What I Know Now

Excerpt

Madeleine Albright
Former Secretary of State

"You've got the guts to find your own purpose."


It's odd to think of a former secretary of state as someone who worries about fitting in, but for a long time Madeleine Albright did. In a group, she paid attention rather than interrupt. Sitting in her roomy office at the Albright Group, in Washington, D.C., Madeleine recalled her need to be liked and accepted with no regrets. "In the end I don't think it was a disadvantage. Wanting and needing to be liked is part of what got me to where I am."

Wearing a red suit and brown leather Lucchese cowboy boots when I met her, Madeleine, sixty-nine, seduced me with her forthright, unpretentious manner. She treated me as an equal, even though I've never owned cowboy boots or a cabinet title. Smaller than I expected, she held her body very still during our meeting. Her blue eyes seemed to swallow my words with a gravity that lingered even when she laughed. Don't forget this is a woman who has spent numberless hours with world leaders, including Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and grappled with genocide, war, U.S. embassy bombings, and U.S. cruise missile attacks on suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan, among other crises.

Born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague, Madeleine and her family emigrated to the United States when she was a child. Apple-cheeked and round in high school, as she describes herself, Madeleine worked hard to seem casual and American. Her efforts were often undone by a serious streak that revealed itself through bossy outbursts, such as when she turned in a fellow student for talking during study hall. After attending Kent, a private girls' school in Denver, Madeleine went to Wellesley College on scholarship and married journalist Joe Albright three days after graduating.

Her letter is addressed to herself in the spring of 1982, at age forty-four, when she was still reeling from the breakdown of her marriage of twenty-three years. Shortly after Joe announced that he wanted a divorce, she accepted an offer to join the faculty at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. At that time in her life she had already earned a master of arts and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, acted as chief legislative assistant to Senator Edmund Muskie, and worked on the National Security Council's staff. In her new position, she was charged with creating a program that would encourage women to enter international relations, and she was expected to serve as a role model for those young women.

Dear Madeleine,

You will get through this fog and uncertainty--and you'll do it in the best possible way. You won't become cynical, stoical, or hard-bitten over the loss you're feeling. Over the next ten years you'll rebuild and reinvent yourself, finding success--and tremendous satisfaction.
The truth is, you've got the guts to find your own purpose and the integrity to fulfill it on your own terms. Your parents taught you to strive to achieve all you can, with the gifts that you have. Now you're about to direct those gifts toward finding your voice and using it to serve your country in ways that will surprise you.

When your students ask you how you have managed to be married and have children and work at the same time, you feel like a phony because you think you haven't succeeded at that. It's hard to feel qualified as a role model. But you are.

It will take years before you realize that you already are a good role model. But ultimately you'll inspire far more women than you'd ever predict. Twenty-three years from now when women say that they're choosing a career in international relations, the thing you'll enjoy most is telling them that there is no formula, that everybody must choose their own path.

With confidence,
Madeleine


Maya Angelou
Poet, Author, Playwright

"Don't let anybody raise you. You've been raised."


Born Marguerite Johnson, Dr. Maya Angelou was raised by her mother, Lady Vivian Baxter, a self-possessed, successful entrepreneur and businesswoman who owned a hotel and wore diamonds in her ears. Unmarried, Marguerite was pregnant when she finished high school in the summer of 1945. Her son was born in September and she decided to leave home two months later.

Leaving the comfort of her mother's big house, which had live-in help, was characteristic of Dr. Angelou's courage and fierce sense of independence. She has gone on to embrace--and excel at--a dizzying array of disciplines. She speaks French, Italian, Spanish, and West African Fanti. She has danced onstage, composed music, written plays, directed and acted in movies. In the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., asked her to become the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and in 1993, President-elect Bill Clinton requested that she write a poem for his inauguration.

Dr. Angelou has written prodigiously: six autobiographies, including the best-selling I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published by Random House in 1969; three children's books; six plays and two screenplays; numerous books of poetry and other books. Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, a collection of her poetry, earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1971. In 1981, she was appointed to a lifetime post as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.

