear someone speaking at the top of his lungs, chances are the next time you’re on your cellphone, or at a diner, you might just drop your voice. Or when you’re in an elevator and someone is a stink factory, and you’re thinking, God, that woman is wearing way too much perfume, then perhaps the next time you put yours on you’ll be more conscientious. If we carry this phrase, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” with us, we all might get through life a little bit easier.

DON’T LET THE TURKEYS GET YOU DOWN

On Rejection and Resilience

If I had listened to the critics I’d have died drunk in the gutter
.

—ANTON CHEKHOV

I
f I thought I had experienced challenges early in my career, I hadn’t seen anything yet. The time in my professional life that required every drop of resilience in my personal reservoir came during my first two years as the anchor of the
CBS Evening News
. There had been a great deal of hype over my hire. I was the first woman to solo-anchor an evening newscast on a major network, and the significance of that wasn’t lost on me. In fact, when I was offered a job on the
Today
show fifteen years earlier I told Michael Gartner, then the president of NBC News, that I would accept the job only if Bryant Gumbel and I were going to be equal partners. I didn’t want to be relegated to cooking and fashion segments, and I wanted assurances that that wouldn’t happen. So in a moment of extreme moxiness I told him, “It’s really important to me that there’s a fifty-fifty division of labor.” I had been covering the Pentagon and didn’t want my news chops or credibility to be eroded. So he relented. Almost. “Fifty-two, forty-eight,” he told me. “And that’s my best offer.” I agreed. I think I had the audacity to insist on an equal division of labor because I was well aware of how images from television can shape attitudes and values. God knows I was influenced by watching the adventures of a career woman named Mary Richards every Friday night on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, and by the show
Julia
, starring Diahann Carroll, about an African-American nurse and single mother.

When CBS came calling, I once again thought about the importance of seeing a woman in the role of solo anchor. I would be shepherding a broadcast that had been largely the domain of white males. That, coupled with the challenge of reinvigorating a genre that had a declining viewership, made the opportunity too exciting to pass up. But little did I know what lurked ahead.

As Linda Ellerbee once wrote, “Some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.” Well, I was the statue for about two years, and let me tell you, it’s not a lot of fun. From my very first day, I was pounded for everything from the color of my jacket (it was white, tropical-weight wool, and perfectly acceptable after Labor Day!) to my eye makeup and the way I held my hands. There had been a great deal of publicity before the first broadcast, and in the initial few weeks the ratings were high. But when they started to head south, it became open season for the critics. Despite fifteen years covering major news events and countless hard-hitting interviews, they claimed that I didn’t have the “gravitas” (which I decided was the Latin word for
testicles
) required to be at the helm of such a prestigious enterprise. I often felt like the protagonist in T. S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he spoke of “the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase … pinned and wriggling on the wall.” The very public vivisection was at times painful and hard to understand. During that dispiriting period, I often imagined one of the New York City buses with my face splashed across the side running me over on West Fifty-seventh Street. Somehow, it seemed a fitting O. Henry–esque ending to my current predicament. My sense of humor was getting pretty dark in those days.

My friends from NBC urged me to “come home.” It was very tempting. Some days I just wanted to pull a Steven Slater, the fed-up JetBlue flight attendant who said, in so many words, “Take this job and shove it,” before he slid down the escape chute. I found solace on, of all things, a coffee mug on a co-worker’s desk that read, “Don’t let the turkeys get you down.” My friends were also great listeners and morale boosters. And I had many heart-to-heart conversations … with myself. “You’ve been successful before,” I told myself. “You have something to offer. You haven’t changed.” I realized that whatever your path, whatever your calling, the most damaging thing you can do is let other voices define you and drown out your own. You’ve got to block them out and find that place deep inside you, shaken but still intact, and hold on to it. As many wise people have said, you can’t always control the circumstances, but you can control how you repond to them. Even during those tough days, a voice inside me kept saying, “Keep going. You’re in the big leagues. Put on your big-girl pants. You’re not a quitter. There will be better days ahead.” And there were. The broadcast got stronger, the team came together, and I got better. I fell back on my dad’s advice: “Just do the best you can.” And that’s really the only thing we can all do, every day.

Kathryn Stockett

Bestselling Author of
The Help

Don’t Give Up, Just Lie

If you ask my husband what my best trait is, he’ll smile and say, “She never gives up.”

And if you ask him for my worst trait, he’ll get a funny tic in his cheek and narrow his eyes and hiss, “She. Never. Gives. Up.”

