Make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You push for colour-blind casting; you draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are, not what colour your parents happen to be.

I think you have to make time for yourself so that work doesn't become the end-all be-all.

Just as black and white, when mixed, make grey, in many ways that's what it did to my self-identity: it created a murky area of who I was, a haze around how people connected with me. I was grey. And who wants to be this indifferent colour, devoid of depth and stuck in the middle? I certainly didn't.

Be able to delegate, because there are some things that you just can't do by yourself.

My parents came from little, so they made a choice to give a lot: buying turkeys for homeless shelters at Thanksgiving, delivering meals to people in hospices, giving spare change to those asking for it.

If you have an Ina Garten-level roasted-chicken recipe, it's a game changer. I bring that to dinner parties and make a lot of friends.