Posts Tagged ‘courage’

Children are much more influenced by what their parents do than what they say. Sherry Lansing is a perfect example.

When Sherry chattered about becoming an actress, like other stereotypical moms in the 1950s, Margot Heimann Duhl told her daughter to focus on becoming a housewife. But necessity had forced Margot off traditional paths. When she’d fled Nazi Germany for America at 17, she’d had to be self-reliant, learning to speak English and working as a dressmaker. And when Sherry’s father, real-estate investor David Duhl, died of a sudden heart attack when she was nine, Margot stepped up again. The grieving widow went to his office and announced she was taking over the family business. On being informed by a male office manager that she couldn’t possibly do that because she didn’t know anything about real estate, she replied, “Teach me. I can do it.”

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What happens when you have a big dream but no education or experience to support it? Does that mean you have to give up your ambitions—or at least put them on hold until you can collect the prerequisites?

Not necessarily. How’s your supply of chutzpah?

Edith Head was an educated woman. She had a B.A. in French from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in Romance Languages from Stanford. But she didn’t have the education necessary to get the job she really wanted.

So it’s a good thing she had all the nerve in the world.  Read the rest of this entry »