Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.
We are a product of our families, schools, and churches. Without the liberty and rule of law that characterize America, entrepreneurship would indeed be impossible. Any successful American who is not a patriot is a rank ingrate.
It's always nice to get out there and kind of put Boston College on the map, because we're not one of those schools that is seen nationally by everybody.
I went right to Chicago to do improv [after law school], but I wish I had gone, "Let me just bypass this law thing." I mean, sure, it helps you read a contract, but I can read a contract regardless. It's just common sense, contracts.
The first day I went to law school, I realized I'd made a huge mistake. It was nothing like what I thought.
I thought you'd be arguing [in the law school], and then I realized you have to read all these cases, and it's mostly writing, and then I just thought, "Well, I might as well stay and get the degree."
I missed the day in school where you subtract all the zeros. Let's say you subtract 10,000 minus 89. I never got the fact that you go next door and borrow a cup of coffee, and the zero changes to nine. For the longest time, I didn't know how to do it. I still to this day have been affected, and it was just one day they taught it. I was too afraid to say, "Why? What's going on with the zeroes?" So for the longest time, I thought that was a conspiracy.
I didn't have many friends. I was very shy ... And, then, even worse, when I was 14 I became Gothic. I had long, black hair. I was going to school with makeup. Because I was trying to find my language, to scream to the world that I felt so closed in a box where I was living.
I used to hate to go to school, because when it was Friday afternoon and everybody was finished school, I knew I was going to work Saturday and Sunday.
When I was young, especially when I was at school, I thought couture was about big gowns, big hats (that is couture as well, of course) - but my couture is about going near the clothes and having a look at the details. I like people to have a shock in a chic way.
I played a lot of other sports at school and just one day the golf bug bit me and I started playing serious golf from when I was ten years old.
Students can't leave their lives at the door when they come to school. They bring with them whatever is going on at home and in their communities. Poetry and theater provide an outlet for students to express themselves and process what they're going through.
Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - I went there maybe 20 times - it's also been also super-controversial. There's an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there.Because of colonialism and so on.
If you're not mechanically in the community with people from the community trying to talk about our party, talk about school choice, talk about SBA loans for business owners - if someone's not there, nothing is going to change. You also need to have the tone ... people believe obviously you like them. If people don't think you like them, then they're not going to vote for you.
My greatest influences are actually probably a set of different teachers. And these teachers, most prominently at my high school, but also a few others, helped kind of instill in me, thinking thoughts about how life is meaningful in terms of how we all kind of live in a network of people and how you interact with those people is part of what makes life essentially meaningful and then kind of concepts to think about, how do you add value to other people's lives? How do they add value to yours? And how do you kind of form a community together in the network?
I think the boarding schools are like miniature versions of "Lord of the Flies."
Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth's four volume Haiku became especially popular at this time [1950's] because his translations were based on the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen.
I became alcoholic at around age of 13 or 14. I was full-blown. Every day we would hide the alcohol, stealing from stores or stealing it from our parents and hiding out in dirt fields and drinking it before school and after school.
And once I was in college, about - maybe the end of my first semester of my sophomore year, I realized that college just was not my jam and that I felt like I was learning more when is actually on set. And I think a lot of that had to do with - I was working while I was in college. I was on "227," so I didn't get a chance to really be immersed in the culture of my school.
I never really loved school through junior high, but then I started running track my freshman year, and I was just like, 'Wow, this is cool!
She couldn’t picture anyone falling madly in love with such a person as Fish. What a name, Fish...Fish: think cold, slippery, detached. Benedict: think dry scholarly monk from the Dark Ages. Denniston: think English preparatory school, stolid country squire. Nothing about his name sounded the least bit romantic.
We have multiple Black men and women losing their lives simply for being. Who gets to say you don't get to live anymore? I don't understand that. And it doesn't stop there. Can we go into the school system and look at the imbalance of what our children are learning? We are functioning crazy, people.
My mom was a pretty hard worker. She worked her ass off, but I'd say we were middle class. I had a car in high school, so I loved the idea that I could mimic this lifestyle.
Music and art is regarded as extra and can be the first thing that you cut in a school program, and it's completely not true. If you want to create really boring, frustrated human beings, then yeah, cut out art and science.
About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.
