It's not hard to motivate myself because once you get a taste for winning races, you simply don't want to do anything else. You get a buzz from it. You want it every day. Only someone who has experienced winning can understand how good it feels.
I believe in myself, because I believe anything is possible.
For me to be the first African-born WWE Champion is incredible because now, people who look like myself can look at TV and see on WWE television that anything is possible because I'm doing it.
I didn't feel that I really fit in anywhere. So when I was young I always had to prove myself through my sporting ability.
The Beatles exist apart from myself. I am not really Beatle George. Beatle George is like a suit or shirt that I once wore on occasion, and until the end of my life, people may see that shirt and mistake it for me.
Now, myself, I'm not a pacifist at all. I believe in just war. I would have joined the spirit of the nation to fight against apartheid.
My grandmother and I would go see movies, and we'd come back to the apartment - we had a one-room apartment in Hollywood - and I would kind of lock myself in this little dressing room area with a cracked mirror on the door and act out what I had just seen.
I probably looked pretty conventionally successful as a 24-year-old getting paid $125,000 a year, plus bonus, wearing suits, and living in a Manhattan apartment. But I hated my job, I didn't admire the people I was working with, and I felt that I was becoming a smaller, less imaginative, less risk-taking, less likable version of myself.
I was very depressed when I was 19... I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.
I would never call myself anti-football. I think I'm pro-information, pro-people making informed individual choices, pro-health, so for that reason, personally, I'm apathetic towards football. But at the same time, I think we can retain some civility, and I understand why people support and love it.
When it comes to MMA, there is a big chip on my shoulder. There is a way that I look at myself. I think it's really, really important, and it's something I'm not really apologetic for it. As I get older, and I win more, I start to embrace it even more.
For the most part, it was never assumed that I was gay, and I've had people be sort of surprised that I was gay or act apologetic like they didn't know, which would just make me really uncomfortable. And I never had shame for it, but I never felt like introducing myself as, 'I'm Antoni. I'm gay. How are you?'
I used to blame myself for a lot of things, and I apologise loads. I don't do it any more, but when I was in the studio - and it was my song - I'd say 'sorry' every time I got a note wrong.
I've actually apologized to some people I was a real jerk to, because I feel ashamed. I didn't need to be that hungry. There was something going on inside me when I was angry and feeling very threatened and not feeling good about myself.
I've stopped apologizing to myself for having this great period of success and financial acceptance.
I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
I feel in me the vocation of the Priest. I have the vocation of the Apostle. Martyrdom was the dream of my youth, and this dream has grown with me. Considering the mystical body of the Church, I desired to see myself in them all.
Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad, pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.
Usually when I see myself in a film or on television, there's about a six-month period where I can't look at it because all I'll see are the mistakes. I'm just appalled by the person that I see.
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
