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Oprah Winfrey
Entertainment Executive
I was raised on a farm with my grandmother for the first six years of my life -- I knew somehow that my life would be different and it would be better. I never had a clear cut vision of what it was I would be doing. I remember absolutely physically feeling it at around four years old. I remember standing on the back porch -- it was a screened-in porch -- and my grandmother was boiling clothes because, you know, at that time, we didn't have washing machines, and so people would, you know, physically boil clothes in a great big iron pot. She was boiling clothes and poking them down. And I was watching her from the back porch, and I was four years old and I remember thinking, "My life won't be like this. My life won't be like this, it will be better." And it wasn't from a place of arrogance, it was just a place of knowing that things could be different for me somehow. I don't know what made me think that.
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Tom Wolfe
America's Master Novelist
Tom Wolfe: I think The American Dream is very much alive. That's why there's incredible immigration to this country. And the idea is that no matter where you start out, you have the freedom to reach the height that your ability will enable you to do that. And the New York Times has just run a long series about class in America. They don't even realize they're not talking about class, they're talking about status. I mean, when they have an article -- one of the articles was about some evangelical Christians who somehow have come into money, and they know enough to go to Ivy League colleges, and they're making inroads at Brown and so forth and so on. That's class? These people have moved up? That is just sheer status. They've improved their status through hard work. And the entire series. Class, to have real class, it was understood in Marx's day, you almost have to have a land-based economy. People have to be pretty static. And there has to be symbolism. There has to be a sense that in one class you cannot wear -- in a lower class you cannot wear what they wear in a higher class. There's a certain kind of obeisance you have to make to people who are above you. And all that is gone in this country.
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John Wooden
Basketball's Coaching Legend
John Wooden: They use the winning percentage, and that's not an accurate way of judging success. I wanted to come up with something of my own, and I think there were three things embedded into it. One was the discussion in Mr. Schidler's class. Then, my dad's words: "Never trying to better than someone else, learn from others, and never cease trying to be the best you could be." And, always being interested in verse that makes a point, about that time I ran across a little simple one that said:
At God's footstool, to confess,
A poor soul knelt and bowed his head.
"I failed," he cried. The master said,
"Thou didst thy best. That is success."
I think those things, more than anything else, accounted for my own definition. The definition I coined for success is: Peace of mind attained only through self satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you're capable. Now, we're all equal there. We're not all equal as far as intelligence is concerned. We're not equal as far as size. We're not all equal as far as appearance. We do not all have the same opportunities. We're not born in the same environments, but we're all absolutely equal in having the opportunity to make the most of what we have and not comparing or worrying about what others have. I coined that in 1934. Later, I started working on my pyramid. I worked on that for the next 14 years, placing success according to my definition at the apex.
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