The whole concept behind 'Forty Chances' is really a mindset: If everybody thought they had to put themselves out of business in 40 years, you had 40 chances to succeed in what your primary goals are, you would probably be more urgent and you would b...
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had...
The rest of the world cares about how we conduct our affairs because they then take that lead. We're the only leader in the world today. Some are wishing us well, others think that we're down and are not going to get back up again, but they are all w...
Baseball cannot be learned as a trade. It begins with the sport of the schoolboy, and though it may end in the professional, I am sure there is not a single one of these who learned the game with the expectation of making it a business. There have be...
Mom was 50 when my Dad died. She got on a bus every weekday for years, and rode 40 miles each morning to Madison. She earned a new degree and learned new skills to start her small business. It wasn't just a new livelihood. It was a new life.
I missed so many opportunities along the way to do what I wanted to do because I didn't have the confidence to tell myself, much less anybody else, 'Yes, this is the business I wanted to be a part of, and not feeling that I had the talent... and lett...
My mom, who's been in the restaurant business for 40 years, is the number-one influence in my life. But I look up to a lot of people in the industry. Tops on my list is Mario Batali. My mom and Mario taught me the same lesson: Food is love.
I used to sneak up to the 8th floor and watch Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo rehearsing 'Saturday Night Live' and could only wonder if I would ever have the chance to be funny. It took me five years to go up the two stories, but it is such a sense of f...
I think as a 20-year-old you expect life to always be easy. You get given a good hand and the chance to race in Formula One. You think the driver can make the difference, can make up for everything else within the team. But that is not the case. You ...
When I decided to go to university I didn't know what I wanted to do. When I had an opportunity to take an elective I took Drama by chance, even though I'd never taken a Drama course or even been in a play in high school. Two years later I was majori...
The only way you can obtain brood mares on a basis you can afford is to buy two or three yearling fillies every year and race them. The good ones, the ones that show potentialities, you keep, and the others you get rid of. In that way, you have a cha...
I am a legal immigrant whose parents went from Russia to China to Chile to finally reach the United States and thereby give me a chance to have a better life. I served six years in the U.S. Army Reserve, went to college, have a successful career and ...
Who I was back then, when I started on 'One Tree Hill,' is so different from who I am now. Coming off Laguna, being 19 years old, and thrown into this odd, ridiculous spotlight, wasn't for me. There have always been haters, and people don't want to g...
When I first started acting I was about nine years old. I had never been to audition in my life and my agent sent me out. It was just a commercial for 'Harry Potter.' That was the first thing I ever went out for and I got the 'Harry Potter' commercia...
It's interesting because a lot of my 16-year-old kids' friends know me from 'Wedding Crashers,' and not so much Bond. My kids have a good laugh. I was 20 then. The look I had then was the look that a lot of their friends are assuming now. They think ...
When I first arrived in Baghdad in January 2003, I thought I would soon rent a house and envisioned myself swimming in the Tigris to cool off after reporting in the city the caliphs called Madinit al-Salam, the City of Peace. A year later, I realized...
Cinema builds memories; great films continue to exist in the spectator's mind. We are naturally capable of and prone to nostalgia. A spectator will reconstruct a film he or she has seen, years later, and may even change their original opinion. One cr...
It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world i...
There have been times I've planted stuff in songs where four years later I'll be singing it from a subconscious, kind of chameleon little lizard mind... and at a certain moment, all of a sudden, I'll hear a line from a different vantage point and it'...
Statistics vary, but in less than seven years there won't be a single cell left in any of our bodies that's the same as it is today. This means that any human being who 'wants' to change is like a mountain river wanting to reach the valley floor. It'...
As much as the Democrats try to change the subject, this election will be about Barack Obama, period. Mitt's speech last night hit all the right notes, but this fight is not about him. He's just the vessel. Now the question is, does this guy at 1600 ...
