Be Ready When the Luck Happens

by Ina Garten

Do what you love. If you love it, you’ll be really good at it.

Challenges, disappointments, heartbreaks, problems that hit like a ton of bricks, days when I didn’t want to get out of bed. The solution is rarely obvious, and it’s never a straight line up and over the hill.

The only good thing about having a low threshold for boredom is that I’ve always been willing to take crazy risks just to get out of that miserable state.

word opportunity seemed like quite an overstatement. To this day, it’s hard for me to imagine why this ad spoke to me, but I’m so glad it did, because it changed the entire trajectory of my life.

uranium; I wanted to bake cookies, not just because I liked them (and I do!), but because I saw a completely different life from the one I was living. The food business, this food business, would give me the freedom and creative outlet I craved. You bake cookies, you sell cookies, and if the cookie doesn’t sell, you make something else that customers will love and that WILL sell. It’s a business problem to solve, and it involved chocolate chip cookies! How great is that?

But the universe had other plans for me, and they were big.

“There’s a black cloud over your head. Let’s just wave it away,”

Whatever her condition, my mother liked to be in control of her image, her thoughts, her feelings, and her children. But children can’t always be controlled, which she found very frustrating.

We had all the accoutrements of a comfortable life, but for me, it was a dour existence. Every activity had to have a purpose: it couldn’t be just for fun.

“Those are things you wanted to do, but did you accomplish anything?” I was confused. Why couldn’t succeeding involve something you enjoyed doing?

I remember thinking that Ken had it worse because he was the firstborn—and the only son—and more was expected of him. But he recalls that I had it worse because I was trapped in a cycle of neglect and abuse. My parents didn’t believe in me or my potential, but they held me to impossibly high (and arbitrary) standards, nonetheless.

But even at a time when parents were supposed to be authority figures, my mother and father surpassed the stereotype. They made the rules, set the goals, and expected us to comply. Period. Not open for discussion.

My father actually told Ken, his own son, that he hadn’t wanted children because he was afraid they would interfere with his career. They did so because of social pressure: young couples were expected to have children in the 1940s. But parenthood did not come naturally to them. Child-rearing was an unwanted responsibility, and children were messy, spontaneous, and an endless imposition. My mother had no maternal instincts.

Teenagers are trying to figure things out, and the process is usually one of trial and error, mostly error. But my brother and I weren’t given the freedom to make our own choices—or mistakes. Everything from what friends we saw to what shoes we wore was decided by my mother. If I had an idea of my own, my mother’s response was, “You think it’s a good idea, but it’ll turn out badly.” How did that make me feel? Discouraged. Unmotivated. I believed my ideas weren’t good. Worse still, anything I tried to do would have negative consequences. This was the endless loop in my head: You’ll never amount to anything.

Your own life can be full of surprises. The stories we tell repeatedly don’t always hold up to fact-checking.

He’d assumed I had a fake ID, like every underage teenager in America who wanted to go to a bar. But I didn’t even know I needed one, which made it so much more embarrassing.

He saw that I plowed full speed ahead and didn’t recognize a big problem—say, the bouncer?—until it was right in front of

Behind me were two people for whom I could do nothing right and in front of me was a smart, funny guy who thought everything I did was a total revelation, and frankly, to this day, whenever I see him, I feel the same way.

Life lesson—some things you think are important turn out to be not worth worrying about.

was just living in the moment, happier than I’d ever been.

I figured out pretty quickly that people didn’t want fancy restaurant food at home: they wanted the best home cooking without the trouble of making it at home.

love when changing your behavior—in this case, how I dressed—changes everything without your saying a word. It’s a lesson that I’ve used many times in my life.

“I’m just working all the time,” I told her. “I’m not having any fun.” She asked me what I would consider fun. I’d never asked myself that question, but I thought for a moment.

With Cecily’s help, I asked myself tough questions about the root of my unhappiness and why I had such low self-esteem. I could link my self-doubt to my childhood, when I felt unseen and unappreciated—there was a lot to unpack there. But Cecily made me realize that the highly critical voice in my head was actually my parents’ voice, not mine. It’s really hard to separate yourself from that voice, but I started telling myself, That’s what my mother would have said. Everything you’ve done has come out better than you could have imagined, so listen to your own voice.

Cecily helped me to understand that the past wasn’t my only problem. How I was dealing with it, or more accurately, not dealing with it, was making me unhappy.

There’s a wonderful quote attributed to George Lucas: “We’re all living in cages ...

To step out of the cage of whatever I’d experienced in the past, to think for myself, and...

There was one legacy that had real consequences. When I was in my twenties, I had no idea why people have children. Because I had such a horrible childhood with my parents, with emotional and sometimes physical abuse, I couldn...

There’s a saying, “What goes in early goes in deep.” After my experience, my mind was closed to the possi...

When Dolly Parton opened up to Oprah Winfrey about why she didn’t have children, she said, “If I hadn’t had the freedom to work, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’ve done.” I feel the same way.

More important, I think my subconscious was sending me a message: after so many years of moving from rental to rental, I wanted roots.

I felt that I wasn’t doing anything new, and I certainly wasn’t bringing any creativity to my work.

What else could I do? I wondered. What would challenge me? Make me work twice as hard? Keep me up at night solving problems?

She told me that “Type A” people (I guess she was talking about me!?) can’t begin to think about what to do next until they stop what they’re doing. They need space and time to allow “the universe” to reveal what is next. I frankly had no idea what she was talking about, but

also learned that it’s important to listen to advice and then decide if it’s true to who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish.

Shopping in East Hampton is just about getting into the car and collecting ingredients. Shopping in Paris is a totally sensual experience—all the stinky cheeses, fragrant breads, and sweet ripe fruit you can gather, plus a walk around the neighborhood. Old buildings, bright-blue skies, familiar shopkeepers greeting you (in French!). It’s such a happy experience.

Almost every recipe, whether savory or sweet, needs an edge. Savory things tend to need something acidic, and sweet things tend to need something bitter to give them more depth of flavor.

one point, Nora raised her glass to make a toast and said, “To better times!” We all laughed hysterically because of course there could be no better time! We all thought, Life just doesn’t get better than this!

This is the thing about being in Paris. I always say that you can’t be inspired sitting at home alone by yourself. You have to go out into the world and see what people are doing, and that will trigger something else in you, and then you’ll do it your way. That’s exactly what Paris has done for me. It opened a world I would never have had the opportunity to see or be inspired by.

“It’s always cocktail hour in a crisis!” I posted, tongue in cheek. “During these stressful times, it’s really important to keep traditions alive,”

My friend Maile Carpenter, the remarkable editor of Food Network Magazine, who’s wise beyond her years, told me that the definition of a good marriage is that each person thinks they got the better deal.

It was a new frontier, and I was intrigued to see where it would take me.

In each case, my guests’ successes were hard-won. I learned, and continue to learn, from their stories that seemingly insurmountable problems not only make us who we are but can propel us to exactly the place we want to be.

others. I had always thought that I did what I loved and just got lucky along the way.

I spoke about how lucky I was at each phase of my career because it seemed that whatever I was most interested in doing was exactly what the world wanted at that time. I was lucky that I was interested in food and cookbooks at a time when the world was interested in food and cookbooks. I was lucky that Food Network was looking for home cooks when they found me, and lucky that they refused to take no for an answer. Lucky.

“Why do successful women always say they’re lucky, and successful men say they got there by the force of their talent?”

My story was about hard work and luck.

show. I concentrate on what’s in front of me and work hard because I love what I do, and I have fun doing it. And then I leave the door open, so I’ll be ready when the luck happens.