If I Could Tell You Just One Thing

If you’re ever lucky enough to be successful in what you choose to do, don’t ever believe your own hype, and remember it could all stop tomorrow. Do whatever you do to the best of your ability. Take the job seriously, but not yourself. And most of all, be nice to work with.”

Avoid hippies.
“Hippies. I hate hippies and I hate their music. Bad for morale, bad work habits. And they are never on time.”

If you’re mean or dismissive to waiters and hotel staff, you’re dead to me, or if not dead to me, you are bleeding out—our time together is going to be very limited. Because if you’re pissy to waiters, that’s the real you: you may not be like that to me now, but you will be

1. Turn the f**k up on time.
“I am punctual—that’s probably the most useful lesson I ever learned. It is the first evidence of your character I have: are you the sort of person who says they’re going to do something and then doesn’t? Being on time is the first thing I require of my cooks. If you have problems doing that, chances are I’m wasting my time showing you how to make hollandaise sauce. It’s the same in social relationships—do you have enough respect for me to show up on time, or do you not? If you don’t, we’re probably going to have problems down the line.”

If I was passing on anything, I would say, for goodness’ sake, look for the pluses in life. Being negative completely erodes everything. If something bad happens, I always say cancel and continue, and get back on track. There’s no good being negative. I don’t believe in negativity.”

Well, to get anywhere, you’ve got to work hard, so that means you’ve got to do something that you love. Who wants a life where you turn up each day to do something you don’t like? But most importantly, make sure you actually then get up and do it. There is always someone else who can do what you can do, so you’ve got to make sure you do it first, before the other guy does. You have to get up early every morning and get to it.”
In other words, the mayor of the city that never sleeps says, “Wake up!”
“There is always someone else who can do what you can do, so you’ve got to make sure you do it first.”

The only way barriers exist is in our heads. We create them, we feed them, and we choose to keep them alive.”
—Katie

“I have never met a child that is not fascinated by our natural world, the animal kingdom, and the wonders within it. It is only as we get older that we sometimes lose that sense of wonderment. But I think we would all be better off if we kept it. So my advice is to never lose that, do what you can to always keep that sense of magic with our natural world alive.”

Discover the joy of embracing diversity. When people become more open to the strange, to the unusual, to the radical, to the ‘other,’ we become more nourished as a species. Currently our ability to do that is being manipulated, diversity is being looked upon as a source of evil rather than as a source of joy and development. We must recapture the profound benefits of seeing the joy in our collective diversity, not the fear.”
The most important advice I ever

he quality of your life ultimately depends on the quality of your relationships. Not on your achievements, not on how smart you are, not on how rich you are, but on the quality of your relationships, which are basically a reflection of your sense of decency, your ability to think of others, your generosity. Ultimately at the end of your life, if people commend you, they will say what a wonderful human being you were, and when they talk about the human being that you were, it won’t be the fact that you had a big bank account, it really won’t. It will be about how you treated the people around you and how you made them feel.”