So, I was offered this job to come down there but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it's all about, and I tell you that was a revelation to me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Fortunately for me I was able to do well here, and it really did great things for my career and now hopefully I can go out there and continue to do what I did.
I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.
It was a great experience for me - the ups and downs - because I became a man in Philadelphia.
Out of college, I had two job offers. One was to be a canoe instructor for Outward Bound. And frankly, that would have paid better than the job I took, working on a policy commission in Washington that focused on immigration policy and refugees. But that decision made all the difference.
What I like in this job is you can travel to many places, many imaginations.
I'm always intrigued when you are travelling through a place and there is somebody who has lived there and done the same job for years.
Almost all of my jobs have been on locations. And I think you can be that person who says, 'I have a job that forces me to travel and I'm just going to go ahead and do it and pray for my next flight home.' Or 'this is where I am, this is my life, let me see a part of this world I now live in.'
I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
I saw the prospect of serving as labor secretary as a wonderful opportunity to further the policies that I have been fighting for my whole life, and I had to seize it.
I knew what my job was; it was to go out and meet the people and love them.