Marlo Thomas – It Ain’t Over

By starrymag | May 13, 2014

Q) How do you start a business?  How do you change your career?  How do you get the career you want?  How do you make your dream come true? 

A) One of the things that I’ve learned is the first thing you have to do is never face the facts or you won’t get out of bed in the morning.  That’s my mantra, anyway.  I have that hanging over my computer.  People are always telling you that you can’t do it.  You don’t have enough money, or you’re too young, or you’re too old, or you’re too tall, or you’re too short, or whatever.  Don’t listen to any of those facts.  Make up your own facts.  That’s the first thing. The second thing, maybe the dream that you have needs another skill set.  Maybe in order to get to that dream, you have to learn something new.  Or maybe you should intern somewhere where you want to work, in the field you want to work.  Everybody is very happy to hire you for nothing, so you can intern somewhere and learn what you want to do. Maybe it’s too scary to start alone, so maybe you need to do with a girlfriend, or a couple girlfriends, or with your mom, or with somebody, with your boyfriend, with your husband, whoever is in your life.  Maybe the two or three of you need to get together to do it.  The most important thing is to try to figure out what is something that you love to do. The book has 60 different women that I interviewed and they come from all walks of life.  Some of them were really broke and sleeping on their friend’s couches, sold their clothes through EBay to make enough money just to begin to start a business, to fund a business.  Other women mortgaged their houses.  Other women borrowed money on their retirement funds, or sold the things that they had, but a lot of women that really were able to get started, were with things that they already did well and liked to do. One woman liked to make jewelry.  She was in her early 30s and her husband died and she had three little kids.  She certainly wasn’t planning on going back to work at that point in her life.  She didn’t know what to do and her friend said, well, you’re always making jewelry and giving it to all of your pals.  Why don’t you try selling your jewelry?  She said, would anybody want that?  And she said, yes.  Sure.  Try it.  So she stayed up for nights making ankle bracelets, and nose rings, and earrings, and bracelets, and necklaces, and all kinds of things, and started taking them to stores in her neighborhood and sold them.  She went on EBay and Etsy and sold them some more, which is great about the web, because you don’t have to have money for a storefront.  You can actually have a virtual store.  So she’s making a living doing something that she loves. Another woman made caramels.  She was trying to make some money and everybody loved her caramels.  She made little packages of caramels and took them around to different offices in her neighborhood and left a card.  People started calling her and saying, gee, we love those caramels you left off.  You could bring some more?  She said, yes, but this time you have to pay for it.  So she sold them to all different businesses and office buildings where she lived.  She also took them to a local bakery and they sold them.  She’s made a business out of these caramels. Those are two examples of taking something that you love to do and making that into a business.  Or the other way of doing it is to learn a new skill set and to do it with somebody that you know.  I encourage anybody that wants to start a new business, or make a new dream come true, you can do that, you just need to have some passion about it.  You need to say, okay, I’m really going to go for this. One of the things that I have learned from talking to all of these women, a mistake that I sometimes make, that if you really want to do something, if you have a dream, you can dream big but work small.  Sometimes all of us, me included, we dream big and we try to start at the very top. One woman had an idea for a product.  She was a mom and she had an idea for – I don’t want to give her idea away because she hasn’t sold it yet, but it’s something that would help her deal with all the things she needed to do to take care of her kids, or when her mother came, her grandma came, to take care of the kids.  She took it to QVC and they rejected it.  She was devastated.  I said, you can’t be devastated because you went to QVC.  You’re going to the top of the mountain. Start at your local stores.  Start by sending it to your friends.  Start selling it on Etsy and other places like that.  Just start working small. Make a call every day.  Try to do something every day for six months, just a step every single day.  As I say, “Get a new skill set, intern somewhere.  Make calls to people that can inform you.”  There’s a saying that “it’s not who you know, it’s who you get to know.”  If you don’t know somebody in the area that you’d like to learn about, find somebody who does know somebody and make a call to somebody you don’t know.  Just keep trying every single day to do one thing to get you closer to your dream.  So those are some of things that I’ve learned by being on the road and talking to women.  I get very excited when I see women say, “I could do that.  Alright, I’ll try that.” What I also like about the book, and I think it’s important, is that with the 60 stories, or the 60 different women, you can look at it as a roadmap.  Every single woman has some little tip in there that might be useful to you, or your friend, or your mother, or your sister.  If you look at the book that way, not looking at the book as oh, wow, aren’t these 60 women fabulous because they did this?  Which they are, but if you look at it as, where is a roadmap for me?  What is something I can take from each of these women and make my dream come true? So that’s my last tip and now I’d love to hear from you all.

