What Would Dolly Do? Lessons From Dolly Parton on Work, Life and Getting Ahead

Dolly Parton was one of the greatest songwriters of her generation. She was also an actress, producer, philanthropist and a remarkably astute businesswoman.

And, perhaps less appreciated outside our industry, she was a hospitality entrepreneur.

What started when she partnered with Herschend to transform a Tennessee theme park into Dollywood in 1986 grew into a tourism business spanning a theme park, water park and resorts including DreamMore Resort & Spa and HeartSong Lodge & Resort. Her next hotel, the 245-room SongTeller Hotel in downtown Nashville, is due to open this fall, complete with two live music venues and the new Dolly’s Life of Many Colors Museum. Even at 80, she was still building.

So beyond the music, the rhinestones and some of the best one-liners ever delivered, what can Dolly teach the rest of us about work and life?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

1. Be yourself. With confidence.

Long before “personal brand” entered the business vocabulary, Dolly knew exactly who she was.

Asked by Barbara Walters in a now-famous 1977 interview whether she worried people thought she was a joke, Dolly didn’t flinch.

“I am sure of myself as a person. I am sure of my talent,” she told Walters. “I like the kind of person that I am.”

That self-belief gave her enormous freedom. She could wear the wigs, heels and rhinestones, keep her Tennessee accent and build a career without trying to conform to someone else’s idea of what a successful woman should look or sound like.

As Dolly famously put it: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

Know who you are. Like who you are. Then stop wasting energy trying to be somebody else.

2. Laugh at Yourself

Dolly knew people made fun of her appearance. Her response was to get there first.

“I make more jokes about myself than anybody,” she told Barbara Walters in 1977. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

Self-deprecation became part of the act. As one of her most famous lines went: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap!”

It takes strength and total confidence to laugh at yourself without diminishing yourself.

Dolly could make fun of the wigs and the clothes because she never confused them with her worth. Being in on the joke took away its power.

3. Know the value of what you create

Dolly understood the value of owning her work remarkably early in her career.

The ultimate test came when Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You.” His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told her the deal required giving up half of her publishing rights.

She said no.

“I wanted to hear Elvis sing it, and it broke my heart. I cried all night,” Dolly told W in 2021. “But I had to keep that copyright in my pocket. You have to take care of your business!”

Whitney Houston eventually recorded the song and her version spent 14 weeks at No. 1. Dolly still owned the publishing rights. As Dolly later joked in a CMT interview, “When Whitney’s version came out, I made enough money to buy Graceland.”

The lesson feels particularly relevant in an age when everyone is creating content and intellectual property.

Know what your work is worth. And don’t be so flattered by who wants it that you give it away.

4. Make creativity a habit

Dolly wrote more than 3,000 songs, was nominated for 55 Grammys and won 10. That kind of output didn’t come from sitting around waiting for inspiration.

“I write almost everyday,” she told Vogue, whether it was a thought, a title or a song.

Talking to Adam Grant on WorkLife, she described keeping ways to capture ideas close at hand, including a recorder beside her bed for melodies that came to her in the night.

Creativity could strike anywhere. But Dolly had spent a lifetime developing the discipline to recognise an idea, capture it and do something with it.

The inspiration might have been spontaneous. The 3,000 songs were not.

5. Be prepared. Forget perfect.

Dolly had a wonderful word for her approach to work.

“I am a professionalist,” she told Adam Grant on WorkLife. “I’m not a perfectionist.”

She worked hard and wanted things right. But she also knew technically perfect wasn’t always better.

If the feeling in a recording was right, she didn’t necessarily redo it because of a small imperfection. If she made a mistake during a performance, she often worked it into the show.

“Sometimes the best part of my show is when I’ve messed up,” she told Grant.

Grant also pointed out that women in particular are often under pressure to be perfect, which can turn high standards into something that slows progress.

Dolly’s answer wasn’t to lower her standards.

