Martha Stewart Interview: Recipe for Entrepreneurial Success

okay Market okay Mark okay we're ready okay Martha let's just start off talking about your childhood if you could tell me about your upbringing where you grew up and what it was like to be in your family in Nutley New Jersey which is a small town about 20 minutes by bus from New York City through the Lincoln Tunnel and it was a Charming a Charming residential town with two big corporations they had Huffman LaRoche and which I knew about and was told about it was a very imposing complex of buildings and there was also another automatic data systems and they had a big tower and a swimming pool the only swimming pool in our town which was open to children in the summertimes for swimming lessons and of course I use that pool a lot but it was a lovely town I was able to walk to school from elementary school which was around the corner yantica to the junior high school which was in the center of town about a mile away and the high school which was right across the street from the junior high school so um it was that kind of town where everybody knew everybody um even though there were five different elementary schools um uh four or five I can't remember now for sure um everybody knew everybody and and everybody finally got together at Junior High which started in the seventh grade I was one of six children I was second oldest in the line my mother had children over a period of 19 years and when the last child Laura was old enough to go to kindergarten mother started back at her job which was teaching she taught sixth grade at the Lincoln Elementary School in Nutley and she really loved teaching and she really found it absolutely possible to have six kids at home and teach full-time and cook and sew and iron and do all the chores and no help whatsoever and still maintain a really orderly home dad was a pharmaceutical salesman that was his major job during most of my childhood he worked for first Pfizer and then another company called arist and he his district was really New Jersey Northern New Jersey and New York uh but when I needed him to take me somewhere dad was available and uh I was his favorite uh child it's odd to say but I was definitely his favorite child uh my older brother Eric was a little bit more independent the first to go off to school um to college um and he was an Outdoorsman a sportsman a hunter a fisherman and I was more the homebody type I was the gardener The Cook the sewer the obedient child I would do pretty much anything my parents asked me to do and I was also the babysitter uh the younger children uh were very interesting there was Frank who was also an independent not a Avid student as much as he was an Outdoorsman a curious uh thinker and a and had a big curiosity Kathy was the beauty of the family and she knew it and she spent a lot of time acting and fantasizing and she had her own little world up in the attic where she played dress-up but she was a good student smart and uh and now grown mother of two gorgeous boys and she went into the teaching profession then there was brother George who is a builder in Fairfield married a lovely woman who works at Martha Stewart Living omnimedia and he has two lovely children one of who works at Martha Stewart also in the digital sales department a gorgeous girl and then my little sister Laura Laura Herbert first when she got married to an actor uh the father of her two older children unfortunately Chris Kim died when the children were very young but I introduced Laura to her second husband Randy Plimpton and they're happily married and have a third child who's in college now so um It's that kind of family mom was really the um she was the the glue that held everybody together she was had no favorites dad died when I was I think before I was 30 years old he died it was a big loss for me because he had not yet seen what I went on to do so I felt kind of bad that he didn't realize some of my dream and and I know he would have enjoyed it so very much but he was my best teacher he taught me everything about gardening he taught me everything about perfectionism he taught me everything about doing the very best job you could possibly do he also always gave me the advice Martha you can do anything which was very positive advice for a young girl at that time because instead of saying oh no you must be a secretary or maybe a teacher or he would always say set your sights high and go for it which is a best thing you can tell a kid the best and he would as I said be available for me to answer questions he explained to me what The Scarlet Letter meant for example when no one else would because I was an Avid Reader going to the library all the time bringing home all the classics and when I brought home this Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne um you know I didn't know what the Scarlet Letterman sounded kind of interesting but he had to sit down and tell me the sort of The Facts of Life um and uh but he did it very nicely and very scholarly and he helped me do research took me to the New York Public Library introduced me to The Fabulous Stacks there um and the research facilities offered by the public library we did a lot of research on the genealogy of our family too there uh tell me back my dad wrote and spoke polish and was able to do research in foreign language so we looked up genealogy which is way before any of the uh the online genealogy sites existed and we found out a lot about our family we would traced it way back