The Best Advice I Ever Got (6 page)

George Lopez

Comedian and Host of
Lopez Tonight

Fortune Favors the Bold

Anyone familiar with my stand-up routine or the show I had on ABC for four years probably knows that I had a miserable childhood. My migrant-worker father took off when I was two months old, and my mixed-up mother abandoned me when I was ten. I was raised by my biological grandmother and her second husband in a poor section of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley.

Going to college never crossed my mind. Instead, I have a Ph.D. from the school of hard knocks. To the parents of the kids I grew up around, I was an example: “You wanna end up like George Lopez?”

My friends ran faster and were better athletes. And they had parents.

Everything frightened me—the dark, other people, anything new.

But I had two things nobody realized. One was determination. The other was a wicked sense of humor. From as far back as I can remember, something funny would always pop into my head. It was how I dealt with not having as much as everyone else. It has been the one constant companion on my journey.

My grandmother Benita Gutierrez was the inspiration for my ABC show, which featured a dysfunctional family. I can still hear her scolding me:
“Come over here. Why you crying?”
With my grandmother, it wasn’t tough love. She was just tough.

My grandmother and the man I called my grandfather, Refugio Gutierrez, were never diligent about my whereabouts or concerned with what I was learning or how I was learning. They never mentioned anything about me going to college or pursuing my education.

Whenever something got tough for me, I quit. And whenever I got upset with someone I avoided that person, which is a form of quitting. I would never say “Sorry,” because I never heard the word in my house. All I heard was
“Hey, you, get over it.”

It wasn’t healthy to be always quitting. I was only hurting myself. When golf got tough, I quit. When accordion got tough, I quit. When school got tough, I took easier classes. And school was tough for me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was dyslexic. I didn’t know it until my daughter Mayan, now fifteen, was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was five. By then, I was up and successful, so I didn’t get treated for it because I didn’t want to mess with a formula that was working.

I wasn’t a very good student. I graduated from San Fernando High in 1979, with a 2.2 grade-point average. That’s why my production company is called 2.2 Production. Growing up, I spent a lot of time at home alone in front of a television set. Freddie Prinze, Sr., became my first idol. When I was a sophomore in high school, I was devastated by the news that he had committed suicide.

Freddie Prinze, more than anyone else, got me interested in comedy. He was responsible for my wanting to become a stand-up comedian.

I got a few gigs in a small comedy club in Westwood after I graduated from high school. It didn’t go well. My first stand-up was on June 4, 1979. I was scared to death. I had a wino buy me a small bottle of wine to settle my nerves. It only helped a little.

My second stand-up didn’t go very well, either. But the third time was the charm. The audience was laughing, actually laughing. It gave me a feeling I had never experienced before, an infusion of excitement. In fact, I have never felt like that since, with the exception of the day my daughter was born.

The fact that I had actually made people laugh didn’t exactly jumpstart my career as a stand-up comedian. I had some successes but was often left feeling humiliated. In 1982, I quit. Yes, I quit again.

I had some menial, go-nowhere jobs.

The moment that turned my life around came at 6:15 on the morning of April 23, 1984, my twenty-third birthday. I was sleeping on a friend’s couch in a duplex in Pacoima. I realized for the first time that I was going nowhere and that I was not prepared for anything.

I had been battling my disability, battling my desire. I was battling making choices and commitments. It was on that day that I realized I had quit at everything. I made a vow never to give up on stand-up again.

I realized if I didn’t take the initiative and rewire myself I would end up being like so many people I knew who never committed themselves to anything and just took any job they could get and stayed there forever.

For the first time, I was determined to trust myself and accept the good as well as the bad as it came. In the back of my mind, I had always felt that I could be somebody. The movie
Rocky
came out when I was in high school, and I said to myself, “That’s me.”

I had to deal with my fear, my nerves, and my shyness, but I was determined to make it as a stand-up comedian.

The best advice I ever got came in the early 1990s during a comedy festival in San Antonio. That advice was: “Be bold!”

From that point on, I approached everything with a newfound bravado.

There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about how fortunate I am to be doing something that I love, and that as a performer I created a place that previously didn’t exist for Latinos. That’s important to me.

The message I want to convey is: Be bold. Don’t be afraid. Trust your instincts. If you quit, you’ll never find out what could have happened. So be yourself, and remember:
Fortune favors the bold!

Maria Shriver

Award-Winning Journalist, Bestselling Author, and Former First Lady of California

Don’t Be Afraid of Being Afraid

Someone once told me not to be afraid of being afraid, because, as she said, “Anxiety is a glimpse of your own daring.” Isn’t that great? It means that part of your agitation is just excitement about what you’re getting ready to accomplish.

Don’t sell yourself short by being so afraid of failure that you don’t dare to make any mistakes. Make your mistakes and learn from them. And remember: No matter how many mistakes you make, your mother always loves you!

Susan Stroman

Broadway Director and Choreographer

What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

As a little girl growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, whenever I found myself in a conundrum I looked to my father for advice. And always he offered the same encouragement: “Ask yourself, what’s the worst that could happen? Someone might tell you no, but there’s no harm in that.” Just take a chance. Ask the question.

