Quote

Growing up, I was a target. Speaking the right way, standing the right way, holding your wrist the right way. Every day was a test, and there were a thousand ways to fail, a thousand ways to betray yourself, to not live up to someone else's standards of what was accepted, of what was normal.

I was always fiercely determined and driven to succeed.

At Murry Bergtraum High I wanted to be as different from my father as possible. So I acted out in school, I was very anti-authority.

I worked hard at whatever task I was given and embraced leadership opportunities, whether as a crossing guard, an altar boy, or a general.

I developed a resistance to authority. Not to discipline - I learned that. But to authority. I like to think for myself. And I like to cause trouble.

And though I might have learnt more wit and advanced my understanding by living in a Court, yet being dull, fearful and bashful, I neither heeded what was said or practised, but just what belonged to my loyal duty and my own honest reputation.

I had lost a clear sense of the vision and values instilled in me as a child and was no longer driven by any mission or passion. I made the difficult decision to pull back from the noise of my life and reinvent the way I was living and leading.

I once wrote a book on courage and what made people courageous. I found it was a strength of belief matched by a strength of willpower.

I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment.

I developed a problem with authority. Any time that authority was what I interpreted as being unjust, I stood up to it, and that became my personality.