The Best Advice I Ever Got (27 page)

Matt Lauer

Journalist and Host of the
Today
show

Sometimes You Gotta Go Off Course

Sometimes you get a piece of advice that just sounds all wrong! It seems to go against everything you’ve been taught, and takes you far outside your comfort zone. Following advice like that can be scary and unsettling, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. In fact, unconventional advice can force you to examine a situation from another angle and give you perspective that you might not have found on your own.

While I was a senior at Ohio University, I was offered an internship at a small television station in Huntington, West Virginia. I wouldn’t be paid a salary, but in exchange for spending ten weeks living in Huntington I would get a few credits and a lot of real-world experience. There was one big issue, however. Accepting the internship would cause me to miss a couple of courses that were required in order to graduate with the rest of my class that spring! I simply couldn’t do both. It was either the internship and the hands-on learning that came with it or the required courses and the completion of my degree, on schedule, with the friends I had spent four years with at O.U.

Every bone in my body told me to stay on campus, take the courses, and graduate on time. I’ve always been prompt (almost to a fault). I’m the guy who arrives fifteen minutes early for appointments and organizes his day down to the second. Being late for anything makes me crazy! The thought of graduating late was hard to imagine.

I decided to run the situation by my father before making a final decision. My father started his career as an insurance salesman before changing fields and getting into the bicycle business. He knew almost nothing about the television industry. Even though he did not have experience in my chosen field, he had a wealth of common sense. He was practical (not a shocking trait for a former insurance salesman) and conservative in his approach to life and business. I assumed that he would tell me to follow the safe course and get my diploma on time.

But after some thought my father told me that he truly believed I should take the internship in West Virginia. He said that while graduating was something we both felt was important, the exact date of the event itself was fairly meaningless. He saw the internship as a chance to learn things that textbooks couldn’t teach me—an adventure that I shouldn’t pass up.

I took a deep breath and followed my dad’s advice.

He couldn’t have known how valuable his guidance would prove to be. I completed my internship in West Virginia and was asked to become a producer of the station’s newscast as soon as the spring quarter ended. I took that job and never looked back, moving from one city to the next and from each job on to something bigger and better! Had I stayed in school and passed on that internship, I would have finished on time only
then
to begin my job search along with every other graduate of 1979. Instead, I had a job in hand and a valuable head start!

Oh, by the way, I did get that diploma—eighteen years later, on the day that I gave the commencement address at O.U.! As my father said, the date of the event was fairly meaningless!

General David H. Petraeus

Commander of the NATO International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan

Be Comfortable with the Uncomfortable

Our nation’s twenty-sixth president, Theodore Roosevelt, once observed, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” During the course of my thirty-six years in uniform, I have found great truth in that statement. Nothing beats the satisfaction of knowing that the work into which you pour time, energy, and talent is meaningful.

Meaningful work can, of course, take many forms. Mine—like that of hundreds of thousands of other Americans in uniform—has taken the form of military service. But any endeavor that reaches beyond self and contributes to the greater good is “work worth doing.”

As TR knew—and as those of us in uniform have discovered on numerous occasions, in recent years in particular—work worth doing is often hard work. And one of the best ways I’ve found to prepare for the hard work of meaningful work is to pursue experiences that take me out of my intellectual comfort zone. I owe that life lesson to the great General Jack Galvin, a lifelong mentor and friend for whom I worked on multiple occasions when I was a captain and then a major. During one of my tours with him, as I was weighing options for my next assignment, General Galvin advised me that I should eschew another typical infantry assignment and instead pursue an “out of my intellectual comfort zone” experience by going to graduate school. That ranked with the best advice I ever received.

At Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where I was privileged to study, I was forced out of the relatively cloistered, nose-to-the-grindstone existence that we in the military tend to live. Not only did I gain a healthy degree of intellectual humility, I also came to realize that “not all of these smart folks think the same way I do.” Those and other experiences in graduate school—and others in similar endeavors over the years—helped stretch my mind and my imagination, challenged my ways of thinking, and, I’d like to think, developed in me a degree of intellectual flexibility and creativity. Indeed, my experience at Princeton is one of the reasons I advise today’s young military leaders to go to graduate school, to immerse themselves in foreign cultures, and, in essence, to do “off-the-wall” stuff. We all benefit from learning to be comfortable with the uncomfortable.

Indeed, being comfortable outside my comfort zone—and believing in the value of the work those of us in uniform pursue—has helped enable me at various points in my career to take on tasks that some have considered “mission impossible.” Being comfortable with the uncomfortable helped me in the early days in Iraq, when I realized that, contrary to pre-operation expectations, we were going to engage in nation-building as well as conventional military operations. Being comfortable with the uncomfortable also helped prepare me to sit before congressional committees amid intense focus and scrutiny over our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, to testify to those missions being “hard but not hopeless,” and to accept responsibility for leading our remarkable troopers in undertaking those missions. Indeed, I often counsel young leaders not to be afraid of taking on an exceedingly difficult task—so long as the task is “work worth doing” and they are prepared to be uncomfortable as they work hard at it.

