I ended up being a businessman unwittingly. I wanted to be an academic; I wanted to be like Einstein.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was never supposed to be a businessman. I was going to change the world. I was going to go back to Latin America and work on agrarian reform and equalize the differences between rich and poor.
My dad wanted me to be a businessman, but I felt that wasn't for me.
I went to college because my father thought that I should learn engineering, because he wanted to go into the heating business with me. There, I realized I wanted to be a physicist. I had to tell him, which was a somewhat traumatic experience.
I was really quite geeky at school. At one point, I wanted to be prime minister or a mathematician.
Even as a college professor at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I saw myself as an entrepreneur, and I went out, took risks, and tried to invent new things, such as participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge and working on self-driving cars.
After my health suffered due to the stress of running my second company, I had to switch careers. But I still didn't want to go back to the corporate world. So I became an academic.
When I was young, I was an academically oriented guy like most academically oriented guys. I graduated in science, did an MBA. My dreams as a young boy were I wanted to be an industrialist, or I wanted to be a scientist.
I always said I wanted to be scientist, but I didn't really have the staying power.
I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life.
When I was in college, I studied business because I thought I wanted to be a director and producer.