The Best Advice I Ever Got (24 page)

Jacqueline Novogratz

Founder of Acumen Fund and Bestselling Author of
The Blue Sweater

Commit to Something Bigger Than Yourself

When I was attending Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, I had the great fortune to meet John Gardner, a man of tremendous accomplishment, integrity, and humility. He had served with President Johnson as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, founded the grassroots organization Common Cause, been president of the Carnegie Foundation, and established other important institutions, like the White House Fellows and the Independent Sector. Throughout his life, John focused not on his career but on how he could position himself to serve others in the world. I adored John, wanted to be like him, and believe it is one of my life’s greatest blessings to have been mentored by him.

Years later I was offered a “once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity,” complete with an exalted title, salary, and access to powerful people in the political realm. When I asked John for his advice, he listened carefully and then looked me straight in the eye. “I can see why you’re tempted,” he said, “and this job will certainly make you more interesting to others. But that’s the wrong reason to accept a position. Instead, you should focus on being interested rather than interesting. Now, tell me how this job will truly give you a chance to serve others rather than a chance to serve your own career.”

I didn’t take the job. And I’ve never forgotten John’s sage advice to focus on being interested rather than interesting. Fifteen years later, I understand his wisdom: a focus on being interested in others is the very foundation for a life of meaning and purpose.

John frequently reminded me to commit to something bigger than myself. “Commitment will set you free,” he would say with a knowing look. As a young person, I didn’t fully comprehend this, for I liked keeping my options open. I soon realized, though, that if you always keep your options open you end up living life with a lot of options but without anything of real value, whether in your profession, your family, or your community work.

Through founding Acumen Fund, a nonprofit organization that invests in entrepreneurs in order to bring affordable services like water, health care, clean energy, and housing to the poor, I’ve come to understand the power of commitment in the deepest sense. By committing to something bigger than myself—the goal of ending poverty—I’ve discovered a profound sense of meaning as well as a path to becoming my truest self. Indeed, the more rooted I feel by focusing on one big idea and one organization, the freer I am to explore many parts of that idea. This sense of freedom has enabled me to experience the human journey in ways that I otherwise could not have imagined.

John died a number of years ago, and through his death I’ve learned that the best legacy we can build is to give to others. Through me, and literally thousands like me, John is alive in the world. And as his mentees impart his wisdom to the next generation, so will his spirit thrive and continue to enrich and inspire. His life was a model not only because of what he did but because he made the world a better place just by being in it.

Meryl Streep

Academy Award-Winning Actress

Empathy Opens Doors

I remember very clearly my first conscious attempt at acting. I was six years old, placing my mother’s half slip over my head in preparation to play the Virgin Mary in our living room. As I swaddled my Betsy Wetsy doll, I felt quieted, holy. My transfigured face and demeanor—captured on Super 8 by my dad—pulled my little brothers Harry (playing Joseph) and Dana (a barnyard animal) into the trance. They were drawn into the Nativity scene by the intensity of my focus, in a way that my usual technique for getting them to do what I wanted (yelling at them) never would have achieved.

Later, when I was nine, I took my mother’s eyebrow pencil and carefully drew lines all over my face, replicating the wrinkles that I had memorized on the face of my grandmother, whom I adored. I made my mother take my picture, and when I look at it all these years later I see myself now and my grandmother then. I remember in my bones how it was possible on that day to feel her age. I stooped, I felt weighted down but cheerful; I felt like her. Empathy is the heart of the actor’s art.

