MINDY’S A MENTOR
Self-confidence and work ethic are reasons Mindy Kaling is my mentor
I’ve found a new mentor.
Never mind that she’s decades younger, a major celebrity and an award-winning Indo-American comedian with her own show.
The fact is, Mindy Kaling, 36, creator and star of the sitcom The Mindy Project (which ran for three seasons on Fox and is now on Hulu) and more importantly, author of two bestselling books, most recently, Why Not Me?, is saying important things about work, success, selfconfidence and, yes, entitlement, that should inspire anyone at any stage.
In her emphasis on how grittily hard you must work to be successful, Kaling puts to shame such mega successful but shallow modern cultural contrivances as the Kardashians.
She even leaves the more neurotically self-obsessed Lena Dunham, author and creator of Girls in the dust with her brazen but relatable self-confidence, and her insistence that it’s even all right to feel entitled; you just have to work your tail off to show you deserve your success.
Or as she writes in Why Not Me?: “If you are entitled and hard-working, which I am, you are still pretty insufferable, but at least you somewhat earned your entitled behaviour . . . no one can deny my powerful and driven work ethic, handed down to me by my im- migrant parents.”
Kaling grew up privileged in Cambridge, Mass., the child of Indian immigrants, and graduated from Dartmouth, where she joined a sorority and quit almost immediately when she discovered she was expected to clean up after wild parties she didn’t attend.
Her beloved mother, an ob-gyn, described by Kaling as “the love of my life,” died of cancer in 2012 just as The Mindy Project took off.
For those who don’t have the stamina to follow The Mindy Project — I’ve bailed several times out of sheer fatigue, even though it’s often very funny — Kaling’s onscreen character, Dr. Mindy Lahiri, is an obnoxious ob-gyn who toggles between Olympian selfishness and touching sweetness as she constantly looks for love while wearing astonishing clothes.
Kaling’s Emmy-nominated wardrobe is without doubt the brightest and most eye-poppingly patterned clothes on any screen. They perfectly fit her curvy but distinctly not model-thin body, which she jokes about at every turn.
“I’m a minority chubby woman who has my own show on a network. I don’t know how long this is going to last!” she once told Jon Stewart.
Her character, who has now embraced marriage and maternity, is, in Kaling’s words, “one of the most flawed, interesting but sort of immoral delusional characters. But she always looks amazing!”
I like her books more than her show because they emphasize ambition and goals. At 24, she became one of the first female writers on the hit sitcom The
Office, where she also played an annoying character Kelly Kapoor. (For her own show, she recreated a hilarious workplace “family” of misfits.)
Her memoir oozes an almost romantic love for work, like this description of a three-day work binge: “There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no break, and I had it big-time. If I breathed in deeply, I could smell my unwashed scent and it was intoxicating. It smelled like hard work.”
Maybe I’m easily susceptible but that passage made me want to work that insanely hard again, forgetting about the outside world and concentrating only on a project. These messages are very important for young women — for all millennials — who hate being labelled “entitled” to hear because they emphasize you cannot be successful if you’re not prepared to roll up your sleeves.
Kaling also discounts beauty: “Looks are great, but they’re not compelling enough.” And even dismisses the lack of traditional beauty: “I’m not brave, I’m just not really skinny!”
Instead, she emphasizes smarts, joking once, when asked about her IQ. “Whatever the highest is — it’s that plus five.”
Tellingly, she writes: “People really feel uncomfortable around women who don’t hate themselves. So that’s why you need to be a little bit brave.”
For Kaling, really, it’s all about the work: “The truth is, I have never, ever, ever met a highly confident and successful person who is not what a movie would call a ‘workaholic.’ We can’t have it both ways and children should know that.”
If anyone accuses her of getting there the easy way she tartly reminds them, “I guess they’re giving away shows to every overweight minority woman who wants one now?”
When she realized, standing onstage one early morning announcing the Emmy nominations, that her show had been overlooked that year, she held it together, but she was crushed.
“Maybe it sounds egotistical, but if you’re a person who creates your own show and stars in it, shouldn’t you believe you deserve recognition for it? If you don’t, then why not? Worse yet, who will?”
Kaling is selling an old-fashioned message, but she has enormous cred and she’s right. Here is her recipe for success and self-confidence:
“Work hard, know your s--t, show your s--t, and then feel entitled. Listen to no one except the two smartest and kindest adults you know, and that doesn’t always mean your parents. If you do that, you will be fine.”
More than fine, actually.