When I was struggling to establish myself as a choreographer in New York City, I had an idea, along with my friend Scott Ellis, that we should approach the legendary composing team of John Kander and Fred Ebb about staging a revival of their show
Flora the Red Menace
. Between us we had no money and not many credits, but I knew the idea was a good one. We just needed that “One Good Break”! So, with my father’s advice in my ear, we met the famous Kander and Ebb and asked the question.

They said yes.

With Kander and Ebb’s blessing, we then took our idea Off Broadway to the Vineyard Theatre in hopes that the company would produce it.

Again, the answer was yes.

I’m here because I took that chance, because I knocked on Kander and Ebb’s door and didn’t let the fear of rejection stop me from asking. If you really believe in yourself and your art, then you have to create your own opportunities. You can’t wait for someone else to do it for you.

Our tiny production of
Flora the Red Menace
opened in 1987. Now, decades later, with many Broadway shows under my belt, I’m once again with Kander and Ebb. Together we just opened the new musical
The Scottsboro Boys
on Broadway. I believe in serendipity, but I also believe there are times when you have to be the one who lines up everything so it can fall into place. So just ask the question. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? “No” isn’t really so bad, and “Yes” might take you places you’d never expect.

Tony Hsieh

#1
New York Times
bestselling author of
Delivering Happiness
and CEO of Zappos.com, Inc.

Be Lucky

At Zappos, we try to hire the luckier job candidates. In fact, one of our interview questions is “On a scale from 1 to 10, how lucky are you in life?”

Many years ago, I read about a study in which researchers posed that same question to a random group of people. Each participant was then handed a newspaper and asked to count the number of photos inside. What the participants didn’t know was that it was actually a fake newspaper. Sprinkled throughout were headlines such as, “If You’re Reading This, the Answer is 37. Collect $100.”

Researchers found that the participants who considered themselves unlucky in life generally never noticed the headlines. They diligently completed the assigned task and eventually came up with the answer. But the people who considered themselves lucky in life? They generally stopped early and made an extra hundred dollars.

The takeaway here is not so much about being inherently lucky or unlucky in life. Rather, luck is more about being open to opportunities beyond how the task or situation presents itself.

So try to be more creative, more adventurous, and more open-minded as you go about your life. Try to notice opportunities in disguise. Try to think more outside the box.

In short?

Be lucky.

THE BANK OF EXPERIENCE

On Hard Work and Tenacity

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it
.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON

I
n April of 2009, I had the privilege of interviewing Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who landed that incapacitated US Airways flight on the Hudson River after geese had knocked out both engines. Sully’s split-second judgment and calm demeanor that winter day saved all one hundred fifty-five passengers and crew members on board. While his story is about grace under pressure, it’s also about the value of hard work and the importance of logging enough hours that the expertise you’ve built up almost goes on autopilot. “For forty-two years,” he told me, “I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience. And on January 15th the balance was sufficient so that I could make a sudden, large withdrawal.”

Success really is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his now famous book
Outliers
, to truly master something you need to spend at least ten thousand hours doing it. One example he cites: the Fab Four. The Beatles might have seemed like an overnight sensation, but they had played together more than a thousand times before that famous appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
back in 1964. For them, it really was a hard day’s night—night after night after night for years! Bill Gates’s birthday set him up perfectly for the technical revolution that was taking hold in this country, but good timing wasn’t everything. He dropped out of Harvard and spent every waking moment building and understanding computer codes.

There is simply no way around it. There is no substitute for hard work. Early in my career and to this day, I’ve put in as many hours as needed to get the job done. If it meant working after hours, on weekends, in the middle of the night and getting two hours of sleep, I would do it. People notice. They also notice when you’re doing the bare minimum. Nothing is less appealing in a work setting than a fresh-out-of-college graduate, who’s entitled and unmotivated. If you’re the low man or woman on the totem pole, learn from those up at or close to the top. Pick their brains, follow them around. They’ll probably be flattered. Even today, I’m still learning from my colleagues. When I see an interview or a story that I really like, I’ll watch it several times to understand what made it so good.

No matter how many hours you put in, or how much sweat equity you amass, there will be times when you feel you aren’t getting the credit you deserve or promotion you’ve earned. You will inevitably face disappointments. One of the most empowering lessons of all is: Life isn’t fair. This is something I tried to teach my daughters. When they were demanding toddlers, I often responded to their whines by telling them, “Girls, you know what Mick Jagger says: ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ ” If you realize that disappointment will always be part of the equation, regardless of how unfair it feels, your recovery time will be much faster.

And sometimes things just don’t go your way because someone beats you fair and square. I remember I was desperate to profile Chris Reeves following his horseback-riding accident, because he was one of the most inspiring people I’d ever met. I was relentless. I called his representative almost every day. I wrote letters. Called some more. When I found out that Barbara Walters was going to do a one-hour special on Chris and his wife, Dana, I was crestfallen. But my disappointment was quickly defused when I realized that he had a long-standing relationship with Barbara and, after so many impressive years in the business, why wouldn’t he turn to her and trust her? I watched the special, which was beautifully done. And I thought to myself: This was the right decision. I also thought about a famous line by media mogul Barry Diller: “I lost. She won. Next.”

Sometimes hard work and good timing intersect. Sometimes they don’t. But they likely will at some point, and when they do, like Sully … you’ll be ready.