Heidi Klum: Making It Happen

You might not believe it looking at her today but, when she was younger, people used to call supermodel Heidi Klum "pizza face," mocking her severe acne.

Klum tells The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith she didn't let that or other perceived obstacles block her rise to fame and fortune.

Now, she's graced the cover of the world's top fashion magazines and strutted her stuff on the catwalk for most of the major designers. Klum has a jewelry line, a clothing line and she's even a new mom.

She has a brand new book out, too, "Heidi Klum's Body of Knowledge: 8 Rules of Model Behavior."

Klum told Smith her complexion wasn't her only early shortcoming. "I had the curves, and when I started, that wasn't really what was in fashion. All the really, really skinny girls were in fashion. I was a little too 'healthy' looking.

"But I, kind of, stuck it out. That's really what it was. People, you know, they kind of said. 'Why don't you put that in your drink, maybe you won't be as hungry.' These crazy things."

Klum says perseverance was key. "It doesn't come from nothing. You have do extra work and more things than other people would think that you have to do. …You don't become a big show all of a sudden like that. You have to do all these little steps in between. So I did do a lot of those little segments, you know, stuff other people maybe didn't want to do.

"A lot of people now say, 'How come she gets all these great things?' It didn't, all of a sudden, from one day to the next, happen like that.

"If you want to do better, you have to be the person that makes it happen and not wait for somebody else to do it," Klum observed.

Klum says motherhood has been a revelation: "It's the most amazing thing. For me, now I'm second. Before, I was always first. Now, my daughter's first."

She says she isn't about to become a stay-at-home mom, like her mother was. "I'm different than my mom," she notes. "I've traveled too much, and I've been too much out and about. I'm a little bit more curly and fast than my mom is. So I want to still be the way I am, because I'm happy the way I am. I think that's going to be good for my daughter, too. I just have a different lifestyle than my parents did."

Klum adds that she didn't just want to cram her book full of pictures. "I thought I had so many stories to tell, so many things happen to me, especially always trying really hard and getting better, even whlen people said, 'No, you're only a catalog girl.' "