Lynda Sunshine West: Let's hear it for Forbes Riley. I'm so excited to have you because you know of action takers, really, YOU are an amazing action taker. And we were just talking about something, talking about starters versus finishers and how important they are in our lives, right? That we need starters. We need finishers, but you know, Forbes, why don't you share with us. What is one thing that really, really got you started at the very beginning because you just do some amazing things.

Forbes Riley: I'm working on my eighth book at the moment. And I was writing since four o'clock this morning and I found myself actually revealing something very personal to myself about how geeky and awkward I was as a little girl and, not a joke, it was in the privacy of my own house. I wasn't on stage talking to anybody. I actually felt myself saying I was qualified as a genius when I was a kid, but I had a broken nose and hair and I was overwhelmed and I was awkward.

And I didn’t have a lot of friends just because when you are that smart, it's not fun. Nobody wants to talk to you. You don't relate to regular people. I didn't relate to kids. I didn't play with any. It was weird. But then I found myself writing a sentence -- I think everybody should journal and write. That said, that was in public. And then something I've never revealed to myself until this morning. So you're the first people to hear this at home. I was like a princess. My mom and dad adored me. They loved me. They understood me. I didn't have to explain who I was. My dad was a bigger geek than I was. We built a computer when I was eight years old, we did magic tricks, we used to take apart and tinker with things and we were together. And that was okay.

But they loved me. And they were also kind of weird. None of us had a lot of friends. We were just a really tight-knit, crazy family. We talked on the CB radio. We used to shoot guns in the garage, really crazy stuff. But I spent a lot of time trying to make them happy. One of the things I also revealed, and I do think that you have to do some recovery. Your journey is to figure out who you are and your place in this world. If you want to help others, you do have to put your mask on first. And when I was four years old, my youngest sister had just been born. My mom was an only child of immigrants from Russia. Her dad was a butcher. Her mom was five-foot two, this tiny little thing. Who, from what I understand, I don't really remember her.

She was a bookie. She raised Bulldogs and she was in the diamond industry. Do you imagine the spoken a little, this woman and my mom, they give a lot of money. My mom was five-foot nine and she slept on the couch. Never had her own bedroom. She was an only child. I walked into the bedroom and I'm four years old. My grandma and I shared a bedroom and my grandma was gone. She passed away in her sleep. And I remember my mom with this really precocious four year old. And I started here, but I remember my mom quite a lot. We used to go to the cemetery and visit her parents and cry. She was never as happy as she was before they passed away. And she always used to romanticize that my grandma died of a broken heart because my dad, grandpa, had just died of leukemia.

So I actually think I spent most of my life trying to make my mom happy because I love her so much. And we grew up in the kitchen. And one of the problems with that is everything in our world was about food. We ate, we ate, we were happy with food.

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