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George H.W. Bush
41st President of the United States
You have to have a really thick skin, you've got to turn the other cheek. You've got to try to do what your little kids in high schools do, make friends, and go the extra mile to see that the critic knows where you're coming from. But it can be ugly. There's a pack mentality today. And one hound gets out in front and the rest of the pack are baying at the heels of whoever it is that's being pursued. That's not a good thing. And so, what do you do when you're under fire? Try to tell the truth. Try to give it your best shot. Don't take it too personally, and get on with your life.
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George H.W. Bush
41st President of the United States
I'll give you a personal example. It was alleged that I was out of touch. "Bush is a President that's out of touch. He came from a privileged background, doesn't understand the hurt around this country." I went down to see a technology show and one of the items in the show was a brand new technology for check-out counters. It showed a machine that had never been invented before and, if my recollection is correct, wasn't even on the market at this point. The guy brought in a crumpled milk carton and ran it across this scanner and it did something that no other scanner could possibly do. I made some comment. "Amazing, this is a wonderful thing." And the people that produced this were saying, "This is the state-of-the-art, and we've got more to come." It was wonderful. A lazy little journalist with a famous name working for The New York Times, the son of a decent and honorable father, but a lazy little journalist, was sitting in another room. He didn't see this. He wrote that, "Here is Bush, he's out of touch. He saw a scanner. He didn't even know that at supermarkets you can scan something." It played right into the hands of the press that wanted to show I was out of touch and it was picked up. We pointed out to the press afterwards that, one, the guy wasn't there; two, this was brand new technology. CBS, not my favorite, came and defended me. Another one of the wire service reporters said that I got a bum rap, but the people don't remember that. What they remember is that I was out of touch, that I didn't even know what a grocery scanner was. You can't fight back against that kind of thing. You can do a better job in communicating. I plead guilty to not being the world's greatest communicator. But that was a myth, that was a lie, that was bad for me. And yet it lives on, people remember it. The fact that Bush was out of touch, he didn't even know there was a grocery counter scanner. Now, what's the equity, what's the fairness in that kind of reporting, that kind of cynical attack? But the answer is, you can't let them get you down, you've got to keep on trying to do your best.
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Susan Butcher
Champion Dog-Sled Racer
There are a lot of dangers. We have avalanches. We have the dangers of the Arctic blizzards which are, in many ways, the most fearsome. Many people freeze to death every year who travel in those countries. No one has ever frozen to death in the race, but this happens typically with the local people, so we know that it is extremely dangerous. The open water is perhaps the thing we fear the most, or the thin ice. In 1984 I can tell a story of being ten miles away from a checkpoint village, an Eskimo village of Shaktoolik. I traveling on some salt water ice, and I was quite a ways off land. And all of a sudden I realized that the ice was billowing around me. And so, just as I realized how dangerous it was, I gave the dogs the command to turn towards land, just as my sled broke through. So I went under, broke through, the successive dogs right in front of the sled broke through because of the weight of my sled. But the lead dogs and a couple pairs behind them were able to stay up on the hard ice and slowly but surely pull the rest of us out. It was probably about 30 below, and there is not one blade of grass out there. There is nothing to start a fire with to warm us up or dry us off.
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Susan Butcher
Champion Dog-Sled Racer
Before I won my first Iditarod, I was trying very hard to do so. And I had a very fast team, well conditioned, well trained. But I kept coming in second in more races than I care to remember. Clearly, some essential element was missing. I feel it was the winning spirit and vision. I would often finish in a race an hour or a minute or a split second behind someone else, but I'd have the strongest and fastest team. So in 1986, I learned how to pull it all together. I told myself that not only could I win, but that I deserved to win. And that I could win today. I knew before that I "someday" would win the Iditarod, but I didn't see myself as a winner today. So I kept on failing. In 1986, I lived and breathed the vision of winning the Iditarod for the full year. And I held it 11 days into the Iditarod, where I was neck and neck with Joe Garnie, 44 miles from the finish line. I had less than 20 hours of sleep in 11 days. I had run up every hill between Anchorage and Nome. But Joe made a final push and passed me, gaining a two-minute lead. I was exhausted and demoralized, and said to myself, "Well, I guess second place isn't too bad." But then through the blur of fatigue, I remembered the vision of myself winning the 1986 Iditarod, and I knew this race could be mine alone. And so for the next 44 miles, I ran, pumped with one leg or pushed until I passed Joe and won my first Iditarod.
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James Cameron
Master Filmmaker
James Cameron: You never really "get" an opportunity. You take an opportunity. You know, in the film making business no one ever gives you anything. Nobody ever taps you on the shoulder and say, "You know, I've really admired the way you talk and the way you draw, and I think you'd make a good director." It doesn't happen that way. You have to constantly be pulling on somebody's sleeve saying, "Hey, I want to direct. I want to direct. I want to direct." And you have to be willing to make sacrifices to do that. The mistake a lot of people, I think, make in Hollywood is that they think, "Well, I'll get to the top of my field as a whatever, editor, production designer, writer, and then I'll just move laterally into directing and I'll be more respected and I'll have more power." It doesn't work that way, because you drop right to the bottom of the pack as a director.
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James Cameron
Master Filmmaker
Never give up because it's going to be unbelievably hard. It's going to be a ridiculously brutal, uphill fight all the time, and you just have to have tremendous stamina and self-confidence to power through it. You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they'll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself. But, you know, what I learned from those early days was to trust my instincts and to not back off, because when the hour gets dark, you're instinct is to -- or your tendency might be to say, "Well, this is just too hard and no, you know, nobody should have to go through this in order to accomplish X," whether it's a movie or whatever. But to -- in the pursuit of excellence -- and I think you can be in the pursuit of excellence when you're working on a low budget science fiction horror film, if it's how you define it. You have to go all the way. It's that simple. Now I don't mean trample over people. I don't mean turn into a screaming maniac. I mean, you have to be able -- you have to have made the commitment within yourself to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to try to inspire other people to do it, because obviously the first rule is you can't do it by yourself.
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James Cameron
Master Filmmaker
Everyone around me had basically said, "You stink. You suck. You don't know what you're doing." And I just -- and I accepted it but then a little voice kept saying, "I don't think so. I don't think it can be that bad. I remember doing some pretty cool stuff with the actors in this moment and that moment." And I looked at it and it was fine. So then I thought, "You know what, I actually can do this and I just fell in with a pack of, you know, thieves and whackos here." But I also realized that I was going to have to get busy and create my own thing, and that nobody would hire me after that experience. Nobody would hire me and just put me on a film. I'd have to create my own thing and hang on tenaciously to that in order to be able to direct again, and that's why I wrote The Terminator
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