{"id":664176,"date":"2025-04-21T16:05:58","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T13:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/dana-perino-has-some-life-advice\/"},"modified":"2025-04-21T16:05:58","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T13:05:58","slug":"dana-perino-has-some-life-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/dana-perino-has-some-life-advice\/","title":{"rendered":"Dana Perino Has Some Life Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\n\tDana Perino has some advice. And so does many of her friends and colleagues.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe co-host of America\u2019s News<\/a>room <\/em>and The Five<\/em> is publishing a new book this week, I Wish Someone Had Told Me: The Best Advice For Building A Great Career And A Meaningful Life<\/em>, giving her own advice on work and life, and turning to people she knows to share their perspectives as well. The title will be Perino\u2019s fourth book, and her first for Fox News Books, the imprint that the company says has now sold over three million copies.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf [readers] take anything away from it, it is that being curious is a great quality and a great way to live your life, because the time is short and it goes really fast,\u201d Perino says, speaking with The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> at Fox News headquarters earlier this month.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a wide-ranging conversation, Perino discusses some of the advice she gives in the book, how her political career influenced her journalism career, and the current, tumultuous relationship between the White House and the press that cover it.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat sparked the idea to write this book, and how did you settle on the format where you reached out to friends, family, people you know, colleagues, to ask them some of the same questions that you were thinking about as you were kind of putting it together?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tMy first book was about how I became White House press secretary, and what it was like being there. And in that book I had one chapter where I said, here\u2019s all my mentoring advice in one place. I\u2019m only going to say it once. This is it. Because there are a lot of requests for me to go to coffee, go to lunch, could I talk to this person?<\/p>\n

\n\tI had a major supply and demand problem with my time. So I thought, I think I\u2019ve learned a lot here. I grew up in a rural environment. Never expected to be White House press secretary. I was surrounded by people who went to Ivy League schools, and that wasn\u2019t me in any way, but it all works out in the end, and it gave me great opportunities. So I have always felt an obligation to help younger people, especially younger women. <\/p>\n

\n\tSo that happ<\/a>ened, then the demand for mentoring just kept growing. And what I realized is when I started that minute mentoring group \u2014 it\u2019s like speed dating, but mentoring for young women \u2014 what I find is that most young people, especially young women, they all have the same questions. It doesn\u2019t matter where they\u2019re from in the country, it\u2019s all about, \u201cwhat should I do? What should I study? What field should I go into? Why is it that guys seem to get promoted over me? Why do I have a lack of confidence? What is this imposter syndrome? What about the work-life balance? How do I find somebody that I might want to marry? What if I have a great job, but my new boyfriend lives in Charlotte? Should I move?<\/p>\n

\n\tNow I\u2019m considered like the mentor person that everyone likes to come to. And I actually love it. If I didn\u2019t have the job that I do, maybe I would work in recruiting or HR or something. I really do enjoy it. Around about that time, I really have been trying to figure out a way to stay somewhat current on technology<\/a> and connecting with an audience that is a little bit younger. And I came up with this idea for Foxnews.com. It was called \u201cShort Questions with Dana Perino,\u201d it\u2019s sort of like the last page of People<\/em> magazine, if you ever seen that. It\u2019s sort of like one more thing on The Five<\/em>. [Fox News president] Suzanne Scott called it snackable content, and she loved it, and it kept getting lots of hits. So I just kept doing it. And I would mostly do people around here, but then I was like, I guess I\u2019ll ask [Dirty Jobs<\/em> host] Mike Rowe, or if I had a guest that came on, Dierks Bentley, he\u2019s become a friend, country music guy.<\/p>\n

\n\tI got bored asking, \u201cwhat\u2019s your favorite app on your phone?\u201d And so I started asking people, \u201cwhat\u2019s the best advice you ever got?\u201d, or \u201chow did you end up here?\u201d And for a lot of people, especially that are in positions higher up now, they started doing something else, and now they\u2019re here. <\/p>\n

