| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | On my father's father's deathbed, I saw a man who had accomplished everything I was taught was good in life. He had served his country, raised both children to achieve doctorates, been an executive at a successful company, but he died scared, shrunken, paranoid, and in pain. After coming face to face with the upper limits of successful humanity, I knew that the only worthwhile thing I could do with my life was try to push the boundaries on those limits. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | My brother and I are very similar. People say we have the same laugh. And we definitely have many similar interests, speech patterns, and personality quirks. We shared ideas to develop world views, we shared dreams to develop goals. Thus the fires in the hearts of the young are born. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | Self-awareness and personal understanding first of all. The ability to understand the nuances of the world, and the continual struggle to pair that understanding with a holistic world view. The ability to change one's opinion when presented with a superior argument. Ambition. Loyalty. Trustworthiness. Workaholic-ism. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | I don't keep a record of such things, but one story that springs to mind is as follows: As an undergraduate I worked in a cancer research lab that studied mice. We would carry the mice to the lab from their sterile cages underground in little cardboard tubs. One day, after bringing some mice to the lab and then setting them on my desk, I had to run off for a class. Upon my return, I found the back of my mouse box with a hole chewed in it. I started panicking, pulling out refrigerators, and lifting machinery to try to find my escaped mice. It wasn't until about five minutes later that I caught on to the giggles of my coworkers, and the practical joker who had arduously chewed the box to look like mouse teeth eventually returned my mice. It was the best lab prank in my memory. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | Start in Perth, Australia, on the far western end of the continent. Rent a Jeep Wrangler with an open top. Without a guide, a friend and I travel in the Jeep from Perth to Darwin, on the northern coast. This would be passing through some of the driest, least inhabited, least traveled, and most amazing terrain in the world. Western Australia looks like Mars from above, and is like nowhere else on Earth in regards to the climate, the geology, and the life found there. It would be a grand adventure. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | The hatred of the term "job." If there's one thing in life that I wish all children would learn, it's that from an early age, they should view the world as a marketplace of demand, and ask themselves the question how they should best fill that demand. A "job" is a byproduct of a demand in the marketplace. Understand the marketplace, and you shall never want for long. |