Q) While we’re always moving forward, we embrace and accept our imperfections and imperfections in others.  What you would say is your biggest imperfection?

A) My biggest imperfection? I have many of those.  I have my mother’s Italian body, so I have to work really hard on working out the area from my bra strap down to my waist.  That’s where I carry my fat and I have to really work on exercising that and strengthening that so that it’s stronger because I really don’t like the look of anything flab underneath my bra strap.  That’s my major imperfection.  I have many more, but that’s my major one.

Q) I know in the book you make the distinction between taking the smart risks versus dangerous risks.  Can you explain that a little more?

A) I think you have to know what you can stand.  If you mortgage your house, that might be less risky than borrowing from your retirement fund, because if you mortgage your house, you could pay it off over a longer amount of time.  If you borrow from your retirement fund, you might be somehow endangering your future.  I think that you have to look at which risk you’re willing to take. One woman in the book let go of her apartment.  She was single so she could do that, stop paying rent on her apartment, and asked her friends if she could take turns sleeping on their couches for a couple of weeks at a time until she could save enough money to buy what she needed to start her new business.  That’s a risk she could afford to take because she didn’t have a family to support.

Q) How did you discover the women that you’re portraying in the book?

A) I went out on my Facebook and Twitter pages and asked for them, if anybody wanted to start over and was looking for advice or wanted to share their story.  We got thousands of answers. As you know, I work for AOL and Huffington Post, so I went on their Facebook pages.  Then I also found some women in the country that I hired and asked them to go through local stories. I didn’t want to miss anybody. I wanted to be sure that if a local woman had done something – like this woman had started a nail taxi business, which was great, but it was a local story.  A friend of hers was pregnant and she’d had some trouble with her pregnancy.  She was in bed a while and she was about to deliver and she felt really grubby.  She said to her friend, it would be great if you could find me a manicurist to come give me a manicure and a pedicure before I deliver the baby.  Her friend said, sure, I’ll find somebody to do that. It was in Ohio.  She couldn’t find anybody and she thought, what a great business.  So she created a business called Nail Taxi, which really didn’t take a huge investment because she lived in Ohio, all of her friends had a car, and she had to make an investment in all kinds of nail equipment and nail polish and so forth.  She, herself, went to beauty school so that she could also be one of the manicurists. Then she was a dispatcher and she took in orders.  She made herself visible in the community and she started a whole business called Nail Taxi.  Now she’s in several other cities.  That came from a need from a friend.  That was a local story.  We wanted women from all parts of the country and we wanted women from different ages and different backgrounds.  I think we accomplished that by putting out feelers in these three different ways.

Q) Sometimes people believe that only those with money, or a degree, can reinvent themselves.  How would you encourage those people to get past the “I can’t?”

A) First of all, almost all people who have started businesses started with nothing.  I’m sure there others that had money to start other businesses, but most of the women in my book started with nothing and had to go, as I say, learn a skill set, intern somewhere, borrow money, go in with a friend.  Those are the ways in which people start businesses.  I think that a lot of the women in the book did start with absolutely zero.  Some of the women were already in a business and then wanted to start over in another business, but there are all types in the book. But to people who don’t have anything, and don’t know how to start, I think those are the ways in which to start, which is to take a step every single day and figure out what is it that you want to do and do you know enough about it?  Do you need another class to learn about it?  Do you need to borrow money?  Do you need to go in with a friend, or three friends, to start this business?  Will you all pool your talents and your money?  I think it’s very doable for somebody starting from zero.  I really do.

Q) I’m interested in the fact that you interviewed women of different ages and of different generations such as boomers, the Greatest Generation, Generation X, and Generation Y.  During the course of interviewing each of those generations, did you notice differences or similarities among the women?

A) Yes.  I felt that they were mostly stuck.  They were stuck in a place that they didn’t know how to get out of.  They had to work really hard to reinvent themselves from feeling like they were in a hole.  Whether they had been laid off at a job, or whether they were stuck in a job they didn’t like and they felt they couldn’t get anywhere in it, or they didn’t like their boss, or they didn’t like the whole atmosphere of their job. They had a dream in the back of their mind, but they never really could get to that dream because they had to make a living to raise their kids or be a part of supplementing the family income.  Now was the time that they wanted to at last go back and pick up that dream.  I think that there were all different situations that they were in, but mostly they felt stuck.

Q) You found it to be a commonality across the generations?

