The Best Advice I Ever Got (5 page)

Anna Quindlen

Bestselling Author and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist

Courage Is the Ultimate Career Move

Here is my favorite biblical direction: Be not afraid. It’s truly the secret of life. Fear is what stunts our growth, narrows our ambitions, kills our dreams.

So fear not.

Oh, I have enough of a memory of my own youth to know that that sounds preposterous. You are surely afraid: of leaving what you know, of seeking what you want, of taking the wrong path, of failing the right one. But you can’t allow any of that to warp your life. You must have the strength to say no to the wrong things and to embrace the right ones, even if you are the only one who seems to know the difference, even if you find the difference hard to calculate.

Too often we still live with the pinched expectations of a culture of conformity, which sees daring as dangerous. Go along to get along: that’s its mantra. Only a principled refusal to be terrorized by these stingy standards will save you from a Frankenstein life made up of other people’s expectations grafted together into a poor imitation of existence. You can’t afford to do that. It is what has poisoned our culture, our community, and our national character. No one does the right thing from fear, and so many of the wrong things are done in its long shadow. Homophobia, racism, religious bigotry: they are all bricks in a wall that divides us, bricks cast of the clay of fear, fear of that which is different or unknown.

Too often our public discourse fears real engagement or discussion; it pitches itself at the lowest possible level, always preaching to the choir, so that no one will be challenged. Which usually means that no one will be interested. What is the point of free speech if we are always afraid to speak freely? If we fear competing viewpoints, if we fail to state the unpopular because of some sense of plain-vanilla civility, it is not civility at all. It is the denigration of the human capacity for thought. Open your mouth. Speak your piece. Fear not.

Remember Pinocchio? There is a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder, giving the very best advice. It is you, your authentic self, the one you were in first grade, before you learned to massage your personality into a form that would suit others. Sometimes it’s hard to hear its message because all the external voices are so loud, so shrill, so adamant. Voices that loud are always meant to bully.

Do not be bullied.

Acts of bravery don’t always take place on battlefields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and, yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world. So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter or fail, but you will always know that you pushed hard and aimed high. Take a leap of faith. Fear not. Courage is the ultimate career move.

Helen Mirren

Academy Award and Emmy-Winning Actress

Beware of Fear

My secondary school was a parochial school run by Bernardine nuns in forbidding black robes. On my first visit to the school, I had an interview with the headmistress. She was a very old lady called Dame Mother Mary Mildred. (“Dame” because she had been honored for past achievements; I never knew what.) She had one eye that drooped and was somewhat frightening to the ten-year-old that I was. However, she was also very wise, and kind without being sentimental.

She took one look at me and said, in such a way that I have never forgotten it, “Beware of fear.”

It took me many years to understand the power and importance of that observation.

Fear can be one of the most destructive of human emotions. It is, of course, also very important, in that fear sometimes stops you from doing stupid things. But it can also stop you from doing creative or exciting or experimental things. It can cloud your judgment of others, and lead to all kinds of evil. The control and understanding of our personal fears is one of the most important undertakings of our lives.

Arianna Huffington

Bestselling Author and President and Editor in Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group

A Lot of Greek Chutzpah

My mother was a continual source of wisdom and great advice. She used to say, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” And she taught me that there is always a way around a problem—you’ve just got to find it. Keep trying doors; one will eventually open. She also taught me to accept failure as part and parcel of life. It’s not the opposite of success; it’s an integral part of success.

I talk a lot about learning to become fearless in your approach to life. But fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of fear. It’s all about getting up one more time than you fall down. I had this lesson brought home to me in a very powerful way in my mid-twenties when I was writing my second book. My first book,
The Female Woman
, had been a surprise success. Instead of accepting any of the book contracts I had been offered to write on women again, I decided to tackle a subject I’d been preoccupied with through college (and, indeed, remain preoccupied with today): the role of leaders in shaping our world. I locked myself in my London apartment and worked around the clock on this book. I would write until I couldn’t stay awake—sometimes into the early hours of the morning.

The book was finally finished, and I don’t remember ever before or since having been as happy with the work I’d done. So imagine my surprise when publisher after publisher rejected it. Indeed, thirty-six publishers turned it down before it was finally published. It was the kind of rejection that unleashed all kinds of self-doubt, including fears that I was not only on the wrong career path but was going to go broke in the process. “What if the success of my first book was a fluke and I wasn’t really meant to be a writer?” I would ask myself in the middle of many a sleepless night. And this was not just a theoretical question—it was also a crassly financial one: “How am I going to pay my bills?” I had used the royalties from my first book to subsidize the second, and now that money was running out. It seemed I had no choice but to get some kind of “real” job.

But my desire to write turned out to be stronger than my fear of poverty. Had I been afraid, I might have tossed the manuscript in the wastebasket somewhere around rejection letter number fifteen and taken a job that had nothing to do with my passion. Instead, I walked into Barclays Bank in St. James’s Square in London and met with a banker named Ian Bell. With nothing more to offer than a lot of Greek chutzpah, I asked him for a loan. And, with a lot of unfounded trust, he gave it to me.

