Free The Best Advice I Ever Got by Katie Couric Page B

not feel helpless in unfortunate situations. It’s given me patience with others and with myself, and, most of all, it leaves the problem open to being solved. Which, of course, always leads to a solution.

Morgan Freeman
    Academy Award-Winning Actor

    You Quit, You Fail
    If I’ve learned one life-serving lesson, it is that dogged determination pays off. The surest way to lose at any endeavor is to quit.
    Once, while sailing in the Windward Islands, I put into Marigot Bay, St. Lucia, needing to replace the water-pump impeller on my diesel engine. After putting ashore by dinghy, I went to the marine store in Rodney Bay, certain of success but not having any. I scoured the town of Castries, canvassing every store and shop that looked as if it might carry an impeller for the Perkins 4-108 diesel engine. I took jitneys and walked most of the day, to no avail. Finally, in late afternoon, tired, sweaty, hungry, and thoroughly discouraged, I sat on a retaining wall and pondered the proverbial end-of-the-rope question: Now what? Then my eyes settled on a large fishing boat tied up in an estuary not fifty yards off the road. I walked over and told the guy on the boat my problem.
    “Come on,” he said. “I think I know who can help you.”
    We walked along a dirt path for a short distance, stepped through a chain-link fence, and wound up in someone’s yard. Engine parts were everywhere. This was the home of a “shade tree mechanic.”
    “Perkins 4-108? I believe I do have a couple you can have.”
    And so he did. Cost: EC$25, about $8.25.
    The lesson was clear to me: Don’t give up. Fatigue, discomfort, discouragement are merely symptoms of effort. I was on the verge of giving up when salvation was staring me right in the face. Had I not taken that one last walk across the road, I would have failed. There are a lot of incidents like that in my life, but that one was so resonant that I’ve never forgotten the lesson. You quit, you fail.

Raúl de Molina
    Television Personality

    Against Apparent Odds, Never Give Up
    I arrived in the United States at the tender age of sixteen, searching, as so many before me, for the American dream. But the first thing I noticed about my destination—Miami—was how similar it felt to Madrid, where I had lived as a teenager, and Havana, where I was born. Everyone spoke Spanish. Once I’d settled in Miami, my interests proved to be very different from those of your typical Cuban-American teenager. I went from loving soccer and bullfighting to following NASCAR and pro wrestling. Men like Dusty Rhodes, also known as “The American Dream,” Abdullah the Butcher, Richard Petty, and Jackie Stewart were my heroes.
    In high school, I swiftly became the school’s yearbook and newspaper photographer. Later on, after graduating from college, I became a professional photographer. It was during this time that my boss, Phil Sandlin, the photo editor at the Associated Press in Miami, taught me to never give up or take no for an answer. I covered every riot, trial, coup, and other major news event in Miami and Latin America during the 1980s and early 1990s. Never a dull moment. Then came Miami Vice , with Don Johnson, and so began an American obsession with celebrity. My focus shifted from news to starlets—I became a celebrity photographer. My photos graced the covers of every major publication, from The National Enquirer , The Sun (London), and The News of the World to France Dimanche and Hello! magazine.
    I was invited to the set of Joan Rivers’s show on numerous occasions to discuss my famous photographs, among them shots of Princess Diana, Princess Caroline of Monaco, Prince Charles, George Michael, Delta Burke, Jane Fonda, Madonna, and many others.
    On one of these occasions, a Univision executive happened to see me and, not long afterward, I received an offer to join the network. It was my first foray into Spanish television—a world that was totally foreign to me.
    For the past twenty years, I