I can’t remember that anyone in particular did. I think perhaps it was my mother who influenced me the most. She was a housewife. She had no higher education, but had the most common sense of anyone I knew, and she wanted me to have a career. So she was always very supportive, at a time when many women of her generation would not have been.

We'd walk in the canyons, and we'd often walk with Bethe, and Von Neumann, and Bacher. It was a great pleasure.

My first, most important mentor was Paulette Bates Alden, who taught at the University of Minnesota when I was a junior and senior there. I took my first fiction writing workshop from her. She was teaching in the MFA program and I was an undergrad student and such an upstart that I asked her to let me in the class. She was generous and great.

My father was my major teacher, disciplinarian. But my mother lent a lot to me and to my life, in that, when things weren’t going right, or when my father was too tough, I had the soft feel of my mother to help me, and she did. And she a lot of the times gave me confidence that I needed to overcome some of the things that happened that weren’t so pleasant.

Thank goodness, too. Because that was a long-term investment in myself.

Trust your instincts.

You'll spend your whole life creating: websites, companies, even logos that millions of people love, but none of those compare to how proud of you are of your most important creation: your family.

Because there, between those syrupy bites of waffles, you're gonna realize that you're meant to be an entrepreneur, not a lawyer.

As for his internationally renowned wife, professional tennis player and four-time Olympic gold medalist Serena Williams, he said he often asks her for advice on mastering a field.

deli counter attendant (I was terrible at this and hated smelling like cold cuts after work, despite how much my dog liked it), FedEx warehouse grunt (great exercise, though not very mentally stimulating), and parking booth attendant (get paid to read books? Yes, please! Until the robots replace humans, that is).