to the 9th century so it was kind of fun he that's the kind of curious mind dad had he also was a violinist he could play Anything by ear he had a beautiful little violin I he hoped that I could have that talent and I was horrible scratchy scratchy squawks you know Screech Screech not good I played in the in the orchestra but I was terrible I knew it but others of my family are very good musicians and uh and went on to play instruments and sing and I could sing but I can't play so that's that's pretty much the kind of household we grew up in organic food homegrown a home caught home shot if you wanted to talk about the hunters but that's the kind of upbringing I had what was school like for you were grades about your parents expectations or about your own expectation I was a very devoted student I loved school and I loved my teachers the other really other than being told you can do anything which was very positive and reinforcement of your own uh credibility and your own Talent uh the other thing that I learned from my parents was respect for the teaching profession and for teachers I still oh I cringe now when I hear people complaining about teachers when I hear all the you know the bad things about teachers unions and teachers this and teachers that being brought up by two parents who were licensed teachers my dad was too before he had to make more money for um for to raise his kids um that respect and that that care for the teacher and what the teacher thought was very very prevalent in our household we're going to move on College I just want to touch on that experience for you what you studied and you also worked your way through college just wanted to hear a little bit about that I graduated from Nutley High School I was high up in my class I can't remember the number but it was good I was not valedictorian that was Barbara vivinti and Paul and um and um oh my gosh I almost forgot his name uh oh no Park Richards um I I remember them exactly and how smart they were um and uh and I always admired their their prowess in the classroom we always compared notes to grades we were very open with one another about who was learning more who knew more uh it was that kind of class and I took advanced math classes I was the only girl I had pictures of me sitting in a room full of boys uh and I remember um being very active in the literary Society was The Gauntlet it was called that was the school magazine I did illustrations as well as editing I remember being on the Scholastic committees and on the honor societies and uh all of those clubs that don't even exist in a lot of schools these days so many activities now it's sports sports much more than it was then there were lots more Academia and a lot more even craft oriented and art oriented after school activities than there are now and I think children miss that so if you're not a good soccer player or a good footballer or a good baseball player what do you do you know Mom has to find other things for you to do and it's not so much provided by the schools as it once was but we had a lot to do in school and out of school and when I decided that I would go to college I applied to kind of a diverse group of places I went to visit Vassar because I heard it was a nice school but I thought it was a little um confining to be and where Vassar was located up in the Hudson Valley and I wanted so badly to go to Stanford I just had this dream of going out to Stanford and making a whole new life but it was very far across the country and I had to get a full scholarship uh so I have concentrated really on getting into the best school I could in the New York area which was Barnard College Columbia at that time did not take women but we were Affiliated closely across the street from Colombia uh and I got into Barnard with a scholarship but small I got a full scholarship to New York University but I decided that I I thought that Barnard would give me the education I was looking for so I went there and it did it lived up to all my expectations having the ability to study at Columbia's use utilize all the graduate courses that they were offering I took lots of advanced art history courses which was one of my favorite favorite areas of study um was it was excellent and the the teaching staff at Barnard and the and the quality of the students was it was really extraordinary my class had amazing students in it on people who have become very famous Twila Tharp the great the great dancer and choreographer was in my class can you believe that and uh also Erica Jong the novelist was in my was in my class writing naughty books fear of flying and I think practicing what she was going to write about while she was a student at Barnard um and oh there are lots of others I could I could go through the through the list but also Martha Stewart and you worked during college oh I modeled during college to supplement my um my scholarship I was lucky I was pretty enough to be a photography model I joined the Stewart model agency after a short stint at Ford I just wasn't going to be full-time enough for Ford so um so Stewart worked around my around no relation by the way um to Martha Stewart they worked around my schedule at school and got me enough modeling jobs at 50 an hour which was a lot of money at that time uh 250 a day which sounds like nothing now the you know nothing but it was a lot at that time so I was very very fortunate and was able to lead kind of a dual existence so you were a top student you were working in 1961 and then you