I started out mopping floors, waiting tables, and tending bar at my dad’s tavern. I put myself through school working odd jobs and night shifts. I poured my heart and soul into a small business. And when I saw how out-of-touch Washington had become with the core values of this great nation, I put my name forward and ran for office.
I was a business major at the University of Richmond, and after I graduated, I took a job at a corporate ad agency. I had comedic dreams, but I also had a realistic look at what I had to do when I left school: maybe I’m funny, but maybe I’m one of a hundred thousand funny people, you know?
You may earn whatever money you earn as a cricketer, but you want to play for your country. At the end of the day, you want to do something special. There are plenty of people who earn 50 crores or 100 crores as businessmen or big professionals or who are really doing well in business. But what gives pleasure to your mom and dad is the fame.
I begin early in the morning and edit everything I wrote the previous day. I write until mid-afternoon. My goal is to write a chapter per week, and if I am not finished by Friday, I write on the weekend. I get a lot of fan emails and answer them every day. In the late afternoon, I attend to the business of publishing, etc.
Every night, half an hour before curtain up, the bells of St. Malachy’s, the Actors’ Chapel on New York’s 49th Street, peal the tune of ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’ If you walk the streets of the theatre district before a show and see the vast, enthusiastic lines it sounds like a calling: there is certainly no place like Broadway.
The reality is that business and investment spending are the true leading indicators of the economy and the stock market. If you want to know where the stock market is headed, forget about consumer spending and retail sales figures. Look to business spending, price inflation, interest rates, and productivity gains.
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
I always wanted to be a zookeeper when I was growing up, and I’ve wound up a zookeeper! I’ve been working with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years! I’m the luckiest old broad on two feet because my life is divided absolutely in half – half animals and half show business. You can’t ask for better than two things you love the most.
In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don’t cost much to be housed.
I’m fascinated by the business of belief, obviously, because it’s so ever present with humanity anyway. And, you know, when you have science, which constantly talks of proofs, you have religion, which constantly talks of beliefs and faith and so on.
I grew up on my dad’s sets, but I was never star-struck or desperate to be famous. I grew up being a worker. It took me a long time to realise that my work ended up being seen by people. As far as I was concerned, I was just in the family business.
There were six kids in our family, and I grew up fast. I had to do a lot of things on my own. I was a rebellious teenager. That’s why coming into the film business was good for me because it gave me some discipline. Once I became an actor, I had to grow up a little more.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help… Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
You can put the greatest seafood restaurant next to an average steak house in an urban area, and that steak house will do more business than the seafood place. If you go to the water, you can put an average seafood place next to the greatest steak house, and people are going to eat seafood.
As a small business owner, I’ve had to find ways to keep costs as low as possible while still providing customers with the ability to use their credit cards for payments. Many credit card processing companies are so expensive when it comes to fees that it started to feel like a losing proposition to offer this payment option.
Instant, soluble coffee has long been the unspeakable wasteland of the coffee business. Conventional wisdom would be that no premium brand should go near it. But Howard Schultz’s vision from day one has been to bring quality coffee to the mass market.
Rural technology is moving from kind of the back office to where everything, every company – sales, marketing, customer acquisition, new product development, media – all industries are becoming technology industries. And it’s not information technology: it’s business technology.
Reality TV is flat with the anti-cultural imperatives of business: cheap to make, it does ideological work even when it is not giving guru status to dull business people. It fits in with capitalism’s anti-mythic myth: the idea that we have liberated ourselves from the dangerous illusions allegedly propagated by art and politics.
You gotta know that you’re better than anybody, ‘cause to me, if you don’t go in like that, you’re gonna lose! They’re gonna punk you out! On any stage, court, business venture, on the anchor desk – whatever. You’ve got to go in believing, ‘I can do this better than anybody.’
Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs.
Just because you’re big doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful. The beauty of the motion picture business is that you can make a little movie like ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ or ‘Rain Man’ and go right through the roof. This business is still about creative juices, and size is no guarantee of that.
Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.
I look out the window in the morning sometimes, and the sun is rising, and the people are going to work. I look at Washington as being that big, sleeping giant, just stretching and waking up, and going about its business. And to know that I’m working in the capital of the most powerful nation in the world – I feel good about that.
You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, ‘Come on, you know, there’s life and there’s death and there is love.’ And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.
The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is.