\n\tAnd then I realized I have all this great content. I should utilize it, and I should update my own mentoring book with a post-COVID view, and also not do it just for young women. That was important to me. So I tried to really make sure I had a lot of male contributors to this effort as well. Because lot of the young guys around here, they want help, and they\u2019ll come and ask for it quietly, but they\u2019ll ask, like, why isn\u2019t there a minute mentoring for guys? So that was my goal of putting this all together. And I have to say, it turned out even better than I thought.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the things that you mention is social media<\/a>, that seemed like, from my reading, one of the areas where you kind of felt that it was an important thing professionally for people to think about.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI found myself scrolling way too much on Instagram and kind of getting into a brain fog with it. I love the dog content. I think some of the things are so funny. And I\u2019m like, wow, people are very clever. I love the generational stuff, like \u201cGen Z would never know what it was like\u2026\u201d to use this phone or this Walkman. And my sister, who is four years younger than me, we just send memes back and forth with each other all day long, and it\u2019s fun, but it\u2019s a wasted time of my brain.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo what I decided to do was like, I can have this, for example [she gestures toward a Diet Coke on the table], but I can\u2019t have it all day long. I can have a social media where I am a participant and also where I am an observer, but I had to figure out a way to limit my time on it. So I just actually read online. I just read in an article somewhere that you could put a time limit, so I did that, and it\u2019s actually kind of helpful. So it says, \u201chey, you\u2019re you\u2019re five minutes from your limit. Do you want to end today, or do you want to ignore it?\u201d And sometimes I want to ignore it, but I will say end. And I actually it\u2019s good. Self control, discipline is not a problem in my world, but I\u2019m also hyper aware of things like Jonathan Haidt book The Anxious Generation<\/em>. And I listened to an interview that he did with Ezra Klein two weeks ago, the heightened level of concern that he has as somebody who studies this a lot really was interesting to me. <\/p>\n

\n\tI have a girlfriend in DC, somebody who I worked with on Capitol Hill in 1995. Years later, she and her husband adopted two girls from China. They were twins, and they\u2019re turning 16 this year. So I saw something on Instagram about their birthday, and I sent her a note, and she said, \u201cyou know, we\u2019re struggling. They\u2019re the only two that don\u2019t have phones.\u201d And I was like, how did you do that? How do they function without a phone? But she said, we\u2019ve held the line. And I just really believe it is bad for girls, especially.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the things that you wrote in the book is that one of your first jobs was a waitress, and you cited that as one of your favorite jobs. Why? What are some of the things that you loved about it that you think are still relevant to what are you doing now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI do think it\u2019s important that everyone, when they\u2019re starting out, have some sort of a service-oriented job. It helps you understand and be empathetic. So one of the things Peter, my husband, we\u2019ve been together for almost 28 years, he said he\u2019ll never forget, on one of our first dates, after he comes back from England, we were in New Orleans, and we went to breakfast, and he went to tip. And I said, \u201calways double the breakfast tip.\u201d He said, \u201cwhy?\u201d Because breakfast is the hardest thing to serve as a waitress, and the price points are so much lower, and nobody\u2019s buying a bottle of wine, but they work just as hard, so you have to double the tip of breakfast. And he\u2019s always done it ever since, which I love. <\/p>\n

\n\tI guess I liked meeting people, learning about them. I liked when I was a kid the memory game<\/a> with the cards. I was really good at it. So when it came to waitressing, I guess I like the multitasking bit of it, where I could remember your order without having to write it down, like that was a good challenge. <\/p>\n

\n\tI never even thought of this before, but if I think about the newsroom, it\u2019s a lot of multitasking. A lot of things are happening. I love having like a recall moment, and [co-anchor Bill] Hemmer and I do that very well together. So maybe that is a little bit like that too. But I also think that I know that life doesn\u2019t get better than what I\u2019m living right now. And there are a lot of people who make a living in a lot of different ways. And I loved being a waitress, and I always thought that if everything went away, I could still do it.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou wrote that you started your professional career as a journalist before moving into politics. Obviously you have since made the move back. But what was that experience like for you? Why do you think maybe that wasn\u2019t the right moment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSo in third grade, my dad required me to read the Rocky Mountain News<\/em> and Denver Post <\/em>before he got home from work, and I had to have chosen two articles to discuss before dinner. We loved news. My dad subscribed to every newspaper, every magazine. We got Newsweek<\/em>, Time<\/em>, US News and World Report<\/em>, Life<\/em>, National Geographic<\/em>, you name it we got it. We got National Review<\/em> at my house. We probably got The Nation<\/em> at my house too. And then my dad and I would dog-ear articles. This goes all the way through my high school years, and early on when I realized I wasn\u2019t going to be a gymnast \u2014 I wrote about wanting to be Cathy Rigby from the 1980 Olympics \u2014 when it was clear that was obviously never going to happen, I really did turn to well, how am I going to succeed?<\/p>\n

\n\tI was gonna have to figure out how to pay for college, and even though my parents could have helped me, but I got a full-ride scholarship on the speech team, I was on the speech team from like, eighth grade through high school, and loved it, and I really thought I would work in local television news, and my goal was to be in a top 50 market, and I was going to be a part of a community. I spoke Spanish very well, and I don\u2019t so much anymore, but I can hold my own still. And I went to University of Southern Colorado. The public television station was on the campus, so I was able to do some things there. I helped produce a show, and then I anchored a show called Capital Journal<\/em>, which is hysterical to me thinking back on it. And there was this one state representative named Scott McInnis who would always talk to me. <\/p>\n