married yeah I fell in love right when I was at the end of my freshman year fell in love with a classmate's brother she had uh fixed me up with him he was a Yale law student at the time and you know after one date I was kind of smitten and uh he was my first real boyfriend um I had other boyfriends but he was the first real one um and the first one I ever fell in love with and he wanted to get married he was ready even as a student at Yale law school he just he just wanted to get married so we got married at the end of my sophomore year were you ready did you always have that expectation that you would get married no I never even thought I would get married I never thought about it uh and so when I came home one night and said sat my parents down at the kitchen table and said uh Mom Dad I'm planning to get married my father was irate very very angry at me he did not want me to get married especially to um oh he had met Andy but no he just didn't want me to get married but uh they warmed up and to the idea and went along with it very nicely was it because you were too young or they had this vision of your future was that um you have to ask them unfortunately they're not around to ask but uh but I think that they were just shocked that their their student uh daughter was going to go off and change her life so drastically uh and it did change marriage changed everything what was your expectation at that point for what would happen now that you were married oh well I wanted to continue with school which I did I commuted from New Haven backwards to New York which is a very long commute for anybody it was like four hours a day on the train but it gave me a lot of time to study and I didn't sleep on the train because if you slept on the train you ended up in Boston and you fell asleep so no good to fall asleep um but uh but oh it was a fantastic life it was just unbelievably interesting so then after college you went to Wall Street what drove that how did that decision well first came a baby first came Alexis um and I was I continued modeling after after college but my real interest was um I had started investing in the stock market my father-in-law was a stock broker and I uh I thought this would be a very interesting career um either this or go to architecture school because I was very interested in architecture at the same time but I decided um that I would try Wall Street I interviewed a lot of firms this is right after I had my my only child Alexis and um and interviewed a variety of different firms I I interviewed Merrill Lynch which had a very um excellent training program I interviewed um Parker redpath Elkin Kloss Parker and red path which I don't think exists anymore as a firm but it was a very stuffy very proper kind of existence small but but good but then I then I was introduced to a young firm nobody in The Firm was over 26 years old and it was called pearlberg moness two young guys who had built a very fine research firm it was called a go-go researcher uh in those days they're going to cringe when they see this um but it's true that's what that's what they were known as um and uh and I joined them they were very very interested in me and very interested in training me to become an Institutional stock broker which meant I dealt with large institutional investors like Fidelity Fund in Boston which at that time was Ned Johnson and he had just started it and was accumulating the billions and billions of dollars that he was going to turn into the Fidelity Fund family I had also the Rockefeller Brothers fund which was a huge investment fund for the Rockefeller Brothers money and these are the these are the Big Brothers the not the brothers that are now but the Davids and the lawrences and the um and Governor Rockefeller uh Nelson so that was that fund and then I had the Ford Foundation also which was a large family fund of funds um and I worked with them also so I had an interesting bunch of people and Wealthy individuals who I I cultivated as a client and it was very fun hedge funds were just starting Michael steinhardt was steinhardt fine and Berkowitz he's still a friend a close friend but he was one of my toughest clients I learned a lot about how companies worked how companies grew how companies failed and and I think I got a very good education being a stock broker it was the environment like were there many women or was it there were very few women at the time on Wall Street Muriel seabird had bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange she was my hero that a woman was able to succeed so well and a totally man's world was very interesting there were very few women Executives of big companies very few CEOs and people talked about this imaginary glass ceiling which I tried to never even think about um I thought that you know it's not good to think about uh hindrances to a career think only about the positive and I was always an optimist I think I developed my optimism in those days uh where uh where I wasn't just a you know glassy-eyed um starry-eyed person I was really intensely interested in what I was doing and how things worked and how things got done and um and I thought oh my gosh this would be great if I'd gone into advertising I would have been working probably for Mary Wells Lawrence at the time I remember even talking to that company thinking do I do advertising or do I do the stock market and I really thought that the stock market really gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of people learn a lot and