In high school, another form of acting took hold of me. I wanted to learn how to be appealing. I studied the character I imagined I wanted to be: that of the generically pretty high school girl. I researched her deeply—that is to say, shallowly—in
Vogue
,
Seventeen
, and
Mademoiselle
. I tried to imitate her hair, lipstick, lashes, the clothes of the lissome, beautiful, superficially appealing high school girls I saw in those pages. I ate an apple a day. Period. I peroxided my hair, ironed it straight. I demanded brand-name clothes (my mother shut me down on that end). I worked harder on this characterization than on any one I’ve done since. I worked on my giggle. I lightened it, and liked it more when it kind of went up? At the end? Because I thought it sounded childlike and cute. This was all about appealing to boys and, at the same time, being accepted by the girls. (A tricky negotiation—often, success in one area precludes succeeding in the other.) Along with the exterior choices, I worked on my—what actors call—interior adjustment. I adjusted my natural temperament, which tended—tends—to be slightly bossy, opinionated, a little loud, full of pronouncements and high spirits; and I
willfully
cultivated softness, agreeableness, a natural breezy sort of sweetness, even a shyness, if you will, which was very, very, very effective. On the boys. The girls didn’t buy it. They didn’t like me. They sniffed it out, the acting. (They were probably right.) But I was committed. This was absolutely not a cynical exercise. It was a vestigial survival courtship skill I was developing. I reached a point, senior year, where my adjustment felt like me. I had convinced myself that I was this person, and she me. Pretty, talented, but not stuck-up, a girl who laughed—a lot, at every stupid thing every boy said—and lowered her eyes, at the right moment, and deferred; who learned to defer when the boys took over the conversation. I remember doing this. I could tell that I was much less annoying to the guys than I had been; they liked me better, and I liked that. This was conscious but at the same time motivated and fully, fully felt. This was real acting.

I got to Vassar, which forty-three years ago was a single-sex institution like all the colleges in what were called the Seven Sisters, the female Ivy League. I made some quick but lifelong, challenging friends. With their help, and outside any competition for boys, my brain woke up. I got up and outside myself, and found myself again. I didn’t have to pretend. I could be goofy, and vehement, and aggressive, and slovenly, and open and funny and tough, and my friends let me. I didn’t wash my hair for three weeks once. They accepted me. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, I became real, instead of an imaginary stuffed bunny.

I stockpiled that character from high school and breathed life into her years later as Linda in
The Deer Hunter
, a film co-starring Robert De Niro and Chris Walken that won Best Picture in 1978. I played Linda, a small-town girl from a working-class background. A lovely, quiet, hapless girl who waited for the boys she loved to come home from the war in Vietnam. Often, men my age mention that character as their favorite of all the women I’ve played. I have my own secret understanding of why that is, and it confirms all my high school decisions. This is not to denigrate that girl, or the men who were drawn to her, in any way. She is still a part of me. She was not acting, but she was behaving in the way that cowed girls, submissive girls, beaten-up girls with few ways out have behaved since forever—and still do, in many worlds.

Now, as a measure of how much the world has changed, the character most men mention as their favorite is Miranda Priestly, the beleaguered totalitarian at the head of
Runway
magazine in
The Devil Wears Prada
. To my mind, this represents a huge change. They relate to Miranda. They wanted to date Linda. They felt sorry for Linda, but they
like
Miranda. They can relate to her issues: the high standards she set for herself and others, the thanklessness of the leadership position. The “nobody understands me” thing—the loneliness. They stand outside one character and pity her (and fall in love with her); they look through the eyes of the other. This is such a big deal because, as people in the movie business know, the most difficult thing in the world is to persuade a straight male audience to identify with a woman protagonist, to feel themselves embodied by her. This, more than any other factor, explains why we get the movies we get, and the paucity of roles in which women drive the film.

It’s easier for the female audience. We’ve grown up identifying with male characters from Shakespeare to Salinger. We have less trouble following Hamlet’s travails viscerally, or Romeo’s or Tybalt’s, or those of Huck Finn or Peter Pan or the Lion King or the boys in
Toy Story
. But it’s much, much harder for heterosexual boys to be willing to identify with Juliet or Desdemona or Ophelia or Wendy in
Peter Pan
or Jo in
Little Women
, the Little Mermaid or Pocahontas. Why? I don’t know. It just is. There has been a resistance to imaginatively assuming another persona if it is a “she.”

But things are changing. Men are adapting, consciously and also without realizing it, for the better of the whole group. They are changing their deepest prejudices to accept and regard as normal things their fathers would have found very, very difficult, and their grandfathers would have abhorred. And the door to this emotional shift is empathy. As Jung said, “Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.”

