主题： Life Lessons

I think the best place to learn ethics is in the home. I think most of us get our values from what we see around us before we get to business school. I think that it’s important to emphasize them, but I think that if I had a choice of having great education and ethics fully on in the home or as a course in a school later on, I would choose the home.

Susie was as big an influence on me as my dad, or bigger probably, in a different way. I had all these defense mechanisms that she could explain, but I can’t. She probably saw things in me that other people couldn’t see. But she knew it would take time and a lot of nourishment to bring it out. She made me feel that I had somebody with a little sprinkling can who was going to make sure that the flowers grew.

Marry the right person. And I’m serious about that. It will make more difference in your life. It will change your aspiration, all kind of things. It’s enormously important who you marry. It’s very important in life to associate with people that are better than you are. And it’s the most important decision—you will go in the direction of the people that you associate with. And you’ll get ideas from them and you’ll see how their behavior works and all of that sort of thing.

If you start selecting your investments, or your friends, or your neighbors, based on trying to get people that agree with you totally, you’re going to live a pretty peculiar life, I think.

The biggest lesson I got is the power of unconditional love. If you offer that to your child you’re 90 percent of the way home. If every parent out there can extend that to their child at a very young age—it’s going to make for a better human being. My dad … he was really a maverick. But he wasn’t a maverick for the sake of being a maverick. He just didn’t care what other people thought. My dad taught me how life should be lived.

I never saw my dad do anything in his entire life that [he] wouldn’t feel good about being on the front page of the paper.… He gave me unconditional love.…He was a terrific human being.

When I was a kid, I got all kinds of good things. I had the advantage of a home where people talked about interesting things, and I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools. I don’t think I could have been raised with a better pair of parents. That was enormously important. I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it. But I was born at the right time and place.

I was really rebelling [as a child]. Some of the teachers predicted that I was going to be a disastrous failure. I set the record for checks on deficiencies in deportment and all that. But my dad never gave up on me. And my mother didn’t either, actually. Neither one. It’s great to have parents that believe in you.