also be free enough to have a family so given that was it a big turning point when you left when I left the stock market it was for just a variety of reasons permissions were being negotiated so the big money I had been making was going to be less um I loved making a lot of money as a stock broker I thought it was just fantastic being home a great big paycheck uh feeling you know feeling oh well you know this is a great job I'm doing a really great job and every day remember when you're a broker you're starting every day with zero uh and nobody tells you that really when you go into the business uh and you're you really you don't make anything unless you are productive so I've learned that productivity and doing a job well each and every day is really the best way to build a company and uh and now it's so different there's so many people who don't know that they didn't know it inherently I think that my education in business and and out of business was so intensely good because I learned that productivity could result in great success could result in great financial gain and uh and I and you know there's some luck probably involved somewhere along the line if you just happen to make an investment in the right place but that too took a lot of hard work to ferret out those good Investments so then the next part of your life how did the next phase of your career begin well I um left Wall Street um because the negotiated commissions because I really wanted to spend some time with my daughter who at the time was about six years old and just starting off at elementary school I really wanted to spend time with her I really wanted to see what life was like in the suburbs we had bought an old house in Westport Connecticut and my husband was working in Greenwich at the time commuting to Greenwich I was commuting to New York it was a long and kind of dreary commute and I really wanted to know how to deal with with Family Life um and so I I went home uh oh there was also a little glitch in the in the political scene in America called Watergate and um and I remember listening to the hearings on the radio while I painted the entire exterior of my house I did all the chores around the place built the gardens landscaped the property uh you know pretty Fearless about all this stuff having never really done it on such a big scale but I just started doing it and I built the most beautiful gardens and I built the most wonderful vegetable um Gardens and I started small livestock I joined the Fairfield organic gardeners the only Club I think I've ever belonged to and learned about how to raise a pig how to raise goats how to milk milk goats how to make cheese you know I did the whole thing and had all those animals on my little four acres in Westport so um but then I got bored like within a year and really wanted to start a business and that's when I started the catering business um that was kind of interesting because it was extremely hard work which I was used to extremely long hours which I was used to but it involved a kind of creativity that I hadn't really been expressing before and uh and that gave me the idea that all this stuff that I was doing was so beautiful and so interesting to others as well as to me that I could write a book how did you build the business what was your first catered event what happened what did you think about it I started with a partner why decide to think out of just friendship um and she was a good cook but she wasn't a hard worker and um and I wanted to grow fast and she was happy to be small and she also didn't really like being cooking for other people so much she liked people to come to her house and pick up the dishes you know and take home this stuff I like going to people's houses and redoing everything and setting up these elaborate parties and weddings and and bar mitzvahs and uh anniversary parties I love doing that I loved making something like a restaurant every single night creating something new and different and I built my staff and I built up a clientele and I didn't just stay in Fairfield County I moved a lot of my business to New York catering lots of huge events at the Metropolitan Museum at the Hewitt Museum the Museum of Modern Art Sotheby's those were all very big and good clients when this really started to take off what did your friends and family think about that well um it took up so much time that I think that that really was sort of the the beginning of the demise of my marriage because I was working so hard and not really paying very close attention to what it was doing to home life my daughter uh well she learned how to cook fantastically and how to do all the things and she was very independent she kind of got it and she was off to boarding school at the time too she wanted to go to boarding school but my husband didn't get it quite quite the same way and uh and I think that that really that that um attention to my job was uh was detrimental to the marriage was there a specific moment where you remember thinking that the sacrifice and the struggle of that balance was making you compromise one in favor of the other I'm not a good compromiser so um even though I sort of knew some of the signs I thought we could work it out but the night that I came home from a very exhausting event and drove into the driveway and my husband was hey he was sort of hanging out in the in the back stairs and he looked at the car coming in the driveway and I saw him go in and close the door I knew it was over that was it that was the