My Journey to the Top

I think I play golf for a reason. It seems like the more I play, the more I can help. I love to give back. Seeing those kids happy at school makes me feel even better than winning a tournament. That is the most important thing for me.

Rachael Ray
TV host and cookbook author

In the early '90s when I started out, Domino's Pizza made the 30-minute promise. And so we thought, well, wouldn't that be fun if we had a 30 Minute Meal cooking class. It had this huge instant following. We had everyone from Girl Scouts and people getting married, to football players and retirees. It became this Wednesday-night thing. When I started doing more classes, I had these Easy Bake Ovens on steroids. They were these huge carts with like a little mirror that you could see my hands while I was chopping. And I'd bring in my pots and pans and apple crates and I would teach 30 Minute Meals in the grocery store.

People started writing me angry mail that they couldn't get the recipes, and they couldn't keep track of them. So I went to New York and met with a very small publisher. We published a book of these recipes in three months for Christmas and sold 10,000 copies. That was the biggest achievement in my life at that point. I remember my mom and I got the check in January and we danced through the streets and just thought it was the most money in the world ever. We went to a really great restaurant and bought nice dresses for ourselves and had the best time. Bigger projects grew out of that.Food was always a conduit in our family for storytelling, and it was a way for us to keep in touch and remember things. We're people that use food to keep each other together and to always cheer us up and make all of our days better.

And that's what is so easy about my job. I am sharing the idea that just learning how to make a few simple dishes for yourself or with your kids or for your friends or your lover or your brother or your cousin or your neighbor not only improves the quality of your life, it improves the quality of the lives of those you choose to share the food with. It just does. It's one of the easiest ways for a poor person to feel rich. Make good food.

I recently had this mom on the show. She works all night as a nurse and her husband is a truckdriver, away during the day. Their girls are getting to their teenage years and she just feels this horrendous guilt as a mom. She can't get her kids interested in vegetables. And they're going to go off into the world and she did a bad job because they don't eat right. I showed her how to make a good turkey meal with vegetables and she just broke down in tears. Her kids were smiling, and they got all choked up. And it was just turkey and spaghetti sauce. And they were all so over the moon. That just made my day. Just to give them that one little thing that means so much to her—to help her with something that's really haunted her as a working mom all this time. It's amazing to be able to make people so happy with such a small amount of information.

I like making the good life more accessible to everybody. I told my mom that I wished we could do something in our community to show mothers and latch-key kids that they could make really good food, even on a shoestring, and improve their lives. So now with every avenue that we can think of we're trying to get healthy, fun, affordable recipes into the hands of kids and their parents so that they can cook for and with each other.

It's not just about childhood obesity rates and diabetes rates. I want to help kids feel better about themselves, period. And I think one of the greatest things about getting any child of any age into the kitchen is that it really builds their selfesteem. It's so much about sharing and just opens them up.

It's more than just simple math or making goofy after-school snacks. When a kid prepares a meal that the whole family is interested in eating, it gives them ownership and a way to pay back to their family and their community. You just get such a bang for your buck when you get a kid into the kitchen. It's something that enriches the rest of their lives. They can help themselves at a very early age. And, later in life, they can get a lot of good dates, too. The way to anybody's heart is through their stomach, that's for sure. It's the greatest feeling in life to make a meal and share it with people.

Shonda Rhimes
Creator and executive producer, 'Grey's Anatomy' and 'Private Practice'

I come from a family of readers. We had "book Sundays" in my house where my entire family —I have five brothers and sisters—all sat around and read. I always thought that I would end up being a novelist. I was making up stories and recording them into a tape recorder and my mom was transcribing them before I knew how to write. Then, when I was 17, I saw Whoopi Goldberg live on Broadway and George C. Wolfe's "The Colored Museum." Both made me absolutely fall in love with the theater. After college, I went to film school almost on a whim. At that point, I fell in love with writing and realized that was how I was going to tell stories.