A) I did.  Feeling stuck was a common theme. Now they felt that maybe they could go after it because they had saved a little money.  A lot of it was, how do you start?  How do I start?  I don’t know how to start.  That’s why, when I was saying the thing about one step a day.  Just do something every single day. If you want to get somewhere in six months, if you do something every single day, and I really mean every single day, you will be way further along in six months.  One of those can be meeting a person who thinks like you that wants to do it, too.  That could be one day.  The next day could be learning a new skill set, taking a class, signing up for a class. Just keep doing something every single day.  My acting teacher, Lee Strasberg, used to say, acting is not in the mind.  It’s in the doing.  That’s the same with life.  You can’t sit home and wish for it and talk to your friends about it.  You have to do something.  Do something every single day to get to where you want to go.

Q) You’ve told us about all the ladies that you met that have inspiring stories.  I’d like to know, who are some of the most inspiring people that you’ve met?

A) I’m very inspired by people who say to themselves, you know what?  It’s my turn.  We all do things that our parents told us was the right thing to do.  I met a lot of women who said that they took a course in school because their dad thought that was a good job for them and that was a way for them to do – one woman wanted to be a doctor and her father said marry a doctor, but what you should do is get a job now.  So she went into graphics, which really wasn’t what she wanted to do. Then later in life she decided when she was around 38 years old, while she was doing the graphic arts for a medical brochure. She said to her colleague, it kind of hurts to work on this medical brochure because I really always wanted to be a doctor.  The friend said to her, you could still go to school to be a doctor.  She said, I’m 38 years old.  By the time I become a doctor, I’d be 50.  The colleague said you’re going to be 50 anyway.  So she went to med school and became a doctor at 48.  Now she’s doing what she always wanted to do. I think that’s what inspires me is that people did something that really wasn’t what they wanted to do and then they realized later, I did that, but it isn’t what I wanted to do and it’s not too late.  If you’re 30 years old, you could live another 60 years.  If you’re 40 years old, you could live for another 50 years and so on.  Why not go for what it is that you want?  It’s your life.  I think that that’s how we have to think about our life.  Not what’s gone past us, but how much time there is moving forward.

Q) For a busy mom, or a busy woman, who feels like she’s dragged in so many different conflicting directions with responsibilities to family and career and everything else that takes time in her life, what do you recommend that she does to find that future extra minutes for herself or prioritize to find those few extra minutes so that she can make this change in her life that she needs to make?

A) It’s such an important question.  It’s so important and so many women are struggling with this.  I think you have to take the time to look at what you need to make what you want happen.  You don’t have all the time in the world, but you might have an hour a day for a class.  You might have an hour a day in the evening, or sometime in the morning, or sometime in the day when you can away and get closer to what it is you want to do.  Or get together with a friend.  Do you have a particular career you’re thinking about?

Q) If you are looking to expand on the career that you’re doing right now and find that extra time to take care of the little things that really need to be done to be very successful, is difficult for someone with everything else going on?

A) Then I think you have to make a priority list.  That’s what I do.  As you probably know, I have my own website on AOL and I create 80 pieces of content a month.  I have to raise money for St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital.  I’m doing a new play, and I’m writing blogs for Huffington Post, and I’m married with a husband who’d like to have some of my time. I have to prioritize every single day.  I start on the weekend.  On the weekend, I just sit down and sit at my computer at my desk and say, okay, what is it that I want to get done this week?  What do I need?  What do I want to get done that doesn’t have to do with all these other jobs I have?  For example, all of a sudden I’m writing a book.  When am I going to have the time to write this book?  I have to pick the hour.  Do I have to get up an hour earlier so that I can do it then?  Do I have to stay up an hour later at night so that I can do it then?  Which days do I do which thing?  Which day will be my hour or my two hours?  When will I get them, because you have to plan that out.

Q) So planning out everything and then, in between all of that everything, planning out the extras that you need to do?

A) That’s right.  In other words, if you’ve got to get your kids up in the morning at 7, then maybe at 6 o’clock is your hour for yourself.  Or maybe when your kids are napping, or going to school, or you’ve fixed the dinner, now it’s your hour.  I don’t know if you’re married and you have somebody, that’s going to take pieces of the day. Whatever it is, you have to look at your whole day, every day, and say, which hour, or hour-and-a-half, or two hours, is going to be mine?  This is going to be my time.  I think that’s the only way you’re going to find it, but you have to figure it out.  You can’t say at the end of the day, another day went by and I had no time for myself.  You have to make which time is going to be your time and stick to that.

