Jody Horowitz Marsh has been a television personality (she had a program called Jody Horowitz Reports on Showtime Networks for seven years), a humorist, and a correspondent for CNN, and is now a stay-at-home mom. She's so talented and accomplished that it was reassuring to learn she wasn't always that way. "It's the opening of Dr. Spock's book," Jody said about the advice she wished she had received as a young person. "'Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.' It's a great piece of advice about going with your instincts rather than relying on others for validation. I wish I'd known that all my life—not just when I became a mother." Everyone nodded; it seemed that so often in our younger lives, the force we'd lacked wasn't ability or talent but simply the confidence to swagger our way into things.

On the other hand: "I never took anyone's advice about anything," Sandra said, and we realized, of course, that what we really wished was that we'd been able to distinguish good advice from bad, and learned how to act on the former. But who can do that at 21, when the mind is consumed by the world's great questions, such as how to fit into size 6 jeans by the weekend?