A few years ago, I was asked by a network executive to videotape interviews with the alumnae of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, including Betty White.  The show had been off the air for many years but Mary clearly maintained her star status, and the rest of the cast deferred to her as such.  I, however, only had eyes for Betty.  Then, as now, she lit up the room with those smiling, sparkling eyes, and the sincere attention she gave to those around her.  Listening, I am more convinced all the time, is the secret to relating to the world, and Betty listens with the best.  Her ego does not get in the way of her reception, and as a result, her picture is always crystal clear.  What you experience is not the illusion of a human being, it is human.  It is not a portrayal, not a role.  It is true character.

After we had completed our interview, Betty and I had a chance to talk, and I got to tell her the one thing I really wanted to tell her, how my mom had been a big fan of hers since the Password days, and how she celebrated the relationship between Ms. White and her dream husband, Allen Ludden.  Then, on pure impulse, I asked Betty she’d mind calling Fern on my mobile phone and saying hello.  This was a no-no for someone doing my job, a line you did not cross, it was like kitchen help taking a seat at the dinner table.  But all I could think about was how happy Fern would be to get a phone call from Betty White.  “Of course I will”  Betty said.

Fern was not home.  The call went to voice mail.   Betty didn’t miss a beat.  “Fern, this is Betty White,” she said.  “I’m standing here with a handsome young man who claims to be your son, and he tells me you’re a Password fan.  That is so sweet of you.  We had so much fun on that show, didn’t we?…”  I don’t remember the rest of what she said, but I remember that the tone of her message was as if she and Fern were old high school classmates who hadn’t seen each other in ages.  Which, in a way, they were.

A couple of days later, the network executive called and the conversation eventually came around, as I figured it would, to the subject of the call I’d asked Betty to make to Fern.  “At first, I thought what you did was okay, and later I thought it wasn’t okay,”  said the exec.  She said she had no choice but to fire me.  I could not have cared less.  The happiness in my mother’s voice when she phoned to tell me about the voice mail from her BFF, Betty, was worth a thousand gigs.

I imagine that Betty White’s life has been a series of encounters just like this one, in which she has given the gift of herself, and treated her fans as her equals, her collaborators in a joyful conversation.  (”We had fun, didn’t we, Fern?”)  This is why she is still young and her world is still unfolding at the age of 88, and she’s hosting Saturday Night Live tomorrow night.

3 AM, French Lick (Indiana) Casino

I see this same spirit in my mother, who, at the age of 82, still lives on the farm in Indiana, quilts, bowls, plays bingo, gambles in Vegas, sings in the choir, gardens, cooks amazing meals, mows the huge yard and can drink with the young folks at the Shamrock Pub until closing time.  When I talk to her on the phone, she’s usually the one who ends the conversation because, hey, she’s got things to do and has to get going.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mother!  Break a leg, Betty!  We love you both!

As my friend, the screenwriter Christopher Lofton, describes my early relationship with Cowboy Bob: “He was a teacher who didn’t know what he was teaching and you were a student who didn’t know what you were learning.” But teach and learn we did, and today I gladly share what I learned with my own sons, and with anyone else who’s interested. All you have to do is ask.

Most businesspeople could learn a lot from some time working on a farm like the one where we lived (there are not many of them left any more). No one is more adaptive or more adept at dealing with edge economies than a farmer devising strategies for keeping a family-owned-and-operated farm alive. The variables — markets, weather, cost of raw materials — fluctuate madly. The lessons that come from working with the earth cannot be taught by a mortal animal, and cannot be learned any other way.

The teamwork and resilience required for family farming are matters of survival. You don’t question what needs to be done, you simply do it (though if you’re 12 years old and have been assigned to muck a barn when you want to be watching TV, you might gripe a lot about what needs to be done).

The most important aspect of the whole family farm shebang, was that my mom, Fern, made my father’s performance as local legend, Cowboy Bob, possible. She talked sense to the bankers, kept her six children focused on their schoolwork and their music and their chores, and kept the peace between restless sons and their rambunctious dad. All the while, she showed us how to laugh at life, exposed us to art and language and literature, and demonstrated unfailing grace in the most trying of times. If not for her support, and her abiding tolerance for my father’s schemes and dreams, our family story surely would have been a tragic one, not the happy one we experienced. We may have learned improvisation from my father, but it was my mother who showed us how to change the game.

As many family farmers do, my dad always held some kind of job off the farm to balance the unpredictability of the farm’s revenue. The best of these jobs, it seemed to me at the time, was his position as the southern Indiana sales rep for the Bel-Tone Hearing Aid Company. This came as a relief to me. No longer would my old man be known to my friends as a nutty rehabilitator of castoff horses and dreamer of unlikely dreams, the Don Quixote of Dubois County. Nosirree, he was a guy with a sweet company car, a big yellow Plymouth Fury III, and an office on the town square with his name on its door in gold lettering.

And then one day, just like that, it was all gone. No more company car, no more office on the town square, no more name on the door, and no explanation about what had happened.

Months later, I asked my mom about it. She said that my dad’s boss at Bel-Tone had invited him to the company Christmas party and he had declined because it conflicted with one of my high school basketball games. “If you don’t show up at the party on Friday, you won’t have a job on Monday,” the boss told him.

Without a word, Cowboy Bob handed over the keys to the company car, his hearing test kit and his sales records, walked out of the office with his name on the door in gold lettering, and never looked back. We never heard him say one recriminatory thing about Bel-Tone, the boss or the situation that resulted in the loss of his job. The choice was clear for him. The choice was easy. If asked to choose between business and his family, he was always going to choose family, no questions asked, no hard feelings, and not a second thought about the possible consequences of his actions.

So this is Lesson One, the first lesson about anything, really: Let yourself be guided by love. My father loved his family, loved his ridiculous horses, and thanked God for the life he embraced in a great big bear hug of love. Nothing else was even in the race. Acting on love, doing what you do because of it, is the only way that the pursuit of happiness can be a happy trip. First name your loves. Then go out and prove them to the world.