The Best Advice I Ever Got (30 page)

Julie Bowen

Actress, Mother of Three, and Failed Perfectionist

Advice I
Wish
I’d Taken

“Take the C and live forever.”

This was the somewhat contradictory advice my seriously type-A father began delivering to me somewhere in my teens. I had vigorously taken up his mantle of overachieving in school and felt that anything less than an A+ was simply subpar. Starting at about age nine, I would lie awake in bed obsessing over the next day’s history test, running dates through my mind again and again. (To this day, I can’t get rid of good old 1215. Thanks a heap, Magna Carta. Or 1066. Or 1517 … The list goes on.) My parents valued education and wanted their daughters to reap the benefits of good schooling, but as they started to see the competitive and self-flagellating monster I was becoming, they adopted a mid-course correction. “Take the C and live forever” became my father’s constant refrain. He wanted me to relax and enjoy some of my youth instead of burying any opportunity to have fun under an impossibly high stack of books and an even higher set of expectations.

My parents told me over and over not to put undue pressure on myself—that the big deals of high school would be forgotten in adulthood, but I had my doubts. I tried to have faith in the power of time to erase the jagged edges of tenth-grade embarrassments, yet for years I was haunted by the dastardly split infinitive that took my A+ in Mr. Hollins’s English class down to a meager A. That paper on “The Fall of the House of Usher” had become symbolic of just how close perfect was—if only I tried a little harder.…

I graduated from high school summa cum laude and magna cum miserable. I was headed off to a prestigious college with a solid academic foundation, but with far too few pleasant memories of high school (making out with Alex Mathews in the darkroom notwithstanding. Thank you, Al). I was, in short, a bit of a grind who continued a library-intense college experience. Yes, I drank myself silly with friends, fell in love for the first time, and discovered the perils of heartbreak, but the overriding theme of my life continued to be “I can do better.” I truly believed that if I watched every step carefully I could avoid the pitfalls of a potentially ungraceful entry into the “real world” of work and grownup responsibilities. In short, I consciously attempted to bypass the normal process of trial and error that everyone else seemed perfectly willing to embrace.

Little did I know.

Three children and a busy work life later, I am astonished at how lucky I am to have all that I have. My kids are healthy, and, when they aren’t crying or pooping, they are truly my favorite people. My eternally patient husband puts up with my moods, and, most amazingly, I am paid to hang out and laugh with some incredibly talented people on the set of
Modern Family
. But still, there is a lingering regret. Right now my life is about responsibility and accountability nearly one hundred percent of the time. There isn’t one moment of a single day that someone doesn’t need something from me. I am, in a word, an adult. An adult with a very fortunate set of responsibilities that my years of perfectionism have equipped me to handle. Yet there are moments when I look back on my years at school and wish that I could make a raft of changes. I would make it messier. I would fail more. I would learn to pick myself up from embarrassment rather than becoming an expert at avoiding it, because “real life,” I’ve discovered, is all about compromise, messiness, and, yes, failure. Real life is learning to lower your expectations while not getting completely blown off course. Real life is about showing your kids that abject failure is not the worst thing that happens, but sometimes the best.

Real life, it turns out—all these years past pop quizzes, exams, and grades—is about taking the C and living forever.

David Axelrod

Political Consultant and Senior Adviser to President Obama

Don’t Miss Out on Life

Years ago I was absorbed in establishing my political consulting business. I spent long hours in video editing suites, and many days on the road. I was driven to succeed, oblivious of the toll it was taking on the people I love. My wife, Susan, learned to live as a single parent during campaign seasons. My three young children—Lauren, Michael, and Ethan—became accustomed to missing their dad. And, even when I was home, I was often on the phone, immersed in my work.

Finally, Susan sat me down and gave me advice that was as profound as it was simple. She said, “Don’t wake up one day and discover that your kids have grown up and you missed it. It all goes by so quickly.”

It was a bracing admonition that I have never forgotten.

As fortunate as I have been in my career, the greatest gift in my life has been Susan and our children. Career can be fickle and success ephemeral. But the love of family is real, reliable, and sustaining.

The kids I carried on my shoulders are all grown now. I can’t get back the time we lost. But the most satisfying moments—more than any election night—are still those special occasions when we are together. I now know that these are moments too precious to miss.

