The Best Advice I Ever Got (9 page)

NEVER GIVE IN

On Pluck and Perseverance

When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on
.

—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

I
could probably write an entire book about the people who thought I’d never make it in television. I guess I’ll begin at the beginning. In the early eighties, when I was working at CNN as an assistant assignment editor, the Washington bureau chief, Stuart Loory, decided to give me my first big break. He approached me one day and said, “Katie, would you like to go to the White House every morning and report on the president’s schedule for the day?” I could hardly believe it. I had never done a TV report in my life, and now I was going to be at the White House! I went home, thrilled and terrified, spent much of the evening in front of the mirror, talking earnestly into my hairbrush, and had a sleepless night fantasizing about my acclaimed television debut. The next morning, the crew helped me put in my earpiece and watched as showtime approached. During the commercial break, I heard the two anchors Dave Walker and Lois Hart, a married couple, chatting with each other. “Who is that girl?” Lois asked. “I don’t know,” Dave answered. “But she looks like she’s about sixteen years old!” Confidence began to escape my body like air from a tire. When they “threw” to me, I recited the president’s schedule in a singsongy voice, more or less reading from the AP wire: “At ten o’clock, the president has a meeting with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski”—working a tad too hard to pronounce it properly. When it was over, more relieved than anything else, I went back to the bureau, where a very nice assignment editor named Bill Hensel told me that he had gotten a call from the president of CNN, Reese Schonfeld. The message was blunt: He never wanted to see me on the air again.

I eventually started doing some reporting, thanks to another, much more encouraging on-air married couple named Don Farmer and Chris Curle. I had first met Don when he was a correspondent for
20/20
at ABC News and had knocked on his office door armed with a list of potential story ideas. Our paths crossed again a couple of years later at CNN when I moved to Atlanta to produce Don and Chris’s show. They thought I had potential and allowed me to do some reporting. My on-air presentation improved and I was offered a job as a local reporter for the CBS affiliate in Miami. Two years later, I was hired by WRC, the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. While I was there, I asked my news director if I could anchor the morning cut-ins, the short local news updates that ran twenty-five minutes after the hour during the
Today
show. He was skeptical but agreed to let me try. As Yogi Berra said, it was déjà vu all over again. I was expected to write the copy, edit, and time the accompanying video, and run my own teleprompter. I was terrible. I continued talking long after the computer had automatically triggered the commercial break. I’m sure the age-old expression “deer in the headlights” was dusted off to describe my performance. When I saw said news director later that day, I asked if I could anchor the local cut-ins another time, knowing my first foray was, um, subpar. “Sure,” he told me. “If you go to a really, really, really small market somewhere.” It was, in short, another disaster.

So why didn’t I just throw in the towel and say, “Maybe I’m not cut out for this business”? I knew that my skills needed to be honed and that I was a work-in-progress, but I was convinced that I had the skills and could do the job. I also knew something else. Along the way, you’re bound to encounter people who are naysayers and buzz killers. Maybe they’re insecure, maybe they’re bitter, maybe they simply lack imagination. Those people need to be strained from your life like sand from a colander of freshly washed seashells. But then again, some of them may—
surprise!
—be right. Sure, they could have been more tactful, but both of my hypercritical news directors—men who in so many words told me, “You can’t”—actually did me a favor. I worked harder, got better, and became more determined than ever to prove them wrong.

About six months after my disastrous morning cut-in debut, I had started working at NBC as a Pentagon correspondent. During Christmas, management was desperate to find someone to fill in for Garrick Utley on the Saturday
Nightly News
. They asked me. Having practiced over and over with a prompter, I got through the broadcast without hyperventilating. When I saw my former news director in the hallway of the building that NBC shared with WRC, I reminded him about telling me to go to a really, really, really small market somewhere to read the cut-ins. “Well,” I said teasingly, “is the entire nation a small enough market for you?” He hates that story. But really, he who shall not be named deserves only this: Thank you. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in
As Good as It Gets
, he made me want to be a better broadcaster. And I did get better. (Thank God.)

Drew Brees

Quarterback for the New Orleans Saints

Use Adversity as an Opportunity

There are many times when an event will happen in your life, something heartbreaking or tragic, and the immediate human response is to ask why. “Why me? Why now? This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.” We have all had those moments. And, however trivial they seem now, when we look back on them, at the time they were devastating. I can remember one of these moments as if it was yesterday. It changed the course of my career and my life. At the time, I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, and I asked myself all those “why” questions. It was December 31, 2005. I was the quarterback for the San Diego Chargers, playing in the last game of the season, and approaching an off-season where I did not have a contract moving forward. Things were looking up, though, as I envisioned signing a long-term deal with San Diego that would keep me there my entire career. Midway through the second quarter, that all changed in the blink of an eye. I dropped back to pass, only to be blindsided and to watch as the ball fumbled out of my hands onto the ground. I jumped in the pile along with a few defenders to try and recover the ball, only to emerge seconds later with a dislocated throwing shoulder. This is the worst injury a QB can have. Our livelihood is throwing the football, and with a shoulder out of socket this becomes impossible. I saw the doctor a few days later, and he confirmed my worst fears: I had a very serious shoulder injury that would take eight months to heal properly if I was lucky, and it might be two years before I felt totally normal again. Some doctors even gave me a twenty-five-percent chance of ever playing again after seeing the injury up close.