It took me a year and a half to write my earliest version of
The Help
. I’d told most of my friends and family what I was working on. Why not? We are compelled to talk about our passions. When I’d polished my story, I announced that it was done and mailed it to a literary agent.

Six weeks later I received a rejection letter from the agent, stating, “Story did not sustain my interest.” I was thrilled! I called my friends and told them I’d gotten my first rejection! Right away, I went back to editing. I was sure that I could make the story tenser, more riveting,
better
.

Several months later, I sent it to a few more agents. And received a few more rejections. Well, more like fifteen. I was a little less giddy this time, but I kept my chin up. “Maybe the next book will be the one,” a friend said.
Next
book? I wasn’t about to move on to the next one just because of a few stupid letters. I wanted to write
this
book.

A year and a half later, I opened my fortieth rejection: “There is no market for this kind of tiring writing.” That one finally made me cry. “You have so much resolve, Kathryn,” a friend said to me. “How do you keep yourself from feeling like this has been just a huge waste of your time?”

That was a hard weekend. I spent it in pajamas, slothing around that racetrack of self-pity—you know the one, from sofa to chair to bed to refrigerator, starting over again on the sofa. But I couldn’t let go of
The Help
. Call it tenacity, call it resolve, or call it what my husband calls it:
stubbornness
.

After rejection number forty, I started lying to my friends about what I did on the weekends. They were amazed by how many times a person could repaint an apartment. The truth was, I was embarrassed for my friends and family to know that I was still working on the same story, the one nobody apparently wanted to read.

Sometimes I’d go to literary conferences, just to be around other writers who were trying to get published. I’d inevitably meet some successful writer who told me, “Just keep at it. I received fourteen rejections before I finally got an agent.
Fourteen!
How many have you gotten?”

By rejection number fifty-five, I was truly neurotic. It was all I could think about—revising the book, making it better, getting an agent, getting it published. I insisted on rewriting the last chapter an hour before I was due at the hospital to give birth to my daughter. I would not go to the hospital until I’d typed
The End
. I was still poring over my research when the nurse looked at me as if I weren’t human and said in a New Jersey accent, “Put the book down, you nut job, you’re
crowning.
”

It got worse. I started lying to my husband. It was as if I were having an affair—with ten black maids and a skinny white girl. After my daughter was born, I began sneaking off to hotels on the weekends to get a few hours of writing in. “I’m off to the Poconos! Off on a girls’ weekend!” I’d say. Meanwhile, I’d be at the Comfort Inn around the corner. It was an awful way to act, but—for God’s sake—
I could not make myself give up
.

In the end, I received sixty rejections for
The Help
. Letter number sixty-one was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at fifteen? Or forty? Or even sixty? Three weeks later, Susan sold
The Help
to Amy Einhorn Books.

The point is, I can’t tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves, [insert passion here]—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I
guarantee
you that it won’t take you anywhere. Or you can do what this writer did: Give in to your obsession instead.

And if your friends make fun of you for chasing your dream, remember—just
lie
.

Malcolm Gladwell

Bestselling Author and Writer for
The New Yorker

Don’t Turn on Your Greatest Asset

Most people, I realize, get advice from their parents. But my parents are of the type who let their actions, not their words, set the example. So I can’t point to some pithy bit of wisdom passed down from my father or mother (except for my father’s solemn warning to me, when I graduated from college, to steer clear of journalism).

But as a kid I was a great fan of the baseball writer Bill James, who once wrote something that has always stayed with me. It was about the hugely talented Montreal Expos teams of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which never quite fulfilled their potential. Finally, one of those teams confronted its failures and got rid of the player it felt was the culprit—the catcher Gary Carter. But, as James pointed out, Carter wasn’t the reason for the team’s failure at all. He was, in fact, the best player there. The Expos, in their moment of crisis and desperation, had—paradoxically—turned on their greatest asset. I was incredibly struck by that observation. And since then I’ve seen versions of this mistake played out again and again, both in my own life and in the lives of others—not to mention in the politics of countries. That which we do best is the most visible and the most scrutinized thing about us, so it is almost inevitable that when times get hard it’s the aspect of our lives that we fixate on—for better (occasionally) but mostly for worse. I’ve seen relationships falter in bad times, not because they were weak but because they were strong. I saw this country, after 9/11, respond to a challenge to its values (freedom and tolerance) by attacking those very same values. And it’s only by remembering that bit of advice from Bill James that I’ve prevented myself from making this same mistake again and again.

Carter is in baseball’s Hall of Fame, by the way. Most of his teammates on the Expos have been long forgotten.