“I’ve always felt that life should be an adventure,” says home-style guru and multi-millionaire Martha Stewart. “Every day should be important.”

Stewart’s adventures began on August 3, 1941 when she was born into the industrial heartland of Jersey City, New Jersey as Martha Helen Kostyra. The first daughter of six children to her schoolteacher mother and pharmaceutical salesman father, Stewart grew up in a very tight knit middle class family of Polish background. When Stewart was three, the family moved to Nutley, New Jersey. Her father, Edward, was an extremely demanding man who always encouraged his children to have ambitious goals. Stewart’s passion for homemaking seemed to stem from this early period, when her father taught her the techniques of gardening and her mother taught her cooking, baking and sewing.

Today, Stewart makes an annual salary of $3 million, with her net worth totaling over $1.2 billion. Her brainchild, MSLO, not only encompasses television shows and magazines, but also radio programs, direct-mail operations, Internet sales, a line of interior paint, gardening tools, house wares, furniture and more. How did Stewart turn her passion for homemaking and renovations into a multi-million dollar empire?

“My dream now, in retrospect then, was to be an eclectic knowledge-gathering person – in order to be able to learn and then to teach. And I’m still doing that, so I think I am a teacher.

I’m not a sponge exactly, but I find that something I look at is a great opportunity for ideas.

I think it’s very important that whatever you’re trying to make or sell, or teach has to be basically good. A bad product and you know what? You won’t be here in ten years.

I always disagreed with the separation of the name and the brand and the person, … To build on that name and brand is one thing. To divorce the name and the brand from the person was not an approach that I agreed with.

I am a hero worshiper. I love the number one tennis player. I love the number one baseball player. I want to see those records broken.

I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing.

This is what truly interests us, why we all come to work every day … our passion is and always should be to make life better.”

Have you found your calling yet that is more important than sleep?

Evan Carmichael