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Lesson #1: Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously

Article Overview: Newman once pictured his own epitaph as reading: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.” He may be one of the most successful on screen actors of our time, but to hear Newman speak you would never know it. Indeed, despite his iconic status, Newman credits his ability to laugh at himself and his reluctance to take himself too seriously as the single largest factor behind his success today.

Lesson #1: Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously

Newman once pictured his own epitaph as reading: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.” He may be one of the most successful on screen actors of our time, but to hear Newman speak you would never know it. Indeed, despite his iconic status, Newman credits his ability to laugh at himself and his reluctance to take himself too seriously as the single largest factor behind his success today.

“If you don’t believe the legend, then you can’t really take yourself seriously,” he says. “And if you don’t take yourself seriously, you’ve got a chance. It’s when you take yourself seriously and you begin to believe all this bullshit that you can really founder.” Whatever is said about the actor turned entrepreneur, it must be said that he never once left home without his sense of humour. In fact, it was this very sense of humour that served as the driving force behind the launch of Newman’s Own.

It was Christmas Eve in 1970 and Newman was having a few drinks with his writer friend A.E. Hotchner. The two had had a few too many and decided to make a giant vat of their own homemade salad dressing; the container was so large that Newman had to use one of his canoe paddles to stir it. Their fun didn’t stop there. Instead of keeping what they had made for themselves, Newman and Hotchner decided to fill old wine bottles with the dressing, cork them, and distribute them to neighbours as Christmas presents. When it got dark out, they went around leaving bottles of their concoction on strangers’ doorsteps around the neighbourhood.

One of those strangers turned out to be up-and-coming homemaker guru Martha Stewart. She enjoyed the citrus taste of the dressing and the fact that it was preservative free, so she contacted Newman and convinced him to take a sample to Stew Leonard’s, a local grocery store. Leonard’s immediately ordered what Newman describes as “a freight train load” of their dressing. From there, the late night prank turned into a full-fledged company. However, Newman claims it is this very nonchalant attitude about the business that has helped it grow into the multi-million dollar operation it is today.

“There are three rules for running a business; fortunately we don’t know any of them,” Newman writes in his memoir. “From the beginning, our management philosophy was, ‘If we ever have a plan, we’re through.’” Newman insists that his business was born from a “bad joke that just ran out of control.” Today, by refusing to take himself too seriously and having fun along the way, Newman is keeping that joke going. Even the very bottles that are sold to consumers are true to Newman’s sense of humour; some poke fun of those businesses that tout their ancestry by claiming “Fine Foods Since February.”

However, as fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants as he may be, there is no doubt that Newman has come to love what he is doing. “Now that I’m selling spaghetti sauce, I begin to understand the romance of business – the allure of being the biggest fish in the pond and the juice you get from beating out your competitors,” says Newman. “We don’t take ourselves very seriously as businesspeople, but considering this was something that started off as a joke in 1982, we have had a lot of fun.”

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Article Tags: canoe paddles, christmas eve, citrus taste, concoction, driving force, freight train, giant vat, homemaker, launch, local grocery store, martha stewart, neighbourhood, neighbours, old wine bottles, paul newman, reluctance, screen actors, sense of humour, train load, writer friend



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