final sign that he usually would come out and say oh can I help you know kind of grab your bags or something like that and that was uh that was kind of uh that was a depressing moment was there a quick moment Martha when you knew you were on to something big you'd found your Niche and you could really have this impact the moment that I knew that I had struck a chord with the American woman was when I published my first book entertaining a book that really could not have happened if I hadn't struggled and worked so hard in the catering business uh gardened and and and restored a beautiful 1805 Farmhouse pretty much single-handedly all that all that really amazing creative hard work uh paid off in the publication of that first book that book told a story it filled a void it gave other women hope that they could actually entertain nicely uh with great creativity and it was a book that I was looking for in the bookstores and didn't exist and it was a book that I knew many many people would would want so I wrote that book and uh I found my voice as a writer and this is a 1982 so I was already in my 40s and and to become a writer when you're in your 40s that's kind of late to discover that you're a writer but since then since 1982 I and in my company it published 71 books that's a lot of books a lot of good writing um I have started um six fantastic Seven Fantastic magazines we published four very popular magazines now with the readership in many millions a month um and so that one book um gave me a voice made me realize I had a voice and made me realize that I struck a chord with a very big portion of the American public what was the chord what was it about what you were doing that women were really responding to I think what I what I did was make the art make home Keeping home making housekeeping all those deadly words I made them an art form and I think that that's really what happened I think people realized you know I don't have to work in the kitchen today I have to cook so they change the the the verbs from have to do something or work in the laundry room or have to do that laundry to uh to oh I have fantastic you know I have the laundry to do I'm just going to have a great time I'm going to learn how to iron Ruffles uh you know it just it was just a different way of looking at things that women had been doing for centuries um or having other people do for centuries that was more considered drudgery than than Joy when people talk about you Reinventing the role of the 50s housewife for modern women how are you trying to appeal to both Homemakers and to Career women I knew that women were going to back to work in droves I had done it I had been very successful doing it I thought I could have it all I thought I could have the family have the home have the garden have the husband and you realize after a while that there are sacrifices to be made and there are time constraints but when I was doing it and I keep making this point and nobody is picking up on it as as much as they should I think there was no computer in 1982 I bought my first computer an IBM I went to the IBM store on Madison Avenue and bought a computer that absolutely changed my life as it changed everybody else's life so I had realized already that that women wanted it all they wanted balance they wanted challenge they wanted a job they wanted to make money they wanted to be treated as well as anybody as well as the man next door and um and I had done it I had done it I had succeeded in New York I had succeeded commuting it succeeded in doing all those things but I also realized that home was a really great place and a family was a really great thing and uh and gardening and doing everything that that really fell under that title of living was very very fascinating and very acceptable and I started to think well there's so many subjects involved in just making a home maybe I'll write a book about all of them or a book about each of them many books and then I thought that's not the really best format because a book it comes out and then it it has a life span uh it could last a long time but it's not as as good as a magazine format and I got very interested in creating a magazine called living and that was in 19 about 1988 and i s i virtually sold the idea to time Inc we became Partners in Martha Stewart Living and within a very short time publishing our first issue in 1990 and it was an instant success just like entertaining was an instance success in all my books following I wrote a book a year I kept up very carefully with a schedule of product productivity again and realized that being productive being persistent being very creative and all centered upon home Centric was a very good thing and that's when it also that's when the company idea started I just wanted to touch really briefly on your book on entrepreneurship what was the impetus or the inspiration to write that book well because I've had such an interesting career and I have been um touted as one of America's uh entrepreneurs um and I was the first I think and I'm not sure for for certain but I think I was the first self-made woman billionaire uh when I went public with my Martha Stewart Living omnimedia stock I think that my spirit of entrepreneurial initiative warranted a book and um it was published by rodale it was published in big numbers a lot of people are still buying it still reading it and it's called the Martha rules and I I think it's very helpful because I simplify the the idea of being an entrepreneur I try to