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Johnny Cash
Country Music Legend
Johnny Cash: I think the first time I knew what I wanted to do with my life was when I was about four years old. I was listening to an old Victrola, playing a railroad song. The song was called, "Hobo Bill's Last Ride." And I thought that was the most wonderful, amazing thing that I'd ever seen. That you could take this piece of wax and music would come out of that box. From that day on, I wanted to sing on the radio. That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio. The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station.
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Johnnetta Cole
Past President of Spelman College
Johnnetta Cole: I loved school. I thought school was just great stuff. And somehow, I don't remember being teased because I liked school, being isolated, being called a nerd. And I remember now, and remember with a kind of mixed emotion, that I was growing up in the segregated South, going to segregated schools. There was a point when we went to school only half of the day, because the school board in Jacksonville, Florida said that was enough for colored kids. They'd learn all they needed to learn in half a day. I loved school and I think surely a great deal of the explanation must be in the Mrs. Vances of the world. That these were women, rarely men in my early years, who honest to goodness had a revolutionary idea. That every child is educable. That there's no such thing as a child who cannot learn. And so, learning was an activity that one wanted to engage in. Going to school was fun. And I guess, in a sense, I've never given up that passion.
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Johnnetta Cole
Past President of Spelman College
My grandfather wanted me to be an insurance executive, to carry on the family business. Lots of folk would say to my early declaration of being a doctor, "Oh, that's good. That's a good thing to do." But what I wanted to do, what I had discovered, the real passion, was for this thing called anthropology. And how fortunate I am that my mother affirmed it. That she said, "You must do what you feel passionately about." And I really think that all folk need to do that. The idea of getting up in the morning to do what you think others want you to do is not a very interesting way for me to imagine living a life.
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
It was the 10th grade in high school, it was the first day of the chemistry course. Mr. House, this wonderful man who'd dedicated his life to getting high school students excited about science, came in and said, "We're going to do an experiment today. I'm going to give you this box, which is painted black, and it has an object inside it and I want you figure out all the ways that you might investigate this to figure out what the object is." And my initial reaction was, "What a dumb idea!" And then I started to try to come up with a list of the kinds of experiments one could do to determine what's inside this black box. And I got caught up in it. It was the first time I think that somebody had challenged me to come up with the ideas. I had some exposure to science in previous courses, but it was, "Here's the facts, learn them." This was, "Okay, I'm challenging you. Here's a problem, how would you solve it?" And I knew something was different here.
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
In the lab, you could go for three or four weeks, sometimes longer, without having the sense that you did anything worthwhile. But when you have that occasional flash -- it doesn't come very often -- that occasional flash where you see something, you know something that nobody else ever knew before, that makes it all worthwhile. That's that sort of moment of inspiration, that recognition of some new phenomenon that only God is aware of until that moment. That keeps you going. That gets you through all those months of failed experiments and flawed hypotheses, and keeps you wanting to go on to the next step.
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