“Practice what you wrote.”
It was the morning of January 22, 2007, before the launch of In the Eye of the Tiger. After years of following Sylvester Stallone's career from Malaysia, I was sitting down with his mother for a personal interview at the Concorde Hotel.
I had interviewed celebrities before. But this encounter was different. Jacqueline had crossed continents to support a book by a Malaysian journalist she had come to know through calls and correspondence. Only weeks earlier, I had been wondering whether the manuscript would ever make it into print.
Now she was here, and I had questions that went well beyond the usual story of a Hollywood star's rise to fame.
The steps—and what they meant
She told me about once hearing a tour guide suggest that someone else had run the steps for Sylvester during filming. According to her account, she could not let that pass. She stood up to correct him: “No, he ran up the steps himself.”
“I’m the mother.”
The question that came back to me
Near the end, I asked for one final word of encouragement.
“On who? For you?” she asked.
Then she answered with the sort of bluntness I had begun to recognise.
“Well, for heaven's sakes, I think you ought to read your book more often.”
And then came the line that has stayed with me:
“Practice what you wrote.”
For a moment, the interview had changed direction. I had spent years gathering the lessons in Stallone's films and asking why they moved so many people. Jacqueline was asking a more uncomfortable question: was I following those lessons myself?
She urged me to look at what I already had—a career, an education, the ability to work—and to decide what I wanted to do next. Then, she said, I should write down what it would take to get there.
“What do I need to do to get there?” was the question she said she asked herself.
It was not glamorous advice. There was no promise of fame or a shortcut to success. It was about taking stock, making a decision and doing the work.
That was precisely what had brought me to that morning.