I've always been a very hard worker.
I may not be the smartest, I may not be the prettiest, I may not be the best at something, but I will tell you, I will absolutely positivel outwork you.
99.999% of the time, it's outworking that matters.
My mother is from Cuba, and she's black.
My dad is white, and he's from Australia.
They met because they used to go to daily mass.
They're both very, very devout Catholics.
And my dad used to have a car, so he'd hit on my mother when she was going to church.
And then one day she accepted, and they went on their first date.
And they would eventually get married at the end of 1958, even though interracial marriage was illegal.
They had tremendous bravery, and they just weren't interested in other people weighing in on their life choices.
And I think they really passed that on to me and my five brothers and sisters, to the point where we just...
I mean, it's a cliche.
We just thought we could accomplish anything, and live any kind of life that we wanted to.
There was no, "Ah, I'm a journalist," moment.
It was more like, "Ah, I'm not a doctor."
So I didn't know what to do.
I left school and started working at a TV station, because I could get credit.
And I just loved it.
I loved running down the hall.
I loved being part of the team, even if it was the team that was, like, getting lunch for people.
I really felt very comfortable.
And I grew very fast.
I immediately...
I started off as an intern.
And I just kept growing and growing and getting great opportunities.
I remember watching reporters at our local station in Boston and thinking, like, "My questions would be, like, "as bad as those.
I should be a reporter."
I mean, it was literally that.
I just thought, "I can do this."
And a lot of my growth was about looking at other people and always kind of striving to figure out what they did to be successful.
And then, you know, was I going to be able to do that?
When I was covering the East Asian tsunami, a young woman from the New York Bureau called me and said, "Listen, they want to know "if you want to go to Thailand for the tsunami, "and I told them probably not, because you're a mom, and I'm sure you don't want to go, but I had to call you."
And I remember I had just had my twins.
So I had four kids under four.
And I was like, "Put me on a plane to Thailand.
"Nobody in this building wants to go more than me to Thailand."
But my strategy, in all seriousness, was always to try to hit the ball out of the ballpark, to do such a great job that people would say, "Wow, she's got four kids, and yet she's doing a great job."
I also was very well aware that if I didn't do a good job, that it would have implications for other women who had children.
And other women of color, frankly.
Rightly or wrongly, it just will.
So my strategy was always to really overdeliver.
When I was a kid, Son of Sam was on the loose.
Serial killer in New York.
I remember my mother would go to bed praying, "Lord Jesus, I hope he is not black."
You know, because there was a sense that, like, in our town, where we were one of two black families, it would absolutely come back to bite us if in fact he were black.
And so I think that that's because white people have 100 stories, but black people have five.
And most of them are not particularly good.
And Latinos have three.
And most of those are about immigration.
And Asian people have one, and Native Americans get nothing.
Not to say we're going to do PR for black people, or PR for Latinos.
But we're going to tell 100 stories, so that we can be all of these things, as we know we are.
I don't know that you can tell the story of America and leave out a lot of important voices, which I think we have historically done.
So I'd like to think that I'm adding...
I'm adding a lot of voices to history.