I’ve always been grateful to Ian Bell, and have since sent him a Christmas card every year. He was, after all, the person who made it possible for me to write a book that, though never a commercial success, did finally get published and garnered lots of good reviews. More important, the book was like a seed planted in my twenties that finally sprouted in my forties, when I became seriously engaged in political life.

I had abundant passion and abundant hope (not to mention abundant nerve!), all of which pushed me past all my fears.

David L. Calhoun

Chairman and CEO of the Nielsen Company

Develop Your Own Brand of Self-Confidence

I worked for a guy named Jack Welch for twenty years at GE. He was and is a great mentor and a great leader. If I had to isolate the subject he spoke most passionately to me about during those years, it is that self-confidence is the most important characteristic of successful people. Self-confidence—a quiet self-confidence that is not cockiness, not conceit, not arrogance—is the key to excelling, no matter what you do in life.

Henry David Thoreau once said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I don’t believe that most do, but I do believe that quietly desperate people are the ones who never quite found their self-confidence. So how do you get it? What is the secret to developing your own brand of self-confidence?

First, you must resolve to grow intellectually, morally, technically, and professionally every day through your entire work and family life. You need to be absolutely paranoid about the currency of your knowledge, and to ask yourself every day, Am I really up to speed? Or am I stagnating intellectually, faking it or, even worse, falling behind? Am I still learning? Or am I just doing the same stuff on a different day, or, as Otis Redding sings, “sittin’ on the dock of the bay / Watching the tide roll away”?

The lust for learning is age-independent. When I worked for GE, we had fifty-five- and sixty-year-old engineers in our jet-engine business who were as leading-edge as anyone I knew then, or have known since. Their lust for learning defined their very being at work and in their communities. They perfected the habit of learning, and they practiced it every working hour despite the fact that many of them were already the world’s leading experts in their respective fields. In contrast, we’d occasionally find a thirty-year-old tiptoeing around who had already forgotten how to learn; who may have actually listened to someone who told him, “Today marks the end of learning and the time to begin doing.” If you bring that mind-set to companies like GE or Nielsen, your career will be short-lived. We compensate people for what we believe they will learn—for the discoveries that lie ahead—not for yesterday’s news.

Next, get to know yourself. Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses with cool objectivity. Even as your confidence grows, you must suppress your ego; focus on your weaknesses and on ways to overcome them. What are your sources of anxiety?

Years ago, still early in my career, I realized that I had no real experience with customers—a shortcoming that caused me great personal anxiety, particularly in light of my boss’s desire to promote me quickly into business leadership. Against the advice of my boss, I accepted a job and a demotion in order to work in sales. I’ve never made a better career move in my life. My confidence grew and my anxiety abated. At another period, I found myself envious of the courage and resourcefulness of GE executives who had spent years in developing markets in Southeast Asia or in South America, where there were strange languages and business practices, different timelines and ways of getting things done. In order to have these experiences, I uprooted my family, with their consent, and took a job in Asia. I faced the unknown, made more than a few mistakes, and am better for it in the end, and so is my family.

During the course of our lives, we must all wrestle with the “work/life balance.” This issue, at its heart, comes down once again to self-confidence. Five short years after graduating from college, I fell into a terrible rut, hanging around the office twelve and fourteen hours a day. It was a habit I developed after joining GE’s Corporate Audit staff. I routinely found myself getting home well after the kids had fallen asleep. Then I took a job working for a GE vice-chairman named Larry Bossidy. I quickly noticed a few things about Larry, who retired as the CEO of Honeywell. Larry came to work at a reasonable time and left in time for dinner, even if there was the ever-present possibility that Jack Welch might try to track him down in the evening. By the time I started working for him, he had nine children. He actually knew their names, and he went to a fair number of their games and school functions. Yet, if you surveyed the GE leadership team at any time during Larry’s tenure, they would tell you that Larry got more done than anyone they had ever known.

Larry has, and I hope I now have, the self-confidence to let achievements rather than time spent in the office define our value. Nothing on earth can replace my oldest daughter’s volleyball games, my other daughter’s concerts, my son’s hockey games, or coaching my youngest daughter’s basketball team … nothing on earth!

There is one final attribute of self-confidence: knowing that you possess absolute, unbending, unimpeachable integrity. Everyone must know that—above all else—it is integrity that defines character. There may come a day in your career when you are asked to approve, or wink at, or ignore something that, if you go along with it, will have a positive impact on some measure or metric for which you, your institution, or your friends will be judged favorably. You may know, that day, that you and your colleagues are near the edge. The lawyers or compliance people may say it’s “Okay” or “it shouldn’t be a problem,” or “that’s the way they do business in China” or “Hungary” or “in the insurance industry,” or wherever. But maybe it just doesn’t sit quite right in your gut. It is not the way of global business. You must understand that when you are near the edge, that line in the sand—or that line in your soul—is moving closer to you, not farther away; that you must have the confidence and the courage to say, “No, we are not doing this.”

Then you can go home, look your family in the eye, and sleep like a baby. And there is nothing more important in any career than the ability to do that.