Q) From your experience, and for the amazing women in your book, is there some theme when you’re not getting the support you need for your current set of friends and family?  How can you go out and find it?

A) You know inside of yourself this is the right thing to do.  I think we spend way too much time worrying about what other people think anyway.  Even if it was your husband, we spend way too much time worrying. I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives, but let them be happy and well and do what they want to do.  In the meantime, whatever you’re working on, you need to find some other women, or men, who are doing what you do so that you have a community, some people to talk to, bounce ideas off of.  I think that it’s tough to be isolated. My goodness, there are a whole lot of bloggers, maybe you can connect with one of them.  Or if you have a Facebook page, go on your Facebook page and say, I’m looking for people who I can start a community with.  I’d like to talk to some other women who are working in whatever field. I love my Facebook page because it’s a community.  It’s a new community of women. My mom had passed away and I was feeling kind of bad that I wasn’t going to get any new advice from my mother.  I was making lists of all the advice she’d ever given me so I wouldn’t forget.  I went on my Facebook page and I said, do all of you, any of you, have advice your mom ever gave you that you really cherish? So many women wrote in about different pieces of advice that their mother had given them.  One woman wrote in and said, my mom just passed away a month ago and I’m really feeling sad about the fact that I will never get another piece of advice from her.  Another woman wrote in and said, “I know just how you feel, I lost my mom a year ago and it makes so sad not to be able to hear her voice and be able to tell her what I’m going through and get her advice.  I really feel for you.”  Another woman wrote on the Facebook page her feelings about her mom. It really brought tears to my eyes to see all these different women comforting a woman that they had never met.  They probably will never meet, but here they were talking to each other and sharing their feelings on my Facebook page.  It made me feel so good to know that I had created a space where they could do that.  I think you could pose a question on your Facebook page and ask, I’m looking to communicate with other women, I’m not getting a lot of support from my friends and I really need support and I’d love to hear from you and just start talking and you’ll find a community right there.

Q) For women in the mid or older generation, defining confidence and finding that confidence to chase your dreams can sometimes be daunting, especially with the media with that perception of you can do it all, and be the skinniest, be the healthiest, be the most beautiful.  What advice do you have for women to find their own inner-confidence and not judge themselves based upon the outside world?

A) Like I always say, never face the facts or you won’t get out of bed in the morning.  If I worried about the fact that I no longer look like I did on That Girl, that I’m no longer 25, or 35, or 45, or even 55.  If I want to spend my life in regret of what I no longer am, or no longer can look like, I’m just going to be miserable. I get my confidence from what is it that I have inside of me that is good that works for me? What works for me is I have a lot of ideas and I try to act upon my ideas instead of sitting home and wishing for them to come true.  I really do try to make them happen.  I try to get together with other people who will help me make them happen.  I take my confidence and my go-getedness from working with what I have right now, not with what I used to have.  I don’t look back. My father used to say, never hunch your back with yesterday.  You can’t, because it just weighs you down.  Also, the naysayers of your life, they’re useless.  They have no place for you at all.  On the covers of magazines there are 14-year-old girls who have been airbrushed.  It’s all not truthful, so we’re never going to look like that.  You wouldn’t look like that unless you were 14.  It’s not even something for you to think about. What you need to think about is what have I got that I can work on to be better at that?  What do I need to put into my life that is going to make me feel more confident? I have never run in a marathon or anything because I don’t think I have the stamina for it. But a friend of mine, who is 40 years old, said to me, “Come out with me and let’s just run in one of those 5Ks, which is 3 miles, and you don’t have to run the whole time.  You can walk.  You can run.  You can do all things.  You don’t have to just run.”  I’m doing that now and it’s given me a tremendous amount of confidence that I can do that because I would never run in a 26-mile marathon, but I can run/walk in a 3-mile race.  That’s given me a real sense of accomplishment.  The 26-mile is too daunting.  I could never do it.  Maybe someday I could, but I got to do it three miles at a time.  You get your confidence from doing things you haven’t done before and doing it with a friend, trying them, and seeing how much you can really do.  It’s amazing how we make decisions that we can’t do something before we’ve even tried to do it.

Q) I wonder if you’re going to ever, in the It Ain’t Over idea, speak about, or interview people that have taken on major changes to improve their health and things like that?