So, with my future in San Diego gone and my football career in serious jeopardy, I was faced with a choice. I could sit and feel sorry for myself or I could use this adversity as an opportunity: an opportunity to bring my shoulder back not only as good as but better than it was before. This injury had happened to me for a reason, I thought, and although I may not see it now, it will be for the better. I just need to trust and have faith and believe that if I do things the right way good things will happen. What is meant to be will happen for me, and all I should concern myself with is the things I can control.

Two months later, in the midst of my rehabilitation, I received a call from the New Orleans Saints asking if I would consider being their QB. They were one of only two teams that showed any interest. I felt a calling to New Orleans that transcended the game of football. It involved the rebuilding of not only a team and an organization but also a city, a region, and, more so than anything, the rebuilding of a mind-set. I now look at what this great city has accomplished post–Hurricane Katrina and smile. It is hard not to reflect on the circumstances that brought me here. At the time, I thought my shoulder injury was the worst thing that could have happened to me. Now I look back and say it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It brought me to New Orleans and allowed me to be a part of this special journey.

Michelle Kwan

Figure-Skating Champion

Fall Down and Get Back Up

I started figure skating at the age of five, and the first thing my coach taught me was how to fall. I remember gazing up at the coach with a puzzled expression, thinking, Shouldn’t I be learning how to skate? Why is she teaching me how to fall? Looking back, I realize that my coach was very smart. She knew that I was bound to fall many times throughout my career and that I’d need to learn how to handle it. And boy was she right! Even at twenty-five, as a world champion, I still fell. A lot.

In 1997, I was the reigning national and world champion. I remember feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. Instead of my usual “go for it” attitude, I was skating in every competition as if I was afraid to lose. (And when you skate like you’re afraid to fall, you usually do fall!) That year, during the U.S. Nationals in Nashville, Tennessee, my worst fears were realized. Although my choreography, music, costume, and even makeup seemed perfect, I was far from perfect that evening when I skated the long program. To this day, I still wince thinking of how many jumps I missed and spills I took. It was truly the worst performance of my career.

It would have been very easy for me to give up that night, right in the middle of the program, but I was determined to get through it. Every time I fell I just picked myself back up and kept going; each fall, each miss, made me even more determined to finish the program. And I did. It wasn’t pretty, but I got through it.

That competition taught me to never give up. And it’s a lesson I took with me for the rest of my skating career and beyond. Pick yourself up and keep going. As a competitive skater, you win some and you lose some. In the end, your finest moments in life aren’t necessarily those in which you finish first but, instead, the times when you know that you simply gave it your best—when you did it heart and soul, and held nothing back.

Christina Applegate

Emmy Award-Winning Actress

You Don’t Have the Luxury of Negative Thought

It was March 11, 2005, 8
P.M
. The orchestra had just finished the last note before the curtain was to rise on yet another preview performance of
Sweet Charity
. I was in the wings awaiting my cue. I ran out to twirl around the lamppost and deliver my first line: “Ya ever have one of those days that was perfect?” I had done this now for a month, eight shows a week, and all without a hitch. But this night as I twirled an uneven part of the stage caught my heel and I heard a horrible snap. At first there wasn’t any pain, and I continued to deliver my line and to prepare for the show’s opening song. But as the moments went on the pain became unbearable and I looked down and saw that my foot was broken. There I was in front of twenty-five hundred people, with a broken foot and no way off the stage. It was a devastating blow. I was truly frightened. And all I could think was: I have ruined everything. We had been at this for months—working and rehearsing tirelessly as a cast that had truly become a family. We were one month away from opening on Broadway, in a show that was my dream come true. But now time stopped. We were faced with the fact that the show might not go on.…

After scrambling to get my understudy ready to take over the remaining preview shows, I had one task: to heal. But how? How could I do this? The bone was broken in half. And this was a show in which my character didn’t leave the stage for two hours. Not to mention it was dance heavy. I needed that foot.

Besides going to many different doctors, most of whom said it was nearly impossible for me to heal before opening night, I called the one person I knew who could help: my longtime friend and teacher, the Reverend Michael Beckwith. After a conversation filled with tears and incredible fear, he said this to me: “You do not have the luxury of negative thought.” Uhhh … okay. “How can I not have negative thoughts when doctors are telling me I can’t do this?” I asked. “And when we are faced with the fact that the show might be forced to close? And that my amazing castmates are about to lose their jobs? Jobs we have all put our hearts and souls into?” Once again he said, “You do not have the luxury of negative thought.” I had a job to do! Reverend Beckwith gave me the task of envisioning the bone healing faster than was humanly possible. Of playing over and over in my mind the doctor saying to me, “It’s a miracle!” And so I did. Every day I participated in the healing of that bone. I felt those negative thoughts coming through and told them to shove it! I kept my eye focused on the task at hand. I did not have the luxury of negative thought; of listening to the lies we so often tell ourselves; of being talked out of success by my fears. And within two weeks a doctor did say to me, “Wow, I have never seen a bone heal this quickly.”

To make a long story short, the show did indeed go on—with Tony nominations and great success. It was the single most rewarding and unforgettable experience of my life, and it changed me forever. Those same words and the power they held would serve me again in 2008, during one of the most challenging periods in my life: when I was diagnosed with cancer. Again, I said to myself, “I do not have the luxury of negative thought! Not when I need to make the impossible oh-so-possible.” They are words I live by. And although I occasionally falter and my mind tries to convince me otherwise, it was those words that helped fuse a bone together at record speed. So believe me, this s*** works.