It doesn’t matter if you come from the inner city. People who fail in life are people who find lots of excuses. It’s never too late for a person to recognize that they have potential in themselves.
No matter how good you are at planning, the pressure never goes away. So I don’t fight it. I feed off it. I turn pressure into motivation to do my best.
There’s no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there’s no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.
We live in a country that used to have a can-do attitude, and now we have a ‘what-can-you-do-for-me?’ attitude, and what I try to do is find ways that we can develop common ground.
When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to hang out with the guys. I went from being an A-student to a B-student to a C-student, but I didn’t care. I was getting the high fives and the low fives and the pats on the back. I was cool.
We need to understand that we are not each others’ enemies in this country. And it is only the political class that derives its power by creating friction. It is only the media that derives its importance by creating friction… that uses every little thing to create this chasm between people. This is not who we are.
I first wanted to be a psychiatrist. I decided against that in medical school when I discovered that psychiatrists didn’t, in reality, do what they did on TV.
We’ve reached a point where people are actually afraid to talk about what they want to say, because somebody might be offended. We’ve got to get over this sensitivity and it keeps people from saying what they really believe.