\n\tFast forward, I go to graduate school, and I\u2019m working at the CBS affiliate, and it was the spring of 1995 now [and Republicans swept the House]\u2026 So now I\u2019m in the newsroom for the first time, and I\u2019ve never really experienced this before, but I was kind of shocked at how the news director and the producers would talk about the Republicans. Now my grandfather was a county commissioner, a Republican, and I guess I was pretty isolated in a little bit of a bubble, because back then, Colorado was pretty much a reliably red state, except for a small pocket in Denver. And I wouldn\u2019t even say that I felt very conservative, but I thought that was offensive. I thought it was wrong. I also realized I didn\u2019t like covering local news. I like the politics side of things, but there was part-time legislature. So on the other days, I would be outside in negative 20 degrees, doing the Martin Luther King Day parade, and there\u2019s five people outside, and there\u2019s no one to talk to. And I just looked around and I thought, how do you get ahead here?<\/p>\n

\n\tI went back home, and I was waiting tables at Govnr\u2019s Park Tavern, and I was living in my parents basement, and I heard about a state house job as a deputy press secretary. Now I knew about The West Wing<\/em>. I knew about CJ [Cregg]. I used to love watching George Stephanopoulos and Mike McCurry, and I go to apply, and I said, maybe I can ask that state representative who I used to interview all the time for a reference, because I knew he\u2019d been there. Now he\u2019s in Congress, I called the chief of staff, and she said, \u201cwait, you\u2019re looking for a job. We need somebody in DC.\u201d And it was a big moment, because it was like, \u201cif I decide not to do TV, I\u2019m never gonna get to do TV.\u201d It\u2019s one of the things I talk about in here, you can make career changes. And if I had not taken that job to go and work in Washington, I wouldn\u2019t be sitting here with you today. All those experiences add upon each other, and I had to take this really long circuitous route to get to where I\u2019m on these two programs every day that I absolutely love and have an opportunity to write a book, I can do a podcast. And the opportunities here are really endless.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the things you talk about in the book is when you\u2019re in DC and you\u2019re working in the White House, and you talk about your mentors there, and then you talk about the moment in the briefing room where President Bush says\u2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tWhen he says the reasons I chose her? That was a big deal for me.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs someone who is now in a position where you can not only mentor people, but give them advice, and they will take it seriously, and it could change the course of someone\u2019s career, looking back on on that moment in time when you got the promotion you became press secretary, is there a connective tissue there? <\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI do think that there\u2019s this link that goes all the way through. If I think about my speech coach in high school, Terri Rich, she was amazing. I think his is her last year coaching in Denver. She\u2019s getting ready to retire. She was amazing. The first chief of staff that I had on Capitol Hill was Holly Propst, fantastic writer. She really taught me how to write. I thought I knew how to write. I didn\u2019t. And she also taught me how to manage up to the congressman. I think that kind of mentoring really helped me in the future, for when I\u2019m in front of President Bush and having to say, \u201cactually, sir, this is what I think we need to do.\u201d For example, President Bush\u2019s first answer on every interview request is no, and then you have to say, \u201cwell, this is why I think you should do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI learned \u201cand on a high note\u2026\u201d from her, and that\u2019s how And The Good News Is\u2026, title comes to be because she said, when you go in to tell the Congressman that this article is coming, it\u2019s going to be bad, make sure you find something to leave on a high note. So I would always think of \u201cand the good news is\u2026\u201d so when President Bush is introducing me as the new press secretary, the reason that mattered a lot is that I was replacing Tony Snow, who was a giant in Washington, DC, and here at Fox News, everyone loved him. And for very good reason, the guy was so smart. He had studied philosophy and math. He understood history. He did not know how to manage. But guess what? He put me in charge of management, and President Bush really valued that.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat President Bush did there was not only did it matter that he said it in front of all those people that heard him and that he had confidence in me, I knew he had confidence in me. But what really mattered, and he knew it mattered, is that all of them in the briefing room needed to know that he had confidence in me, so that when they asked me a question, they knew that I had direct access to him. This is one of the things that the Trump administration is dealing with right now, you have world leaders calling and maybe they\u2019re talking to the Commerce Secretary, or they\u2019re talking to the Treasury Secretary, or maybe they\u2019re talking to Peter Navarro, but they don\u2019t know who is speaking for the President, because if the three of them aren\u2019t on the same page, but they\u2019re saying, \u201cwe\u2019ll do this deal, maybe this part of it\u2026\u201d that is kind of a concern. <\/p>\n