What I do know about “success,” fame, and celebrity would fill volumes. How it separates you from your friends, reality, proportion, your own sweet anonymity (a treasure that you don’t even know you have until it’s gone). How it makes things tough for the family. Whether being famous matters one bit, really, in the end, in the ongoing flux of time. I have won a long list of awards, and while I’m very proud of the work, I can assure you that awards have very little bearing on my personal happiness and sense of purpose and well-being. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in the work. It comes from staying alert and involved in the lives of those I love and of those in the wider world who need my help. No matter what you hear me say when I’m holding a statuette on TV, and crying and spewing,
that
is acting. Being a celebrity has taught me to hide. But being an actor has opened my soul.

John Wood

Founder and Board Chairman of Room to Read, Author of
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World

Not Every Path Should Be Linear

We live in a world that has a lot of predefined notions of success. We are supposed to study hard, get good grades, go to the best university, work for a prestigious firm—the list goes on. Societal expectations can be good for us by pointing the way forward. But they also risk becoming a strait-jacket that stifles creativity.

I was on such a path throughout the first fifteen years of my life after high school. Intent on “proving myself” at a young age, I was lucky enough to join Microsoft back in 1991, when it was still a small and young company. I rose through the ranks over the course of a fast-moving decade. Living overseas, I had it all: first-class round-the-world airline tickets, a fully subsidized house in Beijing, two housekeepers, and a car with a full-time driver. What I was beginning to lack, however, was passion. I felt that my life was devoted to making rich people richer. At age thirty-four, I asked myself, Is this all there is?

I had the good fortune one day to discover a potential nonlinear path. As an escape from my job, I decided to make a solo trek through the Himalayas—an eighteen-day, two-hundred-mile journey along Nepal’s famous Annapurna Circuit. For months leading up to the trip, I fantasized about being out in the crisp, clean mountain air, trekking as high as eighteen thousand feet among glaciers and yaks. But on day two of my trek life threw something in my path that would change my course forever.

Along the trail, I met the headmaster of a local school. He invited me to visit the school to meet some of his 450 students. I felt excited, thinking this was a chance to see the real Nepal, not the tourist’s version. The school itself wasn’t much to speak of—mud walls, a leaky sheet-metal roof, and dirt floors. The students didn’t have desks, and the chalkboard was the size of a postage stamp. But what really struck me was the school’s “library.” A library in name only, it was an empty room utterly devoid of books.

“Why?” I asked the headmaster. “How can you have four hundred and fifty students and yet not have something as fundamental as books?”

His answer hit me hard. “We are too poor to afford education in Nepal,” he said sadly. His face dropped and his eyes dulled as he finished the thought: “But until we have education we will always be poor.”

It struck me that the headmaster’s lament said more about global poverty than any fancy academic report ever could. I had traveled enough to know that the billion people in this world living on less than a dollar a day aren’t dumb, nor are they lazy. They are simply caught in this trap of being too poor to afford education, but without it …

It was on that day that the idea for Room to Read was born. Within two months, I had started a book drive, and soon thereafter I quit my executive position at Microsoft to create an organization that would bring thousands, and ultimately millions, of books to eager young students like those in Bahundanda, Nepal. A lot of people told me that I was crazy to give up millions of dollars in stock options to devote my life to this cause, but I reminded myself that “nobody ever erected a statue in honor of a critic.” It’s so easy to criticize. It’s much harder to build. But, ultimately, it’s only the builders who matter.

Had I chosen to stay on my comfortable linear path in life, Room to Read would never have been established. Instead, because I chose to go nonlinear, more than five million children today have access to the ten thousand libraries we’ve opened during our first decade in operation.

I don’t believe that people should
always
follow nonlinear paths. If you constantly go nonlinear, you might end up running around in a random pattern and failing to accomplish anything of significance. But if you go only linear in life, you might suffer that worst of all fates: being boring, and never knowing what might have been possible if you’d taken a risk. And, believe me, the world has enough boring adults.

So that is the challenge. It’s knowing when to go linear. And when to go nonlinear. There is a time for each in life.