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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
From a relatively early age I got interested in business. I'm not sure I knew what an entrepreneur was when I was ten, but I knew that starting little businesses and trying to sell greeting cards or newspapers door-to-door or just vending machine kind of thing is -- there's just something very intriguing to me about that. So I think relatively early on I probably was on a path to be more of an entrepreneur, and I think everybody in my family kind of sensed that.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
The resources you happen to accumulate, what do you do with them? You can spend the money and buy some houses or whatever, and people do some of that and that's fine. You can give the money to other people, either your family -- but usually when you do that you screw them up and it ends up not being a particularly -- it's well intended but often counterproductive. Or, you take those resources and reinvest them in things that you believe in, and that could be reinvesting in a philanthropic cause. That could be reinvesting in business causes or trying to look at it through more of a hybrid approach, which is my inclination, but I do feel a sense of responsibility. People often ask me whether I would want to move into the more formal kind of government role or public service, and I guess never say never, but my preference would be to try to figure out a way through this prism, this platform, building on my interests and strengths. Maybe there's a way I can leave the world a better place than I found it, but in a different way, and that's what I'm going to be continuing to work on in the years to come.
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Johnny Cash
Country Music Legend
Johnny Cash: I think the first time I knew what I wanted to do with my life was when I was about four years old. I was listening to an old Victrola, playing a railroad song. The song was called, "Hobo Bill's Last Ride." And I thought that was the most wonderful, amazing thing that I'd ever seen. That you could take this piece of wax and music would come out of that box. From that day on, I wanted to sing on the radio. That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio. The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station.
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Johnnetta Cole
Past President of Spelman College
Johnnetta Cole: I loved school. I thought school was just great stuff. And somehow, I don't remember being teased because I liked school, being isolated, being called a nerd. And I remember now, and remember with a kind of mixed emotion, that I was growing up in the segregated South, going to segregated schools. There was a point when we went to school only half of the day, because the school board in Jacksonville, Florida said that was enough for colored kids. They'd learn all they needed to learn in half a day. I loved school and I think surely a great deal of the explanation must be in the Mrs. Vances of the world. That these were women, rarely men in my early years, who honest to goodness had a revolutionary idea. That every child is educable. That there's no such thing as a child who cannot learn. And so, learning was an activity that one wanted to engage in. Going to school was fun. And I guess, in a sense, I've never given up that passion.
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Johnnetta Cole
Past President of Spelman College
My grandfather wanted me to be an insurance executive, to carry on the family business. Lots of folk would say to my early declaration of being a doctor, "Oh, that's good. That's a good thing to do." But what I wanted to do, what I had discovered, the real passion, was for this thing called anthropology. And how fortunate I am that my mother affirmed it. That she said, "You must do what you feel passionately about." And I really think that all folk need to do that. The idea of getting up in the morning to do what you think others want you to do is not a very interesting way for me to imagine living a life.
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