The Best Advice I Ever Got (29 page)

Stephen Colbert

Bestselling Author, Satirist, and Host of
The Colbert Report

Yes … and That’s the Word

Say yes to any opportunity to do anything even close to what you dream of doing. This will sometimes get you in over your head, but that will just make you swim harder. It’s the best way to meet other people who love to do what you love to do. You will learn from and comfort each other.

Steve Martin

Award-Winning Actor, Comedian, Author, and Playwright

Take Chances

I have always remembered this line from e. e. cummings’s “Six Nonlectures.” It motivated me to take chances with my craft and my life. I think it’s more relevant for a young person than for an older person, and I put it in the category of inspiration rather than advice: “Who would be ‘secure’? Every and any slave.”

FIND THE JOY

On Wisdom and Happiness

Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it
.

—GROUCHO MARX

W
hen I was a desk assistant at ABC News in Washington, I idolized a correspondent named Cassie Mackin. She had been a reporter for the Baltimore
Sun
and was ABC’s most glamorous correspondent: blond, willowy, and oh-so-chic. I watched in awe as she seemed to float through the newsroom. Cassie Mackin died of cancer when she was forty-two. Her funeral was televised, and I looked at the pallbearers. There were people like Ted Kennedy and a cameraman named Rolfe Tessem, professional colleagues. Cassie had never married and had no children. Suddenly, at age twenty-six, I found my die-hard career ambitions shifting. I didn’t want this to happen to me. I wanted a husband, a family. I did not want my job to be my life. It was a real wake-up call.

I did marry and have children. But after Jay died life as I knew it vanished. I was inundated with books about grief, from C. S. Lewis to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. I read them all. But then I came across a quote by Thomas Jefferson that helped me recalibrate and get my bearings. It was simple but profound, and almost harsh in its directness: “The earth belongs to the living, not the dead.” I think about and miss Jay every single day, especially during those parent-child rites of passage, like recitals and graduations. But I realized that we all have a finite amount of time on this planet. We are all terminal. And, whether our lives are long or cut tragically short, while we’re here we have an obligation to find and give joy—in the beauty of our surroundings, in the pleasure of the moment, and in the company of those we love. It’s been said over and over that no one on his deathbed ever says, “Gee, I wish I had spent more time at the office.” Once, when Jay was so very sick, he turned to me and said, “You know, nothing really matters except your friends and family.” We are often so busy running as fast as we can on that hamster wheel of success, we often don’t take time to appreciate each other, to nurture and tend to our relationships with the people we love. So now I try to savor every moment, and am awed without embarrassment by a water-colored sunset or the tininess of a baby’s foot. I cherish talking about everything and nothing with my parents in our family den that I remember so well, surrounded by my father’s beautiful books, or laughing uncontrollably with my daughters over something silly. Anna Quindlen, one of my favorite writers and people, perhaps put it best in her book
A Short Guide to a Happy Life:
“Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they would come to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.” In other words, find the joy.

Jimmy Kimmel

Late-Night Television Host and Comedian

Wisdom You Can Eat

My family isn’t the type that gives advice. My family gives headaches. Whenever I hear others recount the best advice their parents ever gave them, I wonder what I missed. Why didn’t my father call me into his study, with pipe in hand and newspaper folded neatly over his knee, to give me the kind of simple but poetic life advice that fathers like Mr. Cunningham and Sheriff Andy Taylor gave Ron Howard? Maybe it was because my dad didn’t have a study. Maybe he was too busy. Maybe it was racism of the most unusual sort.

On the day I left Las Vegas for college in Arizona, I stopped at my aunt and uncle’s house to say goodbye. As I backed out of their driveway, my Uncle Frank suddenly bolted toward my car. I stopped, rolled the window down, and heard him say, “Remember, Jim. Safety first.” I paused, agreed to put safety first, and then, as I pulled away, ran over his foot.

My Aunt Chippy sometimes shares her thoughts with others, but I’m not sure you’d call it advice. Some of my favorite nuggets are: “Put some clothes on—you look like a whore!” and “Let’s not make a whole schkabutz about this!” Don’t bother googling it.
Schkabutz
isn’t a word. But we knew what she meant.

