If you want to be an entrepreneur, it’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle. It defines you. Forget about vacations, about going home at 6 pm – last thing at night you’ll send emails, first thing in the morning you’ll read emails, and you’ll wake up in the middle of the night. But it’s hugely rewarding as you’re fulfilling something for yourself.
I understood from a very young age that school was important and that my parents were making great sacrifices for me. Every morning I saw my father get up and go to a job that he didn’t really like. They came to France for the same reasons all immigrants move to another country – so their kids could have a better way of life.
Our perception of celebrities in Hollywood is not the reality. The reality of our lives is so much like everyone else’s life. We have family members we love, everyone gets up in the morning, they have three meals a day and they go about their business.
I used to sleep on the floor next to the bed, because I believed that I didn’t even deserve a bed to sleep in. And then, one morning, a cockroach crawled onto my leg. I looked at it, and suddenly I awoke from a kind of hypnotic trance in which I had been all my life.
The plane took off at 8:10 in the morning – or that’s when it was scheduled to take off. And that’s when I believe it took off. I had been in my office at the Department of Justice. Someone told me that there had been the two strikes that occurred at the World Trade Center.
Where I grew up in Vermont, there is no municipal garbage removal. You have to bring your trash to the dump every weekend. Something like three hours on Saturday morning, the entire town goes in. It is actually a very efficient place to do politics. I would go to the garbage dump, get petitions signed, give out literature, talk to voters.
I have this fantasy of my older days, painting or sculpting or making things. I have this fantasy of a bike trip to Chile. I have this fantasy of flying into Morocco. But right now, it’s about getting the work done and getting home to family. I have an adventure every morning, getting up.
I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn’t, but she always knows where I’ll be. She doesn’t need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.
I am addicted to cereal. I am one of those people who just loves their cereal morning, noon and night. Kellogg’s message is what I tell my kids every single day, which is: You’ve gotta start off your day right with a good, healthy breakfast to give yourself the potential for greatness.
I do heavy weights in the morning for about an hour, and then I do 45 minutes of higher-volume lifting in the afternoon. My least favorite is the legs… I do quite a few chin-ups and rows. I do mostly old-school lifting with a lot of squats.
That’s my father’s theme. Get up in the morning, ‘hello, Dad.’ ‘Get a job, leave the food alone… Who took my car?’ America, you young kids, get a job. All that sagging, the clothes hanging behind, that ain’t nothing. Get a job. You want to be somebody, get a job.
Complex tasks are often better handled in the back of our mind, and that’s often true of creative tasks – when you have something complex to deal with in writing or research or responding to an email. I’ll start working, put it aside, and sometimes I’ll wake up the next morning with a solution, or I’ll find one when I exercise.
I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.
There’s a new holiday tradition in my life, and it comes with an open door policy. Starting at 11 a.m. on Christmas Day, friends, family, whoever, is welcome to swing on through my place – I’ll be cooking and drinking from morning till night.
Growing up, I had a lot of family members who worked in the Dallas Independent School District, and they shared stories firsthand with me about kids stepping into the cafeteria hungry before practice, or waiting for the school building to open the next morning just so they could get a meal.
Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.
On the morning of Thanksgiving, I would wake up to the home smelling of all good things, wafting upstairs to my room. I would set the table with the fancy silverware and china and hope that my parents and grandmother wouldn’t have the annual Thanksgiving fight about Richard Nixon.
But to the slave mother New Year’s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
My first job, 9 years old, part-time, was selling Christmas cards door-to-door. Ten years old, my brother and I had paper routes. We delivered a morning paper called the ‘L.A. Examiner.’ Get up at 4 o’clock, fold your papers, deliver them and get ready for school.
I’m very happy with the way I look. I wake up some morning, catch myself in the bathroom mirror, and go, ‘hey girl, you’re alright’. But on the other hand, I find the website stuff, and the polls, something completely removed from my own personal life. You can’t take anything like that too seriously, otherwise you’d end up in the loony bin.
I grew up, as I joke around, in the ‘People’s Republic of Charlestown’ in the city of Boston. And I was blessed to be raised right there on Monument Square in Charlestown, and every morning I’d hop on the bus and go on a 45-minute ride out to the suburbs in Brooklyn for elementary school. And I got to have my seat, really, in both worlds.
I always like to start my morning with a good amount of fruit. I really like pineapple, particularly because of the enzymes that it has. Sometimes I have oatmeal. But if I’m feeling like I really want to be watching my weight more, then I definitely do a protein, like an omelet, scrambled eggs or some smoked salmon.
Distribution has really changed. You can make a record with a laptop in the morning and have it up on YouTube in the afternoon and be a star overnight. The talent on YouTube is incredible, and it can spread like wildfire. The downside is that it’s very hard to convince the younger generation that they should pay for music.
When they told me I had cancer – a very rare form called appendiceal cancer – I was shocked. But I went straight into battle mode. Every morning, I’d wake up and have an internal conversation with cancer. ‘All right, dude,’ I’d tell it, ‘go ahead and hit me. But I’m going to hit you back even harder.’
It’s not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?