make it clear what it takes to be an entrepreneur I go through the processes of becoming an entrepreneur and finding that passion finding that that idea making that idea come to fruition it's it's the same for everybody Steve Jobs Bill Gates Howard Schultz with Starbucks those dreams those that passionate dream that turned into a real idea that actually comes to a reality with very hard work and investment of either people physical investment or money investment it just helps change the way people look think work be all of that is entrepreneurial and so I wrote the book and for kids is Martha and Friends sort of the kid answer to that same well worth in friends is is a little Martha uh being being a business-like kid there's a commercial on television right now with that little girl who's has her little checklist and she's running around being an entrepreneur I love that commercial I don't even know what the commercial is for but it's a great commercial because that child and her friends have taken over the world and uh and that's what entrepreneurs do entrepreneurs take a little idea a germ of an idea and take over the world what are you excited about right now you have a 30-year anniversary and something coming no 20th anniversary oh yes the magazine will be 20 years old is 20 years old in 19 and excuse me the magazine will be 20 years old in 2011 the end of this year with a December issue and I am so excited about that because when you look back and we don't look back much as a company but we we like to look forward but when you we've put together a special edition celebrating 20 years of creativity of ideas when you look back at what we have done with story ideas with photography with subject matter you will see what a huge impact we've had on so much in the American home so much there are so many brilliant ideas that had that have been created at our company and I'm very very proud of that what did you think of the women's movement were you part of it I think I've always been part of the woman's movement just by my own business and my own development in in the world but um but I've never really perceived myself as the feminist um about you know breaking through the glass ceiling that's not been my my job or it hasn't been my my um the moving force behind what I've done I just never thought about it seriously enough to um to take a strident voice in that movement and by strident I don't mean a loud and too loud a voice but a strong voice I really just went along merrily in my own way and made a successful company but and and influenced a lot of people but I think feminism I think the feminist movement has been absolutely important to the promotion of women as equal in this Society in politics in business in life I think is a very very important thing that we consider ourselves equal I never considered myself an unequal and I think that it's hard because we're not always taught how strong we can be we're not always taught how how productive we can be as women um but I think that um as you view things that go on in other countries uh the oppression that still exists against women in many places and the breakout that has happened in many places I applaud and salute and and uh and just um just glorify those people who are still doing it still finding the struggle exists going back to what was happening in the 60s do you think it was problematic that they may have gone too far in downplaying the importance of the Homemaker and those responsibilities at a time when you were thinking to uplift it well I never I never really thought about it I didn't I didn't irritate me it didn't nothing I just I just looked from the sidelines and let them do their thing as they let me do my thing and and uh you know if it's uh if it's a struggle if it's that doesn't involve home home making but homemaking is at the heart of it all uh home Keeping home making is at the heart of Our Lives we all live somewhere we all sleep somewhere I think that's called home and uh hopefully and uh and we have our families around us hopefully and it's a very very Central to uh to who we are and what we do what do you think is the biggest change for women since you were young I think what my father told me is you can do anything uh has has really come to be a mantra for many many women uh women are now astronauts women are now Pilots women are now deep sea divers women are athletes tremendously excellent athletes women are playing professional baseball women are going to military academies uh the the the change in the attitude towards women has been dramatic in the 20th century and now in the 21st century it's hard to believe that there ever was a movement called the suffragette movement it's hard to believe that that happened but it did and uh and it had to start somewhere and that it did is excellent and that it succeeded is fantastic given all that success why do you still think many young American women today consider feminism to be some sort of dirty word again I haven't talked to a lot of young women about feminism um I uh maybe I should but um but I think that um when I read bloggers and and tweets from young people they all they all realize that life is complex life is is very different for them than it was for their moms or their grandmoms and they have to uh but they still have to know things they realize that they're always asking me questions always ask and I'm always happy to answer a question about anything that has to do with with the home with living I think that that kids