This avalanche of achievement could not have seemed more improbable on the day the seventeen-year-old Marguerite left her mother's house with a two-month-old son in her arms. She had found a job, a room with cooking privileges down the hall, and a landlady who would baby-sit. Here is what Dr. Angelou, seventy-eight, would say to her younger self.


Dear Marguerite,

You're itching to be on your own. You don't want anybody telling you what time you have to be in at night or how to raise your baby. You're going to leave your mother's big comfortable house and she won't stop you, because she knows you too well.

But listen to what she says:

When you walk out of my door, don't let anybody raise you--you've been raised.
You know right from wrong.

In every relationship you make, you'll have to show readiness to adjust and make adaptations.

Remember, you can always come home.

You will go home again when the world knocks you down--or when you fall down in full view of the world. But only for two or three weeks at a time. Your mother will pamper you and feed you your favorite meal of red beans and rice. You'll make a practice of going home so she can liberate you again--one of the greatest gifts, along with nurturing your courage, that she will give you.

Be courageous, but not foolhardy.

Walk proud as you are,
Maya


Rachel Ashwell
Creator of Shabby Chic

"Don't leave school just yet."


Deep pillows and feather beds are at hand. Plump armchairs wear slouchy white denim or cream linen slipcovers. Worn tables bear honorable scars and nicks. In the unpretentious slipcover and flea market world of Rachel Ashwell, coziness counts more than pedigree. A self-taught designer and entrepreneur who grew up in Britain, Rachel, forty-six, says her biggest fear is mediocrity. To her, an ordinary decor looks familiar--because it's been done before. "Mediocrity is a superficial effort--what happens when a project is done without passion," she says. Her company, Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic, based in Los Angeles, celebrates plain design and refurnished furniture, edited by a strict "Less is more" principle. "I can't bear cluttered closets. A cluttered cupboard is a cluttered mind," she says.

The concept has lured customers around the world, including celebrities like Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson. Her fifteen-year-old company, with more than $10 million in revenues and 125 employees, is expanding quickly. In addition to six stores, five books, and a TV show associated with the company, Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic spread in 2004 to department stores like Bloomingdale's (with a new line of sleepwear) and Target stores (with bedding, furniture, rugs, and other products for the kitchen, living room, and elsewhere).

Despite her successful track record, until recently Rachel was uncomfortable if someone she didn't know approached her at a party. She explains why in her letter, written to herself at age sixteen, when she dropped out of school. "In America people think of everybody in Britain as Cambridge- or Oxford-educated and madly intellectual, but they're not," she says.

After dropping out, she found employment as an au pair in Britain and moved in with the family she worked for. A few months later, she relocated into a room in a Council Flats building, which was government-subsidized and "pretty Dickensian," she says. Rachel's working-class floor mates included quite a few drunks. Every tenant shared a hall bathroom. You had to put change into a meter for hot water.

In time, of course, she became an expert at replacing hard edges and dark gloom with soft cushions and pastel colors. That feat is detailed in The Shabby Chic Home, an account of Rachel's unglitzy renovation of her beloved Malibu home, which she later sold. Her special alchemy lies in the way she allows a room to answer to a primal need, described by poet Maya Angelou: "The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned."

Dear Rachel,

Don't leave school just yet. You're sixteen, eager to get a job and get on with it. This willingness to move on--no, actually it's like a compulsion, isn't it?--will serve you well. What would you say if I told you that your love for design and decorating, combined with that incredible drive to start the next thing, will lead to a business with your name on it that generates more than $10 million in annual sales?

So, being impatient will be an asset. But you need school, too--not because you need book knowledge but because you should have more experience with learning. Without that, you'll struggle. Even in your mid-forties, when you're doing something silly, like reading instructions for a new appliance or reading People magazine, you'll have to keep bringing yourself back to focus. You'll love what you do. Your life will be like a big box of candy every day. But the problem will be savoring the one in your mouth. You'll no sooner bite into one piece than you'll have you're eye on the Milky Way over there.

