I got private lessons in keyboard at Julliard, before New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
There was always a piano in the house when I was growing up – my dad played, and I thought it was cool – and when I was eight, I begged my parents to let me have lessons. After a couple of weeks, I wanted to give up, but my parents were very focused and made me keep going, which I’m very pleased about now.
The 9/11 attack itself played out around the world, with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, and money transfers from Dubai – activities overseen by al-Qaeda’s senior command from secure bases in Afghanistan.
Rather than make excuses for their failures, resilient people learn from each mistake. They identify skills, ideas, and life lessons that can be gained from each failed opportunity.
I have spent more than a decade trying to improve the lives of some of the most vulnerable people on earth, and they’ve taught me countless lessons.
I think there’s a reason that horror appeals to teens. There’s a lot of useful lessons to take away from reading horror. We get to be scared in the comfort and safety of our own homes. We can put the book down if we get too scared, and no one will ever know if we decide not to pick it up again.
The lessons learned as we try to build ever more sophisticated nanomachines will almost certainly inform our understanding of the origins of life.
I love mayonnaise. It’s one of the first lessons I teach my cooking students. Turning eggs and oil into an emulsion – that creamy, satisfying third thing – feels like magic.
And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.
No one who ever had lessons would have a swing like mine.
All those days of waiting on tables until I could get a role on Broadway, all that time going to school taking lessons, and all those years of being a nobody following a dream-and now here it is.
One of the key lessons I learned at Netflix was the necessity of focus.
I think I am very hands-on mother. I am very strict, and my daughter keeps telling me, ‘You are too hard on me,’ and I keep telling her, ‘I have to be hard because if I am not hard, you will not learn the lessons that I want you to learn.’ I think it is really important to be that way.
As you get older, you should be better at coaching. You learn your lessons. You keep thinking and learning about it, you should be better than you.
Lessons didn’t really work out for me, so I went to the old school, listening to records and learning what I wanted to learn.
My dad worked for Nestle for 26 years and ended up being the mayor of our hometown. One of the lessons I learned from him was to never mistake kindness for weakness.
My whole belief system is that our paths are drawn for us. I believe in reincarnation. I believe we’re here to learn and grow. We choose how we come into this life based on what it is we have to learn. Some people have harder lessons than others.
I am a partisan and artisan of Europe. But I draw the lessons of my experience in government.
I’m honest and tell it like it is. I’ve been around the horn a few times and learned valuable lessons from screwing up a bit. So, if I can pass off advice or make someone smile on the way to work, I’m for it.
Summer I was 13, my grandfather and my father taught me how to play golf. I took lessons that summer, and I played every day that summer. I probably would’ve kept playing, except I realized that girls don’t watch golf; they watch tennis. So I let my golf game go dormant and started playing tennis.
So I guess I had, I think they tell me I had, about three years total of piano lessons, off and on.
The more I got into playing guitar, the more I enjoyed music, and the broader my listening became. The instrument itself became important to me, and I started messing around with classical guitar and took classical lessons.
I’ve never taken vocal lessons. My early trumpet training and a fortunate talent for singing has always been enough for me. In the case of rock singing, I’ve always felt it was better to remain a bit untrained to maintain your individuality.
I was taught some very good life lessons and morals as a young kid growing up.
Don’t blame the child for forgetting lessons; make the lessons unforgettable.
I started flying because I had a fear of it early on. I figured if I learned to fly, I would understand better what was happening and started taking lessons in the late 1950’s, once I had made some money on tour.
One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing ‘Loving Frank’ is that you don’t try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
I grew up with the Woodstock generation. I went to Woodstock, and like everybody in my school, I wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band, and most of us were. But I also grew up with a lot of piano lessons and a lot of classical music training.
In third grade, I was taking tap-dance lessons, and about six weeks before the recital I wanted to quit. My mom said, ‘No, you’re going to stay with it.’ Well, I did it, and I was bad, too! But my parents never let their kids walk away from something because it was too hard.
One of the first lessons I learned in football is that it takes a team to win a game.
Many of the most important and life-changing moments of my life occurred when I was a young man. The lessons I learned then formed my character and shaped my destiny.
It is only from the people I’ve had the good fortune to meet that I am learning the lessons to guide me. Baz Luhrmann, director of ‘Moulin Rouge,’ for example, has a childlike curiosity about the world. He doesn’t pretend to know all the answers – quite the opposite, in fact. He asks loads of questions of everyone.
I never got lessons. I took influence from Chet Baker, Ian Dury, and Joe Strummer. I don’t hear my voice and think, ‘Yeah, that’s a banging voice!’ It’s more about putting the right emotions into the right words and the lyrics than anything else to me.
All businesses should have an element of social enterprise, and all social enterprises should not ignore the most important lessons from successful commercial businesses.
I’m also taking singing classes as well, not that I ever plan to sing in public in my entire life. I actually have a phobia of singing, so I decided to take some singing lessons to help me get away from the phobia.
I don’t think what people realize is I’ve been through years and years and years of training – piano, dance, vocal lessons.
My parents never pressured me to skate. They always said I could quit if I wanted to. They only expected me to skate when they had already paid for the expensive lessons. But, otherwise they said I could do what I wanted to do.
I think gymnastics trained me as a person, too. Without the lessons I learned in gymnastics, I would be crushed.
Some of the best lessons that I’ve ever learned are on a ball field – basketball, football, baseball, golf. And I learned great lessons from my coaches – being on time, being mentally tough, having some discipline, and being part of a team.
I never really sang for anyone, apart from in the shower or with my best friend. I was shy. I didn’t want to take voice lessons. I knew I could sing, but I just didn’t tell anyone.
It was right after I did Piaf, ‘La Vie en Rose’. I started to take singing lessons and finding where I could go.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned during my time on ‘Oprah’ is that everyone wants to be heard. We all want to have our humanity acknowledged – to have others see us for who we truly are. We all want to know that we are valued, we are heard, we are understood.
I didn’t get into the music business because somebody made me take piano lessons, you know. I got into music because I was a natural writer and had a lot of curiosity about sound.
When you’re in the throes of writing, I find, the lessons you’ve casually imparted to others are not in the forefront of your mind. Which may be good or bad. Probably both.
We’re trying to give a young man life lessons – sacrifice, commitment, teamwork, self-confidence, self-esteem. That’s what this sport does for kids.
I think I give myself high marks being an entrepreneur and entrepreneuring a big idea about how popular social gaming could be. But I learned a lot of hard lessons on the CEO front… and do not give myself very high marks as a CEO of a large-scale company.
I know that life is full of lessons to be learned, and my children will have to learn their own, but I hope I have broken the cycle of shame and fear that plagued my childhood.
The best times I’ve ever had and the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned were when my feet were out over the edge of the line, and I was at risk of getting a little beat up, physically and emotionally.
One of the lessons of 2016 is to spend less time worrying about what will happen and more time worrying about what we want to happen.
I was taking singing lessons, and they’d say, ‘Your voice is too hoarse. You have to do more exercises.’
