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Sam Donaldson
ABC News Correspondent
Now, discipline doesn't mean that you're a martinet, and discipline doesn't mean that you have to do everything anyone in authority tells you in lock-step because you can't think for yourself. But discipline means that you've got to organize your life in everything you do, for your own benefit and for the benefit of people around. If the appointment is at four o'clock, you ought to show up at four o'clock. If you're unavoidably late a few minutes, okay. But the person who shows up at five o'clock or six o'clock and doesn't think anything of it, that person is an undisciplined person. Also, that person is a person who says, "Hey, my time is much more valuable than your time." And none of us likes to hear that. So military school taught me that. And really, the basis, I think, of achieving some success in what I want to do today comes from my mother's push to get me to read and to make something of myself from the standpoint of an education. And from a military school which taught me that to fit into society, you can't just do anything you damn well please because it will suit you. And that it's much better to be with the winners than it is with the losers.
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Sam Donaldson
ABC News Correspondent
Later in the day his assistant called and said, "I'm sorry, you didn't get the job." I said, "Why? I was a leading candidate." "Well," she said, "when Mr. Hunt asked you how cheap will you work, and you wouldn't name a price, he wasn't interested, because he thinks everybody should know what they're worth." And she said, "It wouldn't have mattered if you said $1000 a month, or $300 a month." Well, I don't know what the lesson there is, because I -- you know, you name your price. But I guess the lesson is this: If you don't have confidence in yourself and think that you are worth hiring, or whatever it is, you can't expect anyone else to. And if I now call you in for a job and I say, "Can you do this job?" And you said, "Well, I don't know, maybe I can't, but I'd like to try," I can find someone else. Maybe you should be honest and say, "Yes, I can do that job. Now, I've had this much experience. Maybe I need a little bit more experience, but I can get it," and what have you. But I learned that lesson. And what it also did for me was teach me that I should go back to what I knew. I mean, go back to the game you know, go back to broadcasting. I knew that. I'd prepared myself for that.
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Rita Dove
Former Poet Laureate of the United States
I had a couple teachers who did inspire me. One was this eleventh grade English teacher -- eleventh and twelfth grade. She and I, we still have tea together sometimes today. I was frightened before I went into her class. I heard she was a battle axe. I heard that she would flunk you if you split an infinitive. And it's true. She would, but she also would tell you what a split infinitive was, and then once you knew, you never did it again. She just opened up to me, how language -- how the written word -- can also sing. And she spent, I remember once, 45 minutes on one page: the first page of a novel. By the end of the class, no one had taken down a single note, because we were absolutely enthralled. It was incredible.
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Rita Dove
Former Poet Laureate of the United States
I had a ninth grade English teacher, Mr. Hicks, who put us in groups and gave us impossible poems to interpret. When I say "impossible," I mean poems which had Greek in them -- a little bit of Greek and -- languages we couldn't even -- we couldn't even read the alphabet. "Just tell me what it means. Tell me what you think it means." And after a couple of class periods when we decided this is so impossible we might as well just make a wild guess, it turned out our guesses weren't so wild after all. So he taught us to trust what your gut reaction was to something. Even if you didn't understand every word, to work out the context.
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Sylvia Earle
Undersea Explorer
Sylvia Earle: Well, I say that I worked when I went through school, but it wasn't to me work. It was really a source of pleasure. I worked as a laboratory assistant, and it was throwing me right into the midst of the very people that I wanted to be with. And never mind that I was washing glassware, and whipping up banana medium to feed the fruit flies and things and things of that sort. I found it just that that I was with the people I most admired. It gave me an entree. It gave me experience. It gave me acceptance with them - I became the lowliest member of the team, but part of the team.
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