need to be taught I think that the younger generation cannot just exist with information from their computer that's not the only way to find out things you have to experience things firsthand you have to actually do things with your hands you actually you know it's not just all uh animated games on the on your on your laptop or on your handheld device whatever that is it isn't that that's not real life real life is seeing and doing and experimenting and and making and baking it's all those things that we can never forget you've been quoted as saying my life is my business and my business is my life do you think it's that's sort of what it takes to succeed in the way that you have why don't we see more women in the boardroom I don't think that that's necessary and uh in every in in everybody's case to to make your life your business and your business your life remember I built a company I am I feel very responsible for my company a company which I still have a very vast ownership in and I want that company to be very successful to grow very big to leave a legacy of uh basically of what uh what that company stands for so so I don't think that that has to be the standard and I don't think I I would ever say I've set the standard for women's Behavior but I think that what I've done encourages other women to try to try to break out from from maybe a job that they might consider ordinary and try something new uh to try to balance their lives better with home and family and job to experiment to certainly do it yourself do-it-yourself is a big thing and it's bigger and bigger every year all over the world I understand that in Japan because of as a result of the the horrible uh tsunami and the and the nuclear uh problems that they've had that crafting has be as burgeoned in Japan that's do it yourself take pride in something that you can actually spend time making yourself that's important I think and for people to ReDiscover the handmade and the homemade it's just part of a good life do you think it's easier to be a woman or a man in today's world given all that women have to balance in addition to the desire to have a career I think it's much better to be a woman what's the most meaningful and useful piece of advice you've ever received hmm um be creative Express Yourself uh do what you think is right uh what's the one piece of advice you would give to a young woman on building a career go with your gut um if you feel good about an idea work on it at idea and until it works or doesn't work a sort of pithy piece of advice on the work-life balance well one thing that you shouldn't be afraid of is change and so many people are fearful of change is good change is good changes modern changes evolutionary and it doesn't have to be drastic but little changes in your behavior and your job and what you do every single day is certainly a good thing and how about a piece of advice on raising a child um don't think the child Knows Best be a really good guide to a child the more information you impart to that kid the better and the more and children want to learn that's all I just know how much they want to learn and the more you give them more challenges the more information the more input you have personally I'm not talking about off of off a computer screen but personal interaction and information is extremely important in the development of a of a young person uh well we know what you end up doing but what did you want to be when you grew up a teacher accomplishment you're most proud of building my company and having a family what three adjectives best describe you curious curio sir more curious what person that you've never met has had the biggest influence on your life maybe the person who first made a loaf of bread your mother passed away in 2007 but she certainly had a chance to see your groundbreaking successes what was her reaction to the extraordinary life that you created for yourself we had a very odd relationship my mom and I um even though she knew um what I did she never focused on the success part of it she loved the results she loved that that the books were there um I don't think you ever focus on how much work a book took because she had a very strong work ethic herself and so hard work was just part of our upbringing we just we didn't think twice about working 20 hours a day and that just was part of our upbringing so um so Mom Mom just photos of just an ordinary girl this is a lightning round I give you two words and you you tell me which one best describes you iPad or notepad iPad early bird or night owl early bird spontaneous or methodical spontaneous Diplomat or direct type A or easy going oh type A higher math score higher verbal score um higher verbal patient or impatient impatient Prada or Gap product app prepare or cram domestically skilled or domestically challenged oh skilled of course 10 minutes early 10 minutes late um 10 minutes late book smart or straight smart

Channel: Life Stories

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Keywords: Kunhardt Film Foundation, Martha Stewart Interview, Martha Stewart, Secrets to Success, martha stewart living, martha stewart interview yotube, martha stewart interview 2023, martha stewart interview youtube, martha stewart on late night, martha stewart brand, young martha stewart, martha stewart video, martha stewart exclusive, martha stewart business, martha stewart age, Martha stewart lifestyle

Id: LHYR6x3r2ls

Length: 45min 58sec (2758 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023