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Henry Kravis
Financier and Investor
I like to tell the story about how I sold magazines as a kid in the seventh grade in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'd go door to door, and I always had to be the best salesman. I wanted to go back to my junior high school and win the prize for the day of having sold the most magazines. That was a challenge for me. Or collecting waste paper, old newspaper. I'd go around, and I'd collect, and keep them in the garage. And my mother would say, "When are you going to get rid of that stuff?" and I said, "Well, when you take me down to the waste paper dump, we'll get rid of it then." And I'd collect it in my wheelbarrow, and go around the neighborhood, and she'd take me down and we'd load it on the scales, and they'd pay me $1.36, or whatever it was, for my newspaper, and I'd go back and do it again.
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Nicholas Kristof
Journalist, Author & Columnist
I had been doing a lot of traveling, had traveled through the Middle East, and in particular had gone -- this was 1982 -- had gone to a town called Hamah, in Syria, where about 30,000 people had been wiped out as part of a suppressed insurrection. The center of the town had been completely destroyed. It was rubble, this big, huge, vast area of rubble. And I found some survivors who wanted to tell their story. I couldn't speak any Arabic, they couldn't speak any English or any French, so we couldn't communicate. That experience really made me think that if I wanted to become a journalist, that one of the key skills that would help in that career would be Arabic language, 'cause so few journalists speak it, yet a lot of things happen in the Arabic-speaking world. And so I had applied to study Arabic in Cairo, at the American University in Cairo, and the same week that program came through -- my acceptance there came through and Harvard Law School came through. The Cairo program would essentially take me toward a career in journalism, I thought, and the Harvard Law School to a career maybe as a law professor. So I thought about it, agonized about it, and then decided that Cairo sounded like a lot more fun.
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Mike Krzyzewski
Collegiate Basketball Champion
In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure. He'd tell me to shoot 25 times a game, and I'd say, "No, I can't do that, everyone will hate me." "You do it." And even though I didn't do that all the time, he kept pushing me to be better. If success or talent were on floors, maybe I saw myself on the fifth floor. He always saw me on the twentieth floor. As a result, I climbed more floors when I was with him. I've tried to use that in my way of teaching. He even helped me choose West Point to go to school, where I was afraid of that. He felt that that would give me many more floors in my building, and he was right.
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Mike Krzyzewski
Collegiate Basketball Champion
Imagination has a great deal to do with winning. In my case, and I try to tell kids -- I teach at summer camp -- to imagine yourself. But it's your imagination. Why would you lose in your imagination? Why would you not achieve really neat things in your imagination? Why would you let someone else do your imagination for you? So in all these games that I would fantasize, I always won, and I always played well. Therefore, as a player, as a coach, even though we might have lost in a season or not won a championship, it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy that I'm going to win some time. I've never felt myself a loser. I never let a defeat determine what I think of myself. I think that I win. I don't all the time, but if I play long enough, I'm going to be a winner. I believe wholeheartedly that that came about because of imagination when I was younger.
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