Do the work. Know your stuff. Care about the result. Then know when it is good enough to let it go.

6. Don’t be afraid of getting it wrong

Dolly had a refreshingly useful way of looking at mistakes. Talking to Adam Grant on WorkLife, she said she didn’t tend to view her past decisions as regrets because they were part of getting her to wherever she was going.

“I can’t really call that a mistake or call it a regret,” she told him. “I was building.”

I was building.

Not everything works. Not every decision turns out to be the right one. But wrong turns also give you experience you wouldn’t otherwise have.

Take the lesson and keep building.

7. Practice gratitude

Julia Roberts shared a Dolly lesson she has carried with her since they made Steel Magnolias together.

They were filming in the Louisiana heat and people around them were complaining. She noticed Dolly wasn’t, and asked her why.

“When I was a little girl, I wanted to be famous and I wanted to be rich, and now I’m both,” Roberts recalled Dolly telling her. “I’m not going to complain about it.”

Roberts told People she never forgot it.

Ambition has plenty of inconvenient bits attached to it. Sometimes gratitude is remembering how badly you once wanted the opportunity you’re now complaining about.

8. You don’t need the label to live the values

Was Dolly Parton a feminist? Her answer was wonderfully Dolly.

“I must be if being a feminist means I’m all for women, yes,” she told The Guardian in 2019. “I’m just all for gals.”

Her actions spoke pretty loudly too.

In 1980 she made her film debut alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5, a comedy about three women taking on a sexist boss and transforming their workplace with equal pay, flexible hours and childcare.

Dolly also wrote the title song, turning the frustrations of working women into a global hit.

Nearly half a century later, we are still discussing many of the same issues: equal pay, childcare, sexual harassment, flexibility and who gets ahead.

Dolly might not have loved the label. But she spent her career showing women they could own their talent, own their work, make their own money and do it without becoming somebody else first.

9. Education opens up a world of opportunity

Dolly’s commitment to education was inspired by her father.

Robert Lee Parton could neither read nor write. Dolly called him “the smartest man I have ever known,” but believed his inability to read had prevented him from fulfilling some of his dreams.

That inspired the Imagination Library, which she founded in 1995 to give free books to young children. It eventually grew far beyond Tennessee and has distributed hundreds of millions of books around the world.

But her belief in education extended to the people working in her businesses too.

Through Herschend’s Grow U program, Dollywood employees were offered fully funded higher education.

Asked by Adam Grant why, Dolly’s answer was simple: “We want them to have every chance in the world.”

That gets to the heart of it. For Dolly, education was about widening someone’s choices and giving them opportunities they might not otherwise have had.

10. If you become successful, create opportunity behind you

Perhaps this is the biggest lesson Dolly left us.

When she invested in the Tennessee attraction that became Dollywood in 1986, she had an ambition beyond building a successful theme park.

“I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.”

She did. Dollywood grew into a major tourism and hospitality business, creating thousands of jobs and eventually expanding into hotels and resorts.

Her success also funded and inspired work in literacy, education, disaster relief and medical research, much of it rooted in the community where she grew up.

Dolly became enormously successful.

Then she kept finding ways to make that success useful to somebody else.

When you make it through the door, leave it wider open behind you.

Dolly Parton was never simply a magnet for fame. She was a mirror for humanity.

For someone who spent a lifetime in the spotlight, she had a remarkable ability to turn that light toward other people. Dolly didn’t just bask in it. She transmitted it.

Her career was a masterclass in collaboration. From her legendary duets and musical partnerships to 9 to 5, Steel Magnolias and countless other projects, she understood that someone else’s talent didn’t diminish her own.

Perhaps that’s one reason people were so drawn to her. She could be unmistakably, unapologetically Dolly and still leave room for everyone else.

There’s a lesson in that for anyone who leads.

The most powerful people in the room don’t need all the light.

Sometimes they’re the ones who make everybody else a little brighter.