\n\tSo one of the things you don\u2019t want as press secretary, is the reporters feeling like they can\u2019t come to you, that they\u2019d better call Karl [Rove] to see what the real story is. And that mattered in that moment a lot to me, because it\u2019s very empowering. Obviously, I\u2019m not like Tony Snow in many ways, he was six foot five, and I\u2019m five feet tall and small. And so confidence is a thing you see throughout this book, and it\u2019s something that you constantly are trying to battle, but also to improve upon, because we\u2019re all human as well. And some people might say, like my assistant might say, \u201cwow, you get nervous.\u201d Of course I do. And if I didn\u2019t, then it wouldn\u2019t be worth doing.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou mentioned the current situation in the White House, and we just saw it this week, no one knows who to call. As someone who\u2019s been both behind the podium and also in the newsroom, what advice would you would you be giving to someone like [White House press secretary] Karoline [Leavitt]?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tKaroline and I have a good relationship, and we have become very friendly, and I keep all my advice to her private, but I did say this publicly, and I shared it with her privately as well: When she was asked about the friction between [Peter] Navarro and [Elon] Musk, and she said, \u201cboys will be boys.\u201d I thought that was a great line. I was like, \u201cnailed it,\u201d because how else is she going to explain it? And it was a lighter moment, and she could move on from there. And everybody knew exactly what she meant. I thought that was great. And now the White House is signaling today Bessent is in charge. So, you know, it was just four days of what in the world is going on, but now it\u2019s all set.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt seems like right now, the relationship between the press general<\/a>ly and the White House is at kind of low point.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s adversarial, and I don\u2019t think it necessarily needs to be. I actually think some of it is a little bit performative on both sides. I had a lot of friendly relationships. I never thought, \u201coh, these are my best friends.\u201d They had a job to do. Reporters all have a job to do, and they knew I had a job to do, but I was very friendly with them and took an interest in their lives. But I think it helped that I had been the deputy for so long, because I was on the press charter, and I was with them through thick and thin, like when \u2013I don\u2019t know if you remember this \u2014 in 2005 a grenade was rolled up in a t-shirt and rolled towards the President. When we were in Tbilisi, Georgia, he was giving a speech. Thank God it didn\u2019t go off because the guy was so dumb. Thank God, as President Bush used to tell me, it\u2019s a good thing many terrorists are dumb. He had wrapped the t-shirt too tightly around the grenade so it didn\u2019t go off.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut I didn\u2019t even know that it happened. Air Force One takes off quickly. I\u2019m with the rest of the press. All of a sudden on our Blackberries, we start getting \u201cthere was an assassination attempt on the President,\u201d and so I was with Bret Baier and John Roberts and Kevin Cork and Savannah Guthrie, because they were the reporters at the time Major Garrett, those were all of my colleagues, for lack of a better word. <\/p>\n

\n\tI have heard that one of the things that I think is going well between this White House and the press is that there\u2019s a ton of access. Now the pool issue, I think and I hope it can get worked out fairly for everyone, but logistically, one of the most important things is making sure the press is going to be there when the President\u2019s available. And if you don\u2019t have good logistics, it\u2019s a problem. They had very good logistics in this White House The Biden team I did not hear great things about, but they also didn\u2019t get to ask the President any questions.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou write that \u201cone of the single greatest skills all great leaders have is the ability to really listen to people.\u201d Can you explain the context around where that kind of came from?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThat is advice that is new in this book. I think about the late Charles Krauthammer. Did you remember Charles? He never interrupted anybody. He listened quietly. Took it all in. What a lot of people want is to be heard. I remember asking Dick Cheney one time why he was so quiet in meetings, and he said that he learned when he was in the Ford White House as chief of staff, when he weighed in a meeting, everyone else shut up. You don\u2019t want that. You want to know what your people think. You\u2019ve hired these people, you want them to grow, let them be able to express themselves. And I see it on TV if I am intentionally listening to somebody in an interview, I can be there in the moment to ask a follow up.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo I think it\u2019s important for us as journalists. But also managers or mentors to just sit back, put the phone down, put it away, don\u2019t even bring it to the meeting and listen. And that is an undervalued skill, and I think part of it has to do with our collective shortening of attention spans because of the phones and a need to be faster. However, I will add this, apparently people are really liking listening, because they\u2019re listening to a three-hour Joe Rogan podcast. I actually watched three hours of a Joe Rogan podcast. I\u2019m much more of a listener, a podcast enthusiast. I listen to a lot of them. I would never sit and watch the Commentary Magazine <\/em>podcast. I have to be walking, doing something else, doing the dishes. I had to go to Dallas. This guy next to me [on the plane] watched Joe Rogan the entire time on his phone, the whole time. Just watching it. Wow, that\u2019s so interesting to me, maybe people are longing for a longer format conversation where people are actually stressing issues and not just tweeting things back.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dana Perino has some advice. And so does many of her friends and colleagues. The co-host of America\u2019s Newsroom and The Five is publishing a new book this week, I Wish Someone Had Told Me: The Best Advice For Building A Great Career And A Meaningful Life, giving her own advice on work and life,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":664177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Dana-Perino-I-Wish-Someone-Had-Told-Me-Book-Publicity-H-2025.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[17209,70749],"class_list":["post-664176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-books","tag-fox-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}