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Sam Donaldson
ABC News Correspondent
I threw everything I owned into a car and I went to New York City, because I just knew that New York was ready for me, and that they would welcome me. "Here he comes! Boy, how great! Where have you been all our lives?" Well, you know the rest of that story. They laughed at me, I couldn't get a job. I went and I made the rounds. I met every news director. I mean, it was awful. And they thought I was awful, or at least not anyone they should pay attention to. But I'd also applied at a station in Washington, D.C. And so, about the time my last dollar was about to leave me, they called me in Washington and they said, "Come on down, we want to take a look at you." And they did, and they hired me.
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Sam Donaldson
ABC News Correspondent
I got to Washington, I got in the news business, then I devoted myself single-handedly, single-mindedly to it. I mean, I lived, and breathed, and ate it. I worked 24 hours a day. That's an overstatement, obviously, but almost. I wasn't married then, and I devoted myself to it. And I tell people today, if you're going to succeed, yes, you have to prepare yourself. You have to have some background, you have to have some education, you have to have those kinds of obvious things without which, even though you have drive and ambition, you can't really get far, because the playing field will not be level for you. But once you have those things, the way to succeed is just do it the way the old Horatio Alger says it. You have to work harder than the next person. You have to take the dirty jobs. You have to work for less money than you can live on, or certainly than you want, and certainly than you think you're worth. You have to work on the weekends, you have to work nights, you have to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning. You have to skip your birthday, your anniversary, the kid's birthday.
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Rita Dove
Former Poet Laureate of the United States
Hemingway once said that more writers fail from lack of character than lack of talent. You know? It is not a question of sitting down under a tree and having inspiration come down. If you wait for inspiration, inspiration's going to go away and look for more fertile ground to work with. There's a lot of work involved in it too. There's a lot of feeling that you're almost there, but you don't even know how to get to that point in the poem, and then you just simply keep working. You keep writing, you keep re-writing. And to know that everyone goes through that -- and that's part of the process and it's actually a fun part of the process -- is very important too.
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Sylvia Earle
Undersea Explorer
Sylvia Earle: At various points along the way, the fact that I was a woman was held up to me as a reason why I couldn't do this or that or the other thing. The earliest recollection that I have was when my older brother got to go to the World's Fair, and partly because I was a little bit younger than he, but mostly because I was a little girl, I was told, well, you know, he's a little boy, and he's older than you, and he can go. And I thought, well so? I'm a little girl. So what? That was my first recollection of kind of being rocked back on my heels with that kind of awareness. Although I'm sure that all through school, the role models are pretty well established. You will become one of three or four things. You will become a wife and mother, or you will become a teacher, or a nurse, or maybe a stewardess on an aircraft. Or you could type, you could become a secretary. And there aren't very many other options that are held out. They weren't to me as a child, growing up. But it never occurred to me that was all I could be.
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