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Kent Weeks
Living Legend of Egyptology
I must admit that when I got off the plane and drove into Cairo, I just sort of went, "Ah! I'm home." Came down the next day with acute appendicitis and spent the next four days in the hospital. Went down to Aswan to board our boat down to the archeological site. There were about six Yale students on the project, they were all swimming in the Nile. I decided to swim in the Nile, dove in. Didn't realize how strong the current was, pulled all my stitches, so spent two days in the hospital in Aswan. And then finally went down to excavate with the Yale project in Nubia. About six days after we got there, Kelly gets a telegram. He says, "I've got to go back to Aswan. There's some paperwork that I've got to take care of." And he looks at me and he says, "You're in charge." Here I am, 20 years old, never been out of western Washington before. I am in Nubia, about 250 miles from the nearest living human beings, except for 300 local workmen, whom I suddenly am supposed to supervise, although I don't know a single word of Arabic. It was really an indoctrination, an ordeal by fire. I was just thrown into the thick of it, but I loved it. I was scared out of my mind. The first sentence of Arabic I learned was, "Stop! Don't dig any deeper." The second sentence I learned was, "Can't you dig faster? We're trying to work here!"
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Kent Weeks
Living Legend of Egyptology
Archeology is basically nothing more than systematic destruction. We don't know what to expect. It's a constant series of surprises. What that means is that I can tell somebody who's giving us money, "We're going to do this -- A, B and C -- and we're going to finish in six weeks. Then we're going to get the publication out and you will be credited for it." And you suddenly find six weeks have passed, and you've discovered there's a whole lot more to do. You can't get the publication out yet. You've got to go to the person who gave you the money, ask for more money. Try to explain that you weren't lying to them in the first place, these are just unexpected events. This is always a problem, because after a while people begin to wonder you know, like with our project. When we started out, we were making a map of the Valley of the Kings. I thought we could do it in a couple of years. Well, it has now been 17 years and we're still working at it. I think we're going to be in a position where we can publish -- both in hard copy and on CD-ROM -- in about two years. But who knows what tomorrow's going to bring? I've had problems. You know, concessions or permissions won't materialize, or a promotion I was hoping for didn't come because the publication upon which the promotion was based didn't come. So you know, you delay being promoted from assistant professor to associate, or associate to full for another year. And these are disappointments, sure. But the only thing I can say is, just keep going. Have faith in yourself, and have faith in what you're doing, and one way or another it will get done.
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Andrew Weil
Integrative Medicine
To drop out of medicine after one year of internship, there was very little professional or social support for that. I wanted to be licensed as a general practitioner, and at that time almost everyone that I knew went on to specialty training, so that was a big decision. Secondly, I did not hear other physicians questioning the risks of the methods that they were using. And the things that I was most interested in -- mind/body interactions, for example, natural medicine, the use of plants in medicine -- there was nobody doing those kinds of things. And so it was a very lonely path that I proceeded on when I left professional medicine.
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Sanford Weill
Financier and Philanthropist
If a person is not willing to make a mistake, you're never going to do anything right. Because most of us are not perfect, and therefore, I think it's very important to learn how to be a risk taker. Learn how to be a loser, because it's important to be a loser to be a winner. And learn that when you do make a mistake, you'll surface that mistake so you can get it corrected, rather than trying to hide it and bury it, and it becomes a much bigger mistake, and maybe a fatal mistake.
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