Richard Reed, entrepreneur and the author of If I Could Tell You Just One Thing: Encounters With Remarkable People And Their Most Valuable Advice, writes in the introduction that a good piece of advice can change your life. He made a promise to himself a decade ago that whenever he met someone remarkable he’d ask them for their best piece of advice. “It always seemed more worthwhile than asking for a selfie,” he writes.
He kept his promise, and has now published the answers. Reed has been meeting everyone from Anthony Bourdain to Bill Clinton, to the Dalai Lama to Patrisse Khan-Cullors (a co-founder of Black Lives Matter) to Simon Cowell, asking them what their one piece of advice would be. He put the same question to everyone, “Given all that you have experienced, given all that you now know, and given all that you have learned, if you could pass on only one piece of advice, what would it be?” With accompanying portraits by Samuel Kerr, the proceeds of this book go to non-profits devoted to mentoring and social inclusion. Here are a few pieces of advice Reed collected from some of the world’s most extraordinary people:
Anthony Bourdain, the chef, author and television personality, gave Reed a list of 10 pieces of advice, like a list of ingredients. This was one of them, “If you’re dealing with a**holes the whole time, you’ll die of a heart attack. You know the people I’m talking about- the ones when you see their caller ID you think, ‘Oh f***, I don’t want to talk to them.’ Well, don’t do business with those people.”
Reed spoke with ex-soldier, adventurer and television producer Bear Grylls, known in the states for his show Man vs. Wild where he has completed natural feats with the likes of Academy Award-winning actress Kate Winslet to President Barack Obama (while he was still in office no less). He has watched many extraordinary people, and himself endured, many of the biggest challenges Mother Nature created for mankind. The struggle is where he most excels, and where he believes success is actually determined. “There’s always going to be someone faster, smarter, taller, more experienced than you, but the rewards in life don’t always go to them; the rewards in life go to the dogged, the determined, those who can keep going and pick themselves back up and never say die and just hang in there, sometimes quietly and un-dramatically.”
If being a great boxer is not difficult enough, Laila Ali had to shoulder the legacy of her father, Muhammad Ali, one of the greatest boxers and civil rights activists who ever lived before she even entered the ring. She came to the sport late, and tried to talk herself out of it. It wasn’t what she envisioned for herself, and her father was one of the greatest boxers of all time. There is no dabbling with Ali, if she was going to start boxing, she was going to be a champion, hard stop. She told Reed, “We all have what it takes inside us. Trust yourself, trust your intuition…don’t not go after your passion because of fear. Look fear in the eyes and say, ‘I am coming for you.’”
Many people know the Jo Malone perfumes, but not the woman who created them. Malone learned early on that handling adversity is the key to success, and that she could get through anything. When she was just eleven her mother had a nervous breakdown, a social services worker said if her mother was hospitalized, she would have to go into care. She convinced this social worker she could provide for herself and her sister. She learned to make Revlon creams like her mother, and sold them to upper-class women in Fulham. She explained to Reed, “No matter how bad it is, no situation is ever greater than you. You always have three options: you can change the situation, accept the situation, or change your mindset on how you see the situation. And you have the power in your hands to choose whichever is best for you. Never allow something else or someone else’s opinion to become the title of your book. Ever.”