I worked as an assistant for several years and also at a place called Portals, which helped the mentally ill homeless learn job skills. I paid the bills until I sold a spec script. Right about the time I sat down to write that script, I remember feeling very strongly that this was it for me. I knew that I was an educated woman, and if I needed to, I could do something else. I actually looked into medical school.The script was called "Human Seeking Same" and it was a romantic comedy. It sold and then it resold and then it resold again. I lived off it for quite a while, but it really helped me get my first big job, which was "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge." It's such a joy when you get to do the thing that you would secretly do for free and get paid for it. I thought, I'm doing the thing I love to do. Not everybody gets to say that. I'm going to stick it out.

I felt an enormous responsibility to tell the story of Dorothy accurately. I interviewed people like Dorothy Dandridge's best friend and the Nicholas Brothers, who had been part of early black Hollywood history. It was so inspiring. I always think about Hattie McDaniel, when she was nominated for best supporting actress. They made her eat in a separate room because she was an African-American woman. It puts everything in perspective.

By the time I did "Princess Diaries II," I had become a mother. I always joke that the thing about having a child is that you suddenly realize you can never leave the house again. I spent a lot of evenings with my daughter lying on my chest catching up with DVDs on a lot of television shows I had never seen before like "Buffy" and "The West Wing."

I admired all this great long-term character development that was happening on television. It doesn't happen in the movies because you only have two hours. I also saw a lot of strong female characters on television.

I wrote a pilot about war correspondents. These were women who drank a lot and played very hard and enjoyed their jobs. And then we went to war in Iraq. Suddenly the charming idea didn't feel so charming when actual Americans were dying. The next year I was asked to develop something else. I really was in love with the idea of a world with strong competitive women, so I looked for another like that and that's how I ended up focusing on surgery. And also because I was hooked on surgery shows. With the exception of McDreamy—who is simply the guy I wish was out there—all the characters felt like they were pieces of me. It made it easier to write them because they were people who lived in my head in a very good way.

Television is all about running your own show. And I felt that, like the interns, I was thrown into deep water and I was asked to swim. What I've learned is that if you swim hard enough and you pay enough attention, you create something great. You have to stick to your own vision.

I have a second child this year, the show "Private Practice." I have learned to delegate some things and to focus on the two things I love most, which are writing and sitting in the editing room. I feel absolutely up for it. I have no idea how my own story is going to end. But it's fun to know the answers here at the office.

Elaine Pagels
Professor of Religion

My family were liberal Protestants. My father had abandoned the Presbyterian Christianity of his family because he was converted to Darwin's view that evolution was accurate. He felt that meant the Bible must be a bunch of lies, silly tales for foolish people who don't understand science. I was taken to church, but was also told that religion was for people who needed it and who obviously weren't educated. It was a very condescending view of religion. As a teenager, I was introduced to an evangelical Christian group and found it unlike the church in which I was raised. It was intense and powerful. I was born again and my parents were quite horrified. For me, it was the revelation of a spiritual dimension of life that I needed to explore. For about a year, I found that quite gratifying.

And then I fell out of love with evangelical Christianity. It happened when a friend of mine had been killed in an automobile accident and my evangelical friends asked whether he had been born again and I said, "No, he wasn't born again," and they said, "Well, then, he's in hell." Now, I know a lot of evangelicals wouldn't agree with that today, so I don't want to say that is a view that is universally shared. But that seemed to me completely counter to what I had learned from Christianity and had learned from the teachings. I decided I wanted to find out for myself what it is about Christianity or any religion that is so powerful.

In college, I studied Greek, which, of course, is the language in which the New Testament was written. I thought if you get to the text in the original language, you encounter it more directly. I found some truth in that. It dispelled the familiarity of the text and freshened it, and it just took away the clichés of language.

In graduate school at Harvard, I was interested in finding out about how the New Testament was written. I was under the illusion that if you go back in time, you'll get a clearer picture. In fact, the opposite happened. I found out that the New Testament professors at Harvard had tablets full of Gospels I'd never heard of, like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and a whole range of more than 50 early Christian texts that we never knew existed before. They were just becoming available. This was the Nag Hammadi library. That changed everything. Instead of a simpler golden age of early Christianity, we found a more complicated picture than we ever imagined.

I was educated at a time when parents did not expect girls to do anything useful. I wasn't being practical at all. I was following what I loved. I started to explore this material and only later discovered that one could actually make a living teaching it.