Many entrepreneurs and artists skip the traditional educational path. Still, one thing that's really wonderful is that if you follow certain rhythms in life, the tracks that most people pursue, things do tend to work out. Without that evolution of character building, though, it's hard to catch up. At forty-six, I think I'm just beginning to catch up. I've always been quite nervous about crowds and parties. I worry because I don't trust strangers. I just didn't allow myself to go with that rhythm when it was the right time to connect with people, so you should. I didn't cultivate friendships or a sense of myself, which is why you must.

Now that I have a daughter who's older than you are, I understand that the experience of being around other kids is as important a part of education as classroom material. I see all these dramas she and her friends have. They hate one another; then they love one another. It's just what they do. Without the bumps and bruises of a school's social scene, you're going to be defenseless when conflicts arise. You'll be so uncomfortable around confrontation, for example, that there will be many instances in your future life where you'll walk away without presenting your point of view.

Impatience and restlessness will lead you to one decision in particular that you'll regret. After establishing a career based on making houses into cozy sanctuaries, you'll sell the first house you ever bought, in Malibu. You'll think it's important to have more communal space, something bigger. You won't take into consideration the importance of the place where you made your family's memories. That's what comes of not having the intellectual habit of thinking things through and making a decision for the right reason. Life will be your school, and you'll be successful. But with a mentor and some training, your success could be really amazing.

With patience,
Rachel


Barbara Boxer
U.S. Senator from California

"Don't be so quick to dismiss another human being."


After short careers as a stockbroker and a journalist, Barbara Boxer, now sixty-five, found her voice as an advocate in politics. It was like a race car at full throttle suddenly finding traction. Barely five feet tall, Boxer, a passionate champion of the environment, childhood education, and women's rights, sometimes has to stand on a box to see over the podium at press conferences. In recent years, the Brooklyn-born Democrat has become better known for criticizing key Republican moves. She fiercely censured the war in Iraq. She signed a House member's complaint about Ohio voting problems during the 2004 presidential election, which forced Congress to debate the snafu before certifying President Bush's victory. Her vehement opposition to Condoleezza Rice's nomination as secretary of state inspired a skit on Saturday Night Live.

Far from scaring voters away, Barbara's boldness seems to have endeared her to Californians. Running for her third term in 2004, she received more than 6.9 million votes, the highest number ever tallied for any Senate candidate, beating opponent Bill Jones by twenty percentage points. There's also talk of a Boxer for President campaign on Internet blogs, but she says she has no interest in running.

Though her success looks effortless, she had to learn that passion, clarity, and determination are not enough to ensure victory. The first time she ran for office--a spot on the Marin County Board of Supervisors--she lost. "One of my biggest faults when I started out in politics was being judgmental. At that young age, I didn't really have the patience to hear why someone might have a different point of view from mine," she said. Four years later, in 1976, she ran again and won. This letter is for the thirty-two-year-old Boxer, mother of a seven-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, as she was preparing to run for office for the first time.


Dear Barbara,

You're full of fire. You're passionate about quality education, safe streets, the environment--all of these things. I know you feel these things in your heart and you feel them strongly, but look, you have to understand that the next person may hold their beliefs with the same amount of passion that you have. Don't be so judgmental about other people. Don't be so quick to dismiss another human being. Don't jump to the conclusion that another person just doesn't get it or isn't wise enough just because he doesn't agree with you.

The name of the game in politics is to move forward an issue you deeply believe in. You're just starting out and young enough to be impatient when people don't see your point of view. Stop and listen to what you're saying: I can't believe you feel that way! And: How could you possibly think that way? You've shut off the potential to learn from that person you're talking to and you'll be less of a person for it. In the end, you'll lose what matters most--the chance to advance an issue you care about.

There's something else you may not want to face: It's easier to be judgmental. It's less work to see everything in black and white. But every single person is as important as you are and has a story to tell, just like you do. Open up your mind to other points of view--and you may not have to experience how losing an election can take you down a peg or two.

Your staunchest supporter,
Senator Boxer


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpted from What I Know Now by Edited and with a new afterword by Ellyn Spragins. Copyright © 2006 by Ellyn Spragins. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.