When you're doing a startup, life is not all roses and rainbows, like you see on Instagram, and killing it.
If you can survive in the desert, you survive anywhere. I know more than anything life in desert. You can tell by looking at the dirt how long ago it rained, how hard it rained, how much water came through. You can by looking at a plant, a tree, from an animal's look. I can read the desert like I read my hand.
Expect to have hope rekindled. Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways. The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again.
I have a weird life because I live on songwriting royalties, which are a strange income. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn't.
Working is actually a pleasure. It's just very time-consuming. It's a way of life. I find that I can work when I travel and work when I run. There is nothing like, on a rainy day, to work.
I had a very active inner life as a kid. There's a good album or two worth of stuff that I can bring out on a rainy day if I have a loss for inspiration or whatever - even now.
Raising children is an uncertain thing; success is reached only after a life of battle and worry.
It's hard to think of anything that is more socially beneficial than raising children well. It needs to be valued and respected, I believe by everyone in public life regardless of your political party.
Raising children is an enormously important part of life. I think one of the most important, or the most important, period.
I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.
The best things in life are often waiting for you at the exit ramp of your comfort zone.
Randomly enough, all of my favorite rappers growing up were East Coast rappers. I don't know. I just related to them a little more at first - because if you're born in L.A., and you lived there your whole life, Snoop Dogg literally sounds like cars driving by. You feel me? You hear Snoop Dogg so much.
So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.
Trajectories aren't linear. Life's just a roller coaster. If you're getting a chance to do cool stuff, and it's varied stuff, just enjoy it. I guess I'm a believer in the randomness of life rather than it being a linear trajectory or an arc, a consistent smooth arc, towards anything.
Talk to people no one else is talking to. Who would have thought that giving a speech at a funeral at age 12 would introduce me to a man who would introduce me to my first business contact who would introduce me to several other important people in my life. That's luck. That's randomness.
There are people for whom Rangers Football Club is their entire way of life.
I've fallen back on this periodically, although I must say that getting out of the grocery business ranked right up there with getting out of the army as one of the happier experiences of my life.
All my life I had a rapport with black caddies.
I know it's a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything I can imagine.
Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one's own.