Jay Leno

Comedian and Host of
The Tonight Show

Marry Your Conscience

I’ve been married for thirty years, and I remember having a discussion with Drew Barrymore on
The Tonight Show
, in which she asked me how you stay married. My advice was: You should always marry your conscience. In Hollywood and just about everywhere else, you’re constantly exposed to greed and pride and flattery and lust, and if you meet someone who likewise succumbs to those vices, well, then, you’re just screwed. But if you choose to be with someone who says, “What?! You don’t usually act like this. Why are you doing
that
?” then you have a pretty good chance of staying on the right path. So I always say marry your conscience. Marry someone who you would want to be, someone who wants to help you be that better version of yourself.

Some people spend more time trying to find the right car than they do trying to find the right mate. They usually base the decision on superficial things. I’m lucky, because I was always very practical in this respect. In my bachelor days if I went out with a woman, no matter how beautiful she was, if I saw her smoking I’d think, Okay, this is going to cost me money down the line—two packs a day and lung cancer, and I’d say right off the bat, “Sorry, babe, this isn’t going to work.” I remember once, when I was single and in Las Vegas, I saw this incredibly beautiful girl in a casino. I went up to talk to her, and before I knew it we were taking the conversation up to my room. So we’re walking toward the elevator, and I asked, “What do you do for a living?” and she answered, “I’m a secretary,” and in the next breath she said, “Wait!” She stopped at a roulette wheel and took a hundred bucks out of her purse and shouted “Red!” Well, it went black. “Oh, I lost!” she said lightly. “You just lost one hundred dollars,” I said, incredulous, but she just laughed and said, “Oh well!” Right then, I was thinking in my head, I’m outta here. If she can blow her money this quickly, imagine what she’d do with mine! This was in the 1970s, when one hundred dollars was like five hundred dollars today. So I told her this wasn’t going to work out and I hightailed it out of there! I think I made the right decision.

I always tell people that I spent the first half of my life trying not to embarrass my mother and the second half trying not to embarrass my wife. It’s a good thing to live by. It’s always been my mantra:
Oh my God, what if my wife saw this? What if my mom saw this?
It has worked out pretty well.

Jorge Ramos

Emmy Award-Winning Univision News Anchor and Bestselling Author

Find Your Magic

My dad grew up in Mexico City at a time when the only respectable career options for an aspiring college student were in the fields of medicine, engineering, law, and architecture. His own father, my stern and authoritarian grandfather, held unquestioned dominion over his future, and under that pressure my dad “chose” to be an architect. He grew up to become one of those very serious men, the kind who rarely laughed or relaxed. I have but one memory from my childhood of playing soccer with him. One instance. That’s it.

But what I do remember more clearly is watching as his melancholic persona somehow morphed—he actually became vibrant and energetic—whenever he was asked to perform a magic trick. There was no excuse small enough to cause the sudden appearance of his special cards or the abrupt flashing of his shining white handkerchief at the table. He would come to life like a muted black-and-white cartoon from the fifties gone totally Pixar. You’d see a twinkle in his eye, a hint of mystery in his expression, and the general sense that here was a man in true connection with his soul.

My three brothers, my sister, and I knew all his tricks by heart. It was really our friends, aunts, and uncles, or any other such unsuspecting visitors, who would prove to be the perfect audience for my father’s antics. With their mouths agape and their eyes fixed on my dad’s quick hands, these guests would leave our house feeling at once stumped, amused, and impressed. And I don’t know what we loved seeing more: my dad’s magic tricks themselves or the intoxicating joy that overtook him during a routine. There was no getting around it: Magic made my father’s essence shine.

When it came time for me to decide on a career, my father couldn’t understand why I chose communications. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked in a way that sounded more like a statement than a question. Of course, he (or his DNA) hoped that I would become a doctor, an engineer, an attorney, or an architect. “I’m not exactly sure, Dad,” I responded, “but that’s what I really like.” Though my path was far from being clear to me (or anyone else) at the time, I wasn’t about to let my father take over my life the way my grandfather had taken over his.

Somehow I eventually broke the chain of expectation, became a journalist, moved to the United States (instead of becoming a censored reporter in Mexico), and succeeded as a broadcast anchor and author. I play soccer with my son, Nicolas, almost every week, and I’m proud to say that I outshot my daughter, Paola, the last time we played basketball—a difficult task, given how athletic and smart she is. Whether I’m at work or on the court with one of my kids, I try to remember my dad performing his magic, and in doing so I gently remember to let my own essence shine through.

Ultimately, my father taught me the importance of listening to what makes us truly happy in life. And, at the end of the day, nothing is more magical than that.