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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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Benjamin Carson
Pediatric Neurosurgeon
We lived in the inner city, single parent home, dire poverty, my mother only had a third grade education. I was perhaps the worst student you've ever seen. I thought I was really stupid. All my classmates and teachers agreed, and my nickname was "Dummy." But, fortunately I continued to hold onto that dream and, you know, when I was in the fifth grade, my mother put us on this reading program and said we had to read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Library and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read, but we didn't know that, and she'd put a little check mark on them and act like she was reading them.
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Benjamin Carson
Pediatric Neurosurgeon
But, one time I couldn't get a job, even that way, it was so bad. And, my creativity, I guess, went into another gear, and I decided to go to the Young and Rubicam Company. When I was applying to college, I had done my regional interview there, and I knew that the Executive Vice President would remember me, 'cause he had done my interview. So, I went up to the penthouse suite, waited 'til his secretary turned her back, and darted into his office. And he said, "Benjamin, how are you? How are things at Yale?" And, I said that "Things are wonderful, but I can't find a job this summer." And he said, "Did you try our personnel office?" I said no. Actually I had tried it. And, he said, "I'll tell you what." He picked up the telephone, and he called the personnel director. He says, "I know we're not hiring this summer, but I have a young man here, and I'm going to send him down. I want you to give him a job."
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Benjamin Carson
Pediatric Neurosurgeon
Thomas Edison said he knew 999 ways that a light bulb did not work. He didn't give up, and along with his right-hand man, Lewis Lattimer, they eventually came up with a successful light bulb. There's a cleaning formula called Formula 409. Of course, the reason they call it that is because the first 408 didn't work, but they didn't give up and they kept going. I always say, "If something doesn't work out, make sure you analyze it and try to find out why it didn't work and don't repeat that." It's like people who are always late. You can always count on them being late. They never seem to learn that if you get organized and you leave 15 minutes earlier, you won't be late. They just don't seem to be able to understand that. And, a person who can learn from their mistakes is a person who is going to be successful.
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