A) One woman, Natasha Coleman, weighed 432 pounds.  She went from a size 32 to a size 10.  She had never been on an airplane and she and her husband had won a trip.  She got on the plane and she had this humiliating experience.  They couldn’t put her into the seat.  They couldn’t clasp the seatbelt.  She said she was so embarrassed and people on the plane were impatient and looking at her like, what’s this fat lady doing holding up the airplane while they try to strap her in? She was very embarrassed by that, so she said, now I’m really going to try.  She went to her kitchen, and she had two little kids who were also getting heavy, and she threw out and gave away everything that was cookies, and crackers, and cakes, and all that stuff.  Got rid of all the packaged goods and just started buying vegetables and fresh produce, fruits and things.  She went to a gym.  The first time she went to a gym, she broke the treadmill.  Can you imagine the humiliation? But she just kept at it and she lost weight. In fact, she’s going to be on The Katie Couric Show with me on the 2^nd of June. You will see her, the evolution of her body, but it took a lot of work and a lot of assertiveness to get herself to do it and now she just feels great about herself. You have to decide if that’s what you want.  You have to eat different, drink a lot of water.  You have to exercise and you also have to change what you have in your house.

Q) Did any of the women that you met or interviewed have to divorce their spouse to achieve their dreams or women who had to deal with an unsupportive spouse?

A) A couple of the women did get out of an abusive marriage. One woman left a husband that she found was cheating on her and broke her heart.  A lot of women had to sit down with their husbands, including me.  I had to sit down with my husband at one point and say, look, this is who I am and this is what I need.  I have to feel free to do it without worrying that I’m an inconvenience to you, because a lot of times a man’s dream is something that we all know how to support. Sometimes women’s dreams are not supported because they’re an “inconvenience” to the family.  They’re an inconvenience to other people.  One of the things that I think, women have to learn a new language, which include words like I need, I must have, I insist.  You need to do that.  You need to put those words into your vocabulary.  It’s interesting when you say to somebody, a husband, whoever, you say to them, look, I really need this.  I need to have this.  I need to do this work.  I love this and I want to have this in my life. If they can’t support it, do it anyway.  Just do what you need to do and hopefully it won’t kill your marriage, but you do deserve it.  This is your life and you have every right to your dreams.  Sometimes we can live with somebody who is unsupportive and get our support from somewhere else, but we still need to do what we want to do because we love it, we want it, and need it.  If you can’t, if in fact that is going to threaten your marriage, that’s another decision you have to make. The most important decision, the first step, is expressing what it is that you need, and want, and must have, and you love it.  Some women say, well, they don’t want to admit to their husbands that they love their work.  They say I have to work, but they love their work.  It’s okay to love your work.  I love my work.  I wouldn’t let anybody take it away from me. I have to negotiate with my husband and say, I’m not going to work at dinnertime.  Or if I have to some nights, I have to, but I’m going to try to be giving and make time for my husband, but he also knows that I love my work and if I have a deadline, I have to do it.  I have to finish my work.  Just remember your vocabulary – I need it.  I must have it.  I have to have it and I love it.

Q) At a blogger convention and Katie Couric was asked about women over a certain age being marginalized and ignored.  In relation to your book, how do you encourage women not to buy into that?  Katie responded to it by saying, “To hell with that.”  I don’t think that’s true.  How do you help women in your book, or how do the women in your book, get over that, I’m being marginalized?

A) I think by the things that we’ve talked about today – A) Don’t face those facts.  They’re not your facts.  It doesn’t matter what the polls say, and what statistics say, and what people say – you’re too old for this job.  You’re not the right age for this job. Don’t listen to that.  Go to the places where you can find other people who think like you, who are open to women your age, or get together with other women your age and create something that belongs to you. I certainly would not spend my life worrying about what somebody else says about me.  When I turned 50, the parts that I could play in television and movies dried up. There were not as many parts that I could play because they wanted younger women. That’s not going to be the defining moment of my life. So I started doing more theater.  I started finding other ways where I could perform as an actor.  I may not be able to be That Girl, but I can be in a lot of plays and enjoy it and love it.  I’m also now working on doing another television show.  I keep continuing to go after what I want my way, but it certainly does exist in the world. I met a woman who was in her 40s who wanted to a hostess at a restaurant and they only wanted 28 year olds.  They wanted women under 30.  Well, you can’t fight that.  So move on to something else, either another restaurant, or become a manager of a restaurant.  Take a course in that, but just keep figuring out what you need to do to get what you want.  Forget what the world wants you to do or any other person wants you to do.  This marginalization does exist.  Of course it exists, but that doesn’t mean that you have to buy into it.  Don’t buy into it.

*CONFERENCE CALL*