The best and only real advice my father ever gave me came on a dreaded family road trip. My dad didn’t like to waste money on extravagances like FM radio and transmission fluid, and so our sixteen-year-old Chevy Impala station wagon, as dictated by tradition, broke down halfway to Knott’s Berry Farm. There was no fast food within sight of the gas station, which meant that my parents were forced to take us to a restaurant that employed something called a “waitress.” The diner was filthy and the food scared us. As we scoured the menu, my father gifted me with a pearl of wisdom that I have since shared with my children. He said, “When in doubt, order the hamburger.”

Not exactly Sophocles, but I did order the hamburger and, when in doubt, I still do.

Jane Aronson, M.D
.

Founder of the Worldwide Orphans Foundation

Dare to Be Happy

I achieved my lifelong dream in 1986, when I graduated from medical school at the age of thirty-five. But there was another dream, a secret, which I rarely discussed with anyone: to have a family. To be a mother. I had come out as a gay woman in 1971 at the age of nineteen, and this life choice seemed to require that I become a “professional woman.” It wasn’t that I saw myself as an old maid, but somehow I knew that I should define myself chiefly by work. So I worked very hard, spent eighty hours a week taking care of children with unusual infections, including HIV/AIDS, and orphans adopted from abroad. In the meantime, I found a life partner and developed a sweet circle of good friends. I was busy traveling, growing a pediatric specialty in adoption medicine, and I created a foundation to improve the lives of orphans around the world. What could be more fulfilling?

But still I yearned for a child. I often cried in the restroom at work after seeing yet another deliriously joyful couple walk into my examining room with an adorable baby adopted from Vietnam, China, or Cambodia. I imagined myself as a parent and often spent hours reading
The New York Times
at the local playground, just so that I could watch children play in the sandbox and run to their moms and dads when a friend grabbed their shovel. I befriended many adoptive parents and became involved in their families. But I was convinced that I would never have what they had.

The pain grew to be an issue in my relationship, because my partner didn’t want to have any more children; she already had two who were grown and didn’t want to start over. But my sadness and yearning wouldn’t go away.

I struggled with the idea of having children for another reason, too: self-doubt. Would I even be a good mother? Did I know how? I’d had a challenging upbringing, with little nurturing from my own mother. I feared that I would be the same kind of parent she’d been: distant and unavailable. I felt stuck in this bind—whether to break up a long-term relationship to have children by myself, whether to risk losing love and never finding it again, whether to chance the discovery that I’d actually be a bad parent, too.

So I shelved the fantasy for decades, paralyzed by indecision, anxiety, and disappointment.

Then one night I went to dinner with a new acquaintance, the parent of a newly adopted Chinese baby girl. This woman was a dynamic business executive who had adopted a baby at a mature age. Somewhere during dinner, after we discussed her daughter, her business, and my dreams for my ongoing work with orphans around the world, she looked across the table and asked, “Why don’t you have children?” I answered quickly and definitively, without any connection to the truth: “I take care of other people’s children.” She just as swiftly replied, “That’s ridiculous. You want children, don’t you?” And suddenly I found myself being honest with a stranger, like what happens on an airplane when one starts pouring out secrets to an arbitrary seatmate. I revealed the conflicts I had, my fears that I would not be a loving mother, the reality that my partner didn’t want children.

My new friend gave me some advice that changed everything. “You should take care of yourself at some point,” she said simply. “Before it’s too late.” I went home, quietly undressed, and slipped under the covers next to my partner of eighteen years. I was unable to sleep for a while, mulling over the dinner conversation in my head. I had been here before, and had always just shelved my feelings. This time I couldn’t. Over the next few weeks, I became increasingly moody, angry, sad, and sleepless.

On a Friday night, just one month after that unexpectedly pivotal dinner, I ended my relationship of almost two decades. Within a few days, I went downtown in Manhattan to file for my birth certificate and made an appointment for a home study with an agency so that I could adopt a baby from Vietnam.

My gorgeous first son, Ben, adopted from Vietnam when he was an infant, is now ten years old. I adopted a second beautiful son, Des, from Ethiopia when he was six years old and Ben was four. I can’t imagine life today without my boys. I also met the love of my life, my partner of eleven years, Diana, and we all live in Maplewood, New Jersey, in a 108-year-old Victorian home, the house of my dreams.

That moment twelve years ago when I listened to a new friend’s advice over pasta and salad changed everything for me. I guess I was ready to hear what I hadn’t been able to say to myself. And it has made all the difference. Don’t shelve your dreams or think that happiness is for other people. Dare to be happy. It’s the only way to truly live.