Fareed Zakaria

International Affairs Journalist and Bestselling Author

Run Fast, but Don’t Run Scared

My best advice takes off from Franklin Roosevelt’s famous quotation “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The most important thing to remember for a person coming out of school, or looking around for a new job, or dealing with the pressures of life, is not to get scared—to view all of these transitional moments as opportunities, not as threats. Americans do their best when they view the world as full of boundless opportunities and challenges.

The phrase “can do” is an American phrase. No other country has this idea as part of its daily discourse. Having a “can do” personality or a “can do” attitude really says something intrinsic about Americans. They look at the world and see problems to be solved, not problems to be managed, not problems to be endured. We are not a fatalistic country. I think that one of the key personal attributes that will help anyone, anywhere, is the ability to “look on the bright side.” This might sound mawkish, but actually it’s a very profound insight into how you should look at the world. Believe that you can succeed and thrive and prosper and you will find the opportunities that will allow you to do so. You will find the glasses that are half full. You will discover that the things that look like obstacles are really ladders on the way to advancement.

I came to America from Bombay in 1982, a time when India was among the twenty poorest countries in the world. I was a scholarship kid at Yale, and I had no contacts and no money. I came from a nice middle-class family in India, with educated parents, so I had enormous advantages, but it was also a bit overwhelming to come to a place where I knew nobody and was totally on my own. And America, by the way, was in the midst of what was being called the worst recession since the Great Depression, the recession of the early 1980s. In addition, Americans were still dealing with the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate. It easily could have seemed like a time of despair, but to me it didn’t. Maybe it was just naïveté and being young, but I saw boundless opportunities and I set out to find ways to use every one of them.

My father was a very driven man, always looking for ways to move ahead, and that probably has had a big impact on my life. But being in America really made the difference for me. There weren’t any prizes being offered to me on a platter, but there were opportunities. There were also challenges. I was in a new country—an unfamiliar culture with no contacts and little money. I didn’t see the obstacles as much, though, because I was intrigued by the opportunities. None of the challenges I faced seemed very scary to me; they didn’t get me down. The danger, in being frightened or dispirited, is that you begin to view the world you’re in as one that is dangerous and threatening and you try to blame somebody else for your problems. I never for a moment thought there was any racism or double standard being applied to me because I was an Indian, or a foreign student, or because I didn’t have fancy clothes. I never looked for any of that. I was busy looking for opportunities, not trying to find explanations for why things weren’t perfect. I found America to be incredibly open and accepting, and I really never experienced any type of discrimination. I certainly knew people at the time who had a different experience, and I think some of it was reality. But sometimes you find what you search for. I wanted to define my life by what I was able to do, not by what I was unable to do.

I look at America today, and perhaps the greatest danger we face is that we’re in a completely new world—a world that no American has ever had to deal with before—in which everyone is part of a global economic system. People everywhere are playing by our rules—free trade, free markets, free enterprise—and they’re playing to win. We should be delighted, because it means a bigger world, a richer world, a world where more people are escaping poverty and more people are able to pursue the American dream. But many Americans are fearful of what this might mean.
We might not be on top. Workers from other countries are
stealing our jobs
. When you start getting into the fear business, you blame your problems on other people. But if other people are doing well, it’s not because they’re cheating. It’s because they’re working hard—they’re going to school, they’re excelling in math and science. Fear and blame are essentially pointless. You can’t stop China from growing. What you
can
do is figure out how to succeed in this new world—there are a hundred different ways—and Americans are well positioned to do so.

The hand the United States has been dealt remains the best compared with all others. This is a country with enormous potential, great human talent, the best companies in the world, the best universities in the world, an amazing geographical position where it can access both the Asian world and the European world. But Americans have gotten themselves down and have lost faith in themselves and are now blaming other people for their problems. If you listen to the political discourse in America today, you would think that all our problems have been caused by the Mexicans or the Chinese or the Muslims. The reality is that we have caused our own problems. Whatever has happened has been caused by isolating ourselves or blaming others.

More important, we’re not going to succeed by trying to be like someone else. We can succeed only by trying to be more like us. That is, an open, dynamic, competitive society and economy. The further away we get from a sense of openness and tolerance of differences and diversity, the more we betray American ideals and the uniquely American attitude in the world. So I would say that my best advice for these times is: Don’t let fear guide how you think about the world. Run fast, but don’t run scared.