I grew up in a house where my father encouraged my brother and me to fail. I specifically remember coming home and saying, 'Dad, Dad, I tried out for this or that and I was horrible,' and he would high-five me and say, 'Way to go.'

My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn't have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not trying. Don't be afraid to fail.

My training of cold-calling and everyone under the sun telling me no, and my keeping going, was a huge part of the first two years of Spanx.

I aim to be pretty - I gave up dressing to be sexy in the eighties.

And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that's funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there's all kinds of advantages to it.

We don't appreciate the value of humor sometimes.

The truth is, I should have never done teaching. I did teaching because I didn't have the bottle to have a go at comedy. Whether there's any gain to comedy is not for me to say. But certainly it was no loss to teaching.

I don't know, people take chances on stage. It's a big free speech zone, a comedy show. So sometimes things happen, you say things that are a little bit off the edge.