I'm learning the power of going away for the weekend and keeping myself company.
We used to say, 'I don't wanna be jumping around and going crazy when I'm thirty,' you know? Even Mick Jagger said, 'Well, I can't see myself at forty jumping around.' Well, here we are, you know?
I always looked up to Slash from Guns N' Roses, and I always pictured myself being a rock star and playing the guitar, just going crazy.
I haven't really made plans for the future; I'm just enjoying the moment, going with the flow. I haven't really had time to mortify myself thinking about the future.
I started out as a lawyer and came in laterally to Goldman Sachs. So I learned myself that life is unpredictable. That you really should, in terms of your career, try to be excellent at what you're doing. I think if you focus on your job, and you focus on being broad in the context of your job, the next jobs follow from that.
I've wanted to design golf courses ever since I was a kid. I suppose it comes from the way I've played the game. To find the proper way to play any hole, I've always begun by asking myself what the architect has tried to do with it.
I never want to hold myself up as the poster child of the successful mother-businesswoman. It's a total 'Gong Show.' I won't pretend. When you do so many things, something always suffers. You just can't be great at everything.
Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius - and I count myself among these - have to restore the lost connection once more.
My mother moved abroad when I was 11, my dad wasn't around from the time that I was a baby, so I was not the product of a family, but a product of observation - of watching what went on around me, of watching who I liked, what I didn't like, what I thought was good behavior and what I thought was bad behavior and tailoring myself accordingly.
I never mind contorting myself for a good cause.
To become a good cook is to know yourself, and I, at this point, know myself. I know myself, and I know the cook I want to be and the cook I am striving to be.
My mother wasn't a very patient woman. If I complained about being lonely or bored, she'd tell me to go help someone, anyone. To this day, when I start feeling sorry for myself, I look for a good deed to do.
Going to grocery stores is almost my favorite thing to do to calm myself down. There's something about just walking aisle after aisle making mundane choices. 'Do I want that? No, I want the one that has the low sodium.' And that feels like a good exercise to be doing when there isn't anything to be doing. It's like a kick-starter in some way.
I ask myself: What do I need to do to stay healthy? And I do that all the time. And it's stuff like meditation, making sure I get good exercise, all the things we know.
It's fun for me to try to write concise, compact things. It's a very good exercise for me. And I think it's important to try to do different things - change what I write about, and also the way I write. Otherwise, I'd just be repeating myself, which wouldn't be good for me or fair to my readers.
About myself I have no great illusions. I know what I am. I know what I'm good at. I know what I ain't. I'm always hoping to surprise myself. But I do have a love of music and I do love to communicate it, and that's the best I can do, really. And I can raise a good family, too.
Looking back, I'm surprised I had the nerve to do it, but I'm glad I did. Performing the songs and performing in film was just a part of my personality, just like football and boxing at one point in my life. I was able to lose myself in both of them, and that was a good feeling.
I like to refer to my small social circle as 'boutique.' And much like the hotels of the same ilk, my friends are all unique, high quality, and serve me good food. But more than that, they teach me things about the world and about myself that I couldn't learn anywhere else.
My career had been split pretty evenly between good guys and bad guys until I finally grew into myself enough to play a decent antihero, where you can combine the two.
I'm a grazer by nature - fruit, nuts - but I try to discipline myself and sit down for regular meals when the girls are around, as I want to instil good habits in them.
