To be absolutely alone for the first time in the cockpit of a plane hundreds of feet above the ground is an experience never to be forgotten.
I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.
First time I looked at a Formula One car in person, I just stared at the cockpit, figuring I'd never get in there. The drivers wear the whole car like a tight-fitting suit.
My show mode is that the dressing room is like going into the cockpit. Going down the stairs is like going on the runway, and once we begin performing, it's flight time. I'm just floatin' on that stage.
In World Series, everything is a bit slower than F1. But each time I sit in the car, whether it is World Series or F1, once I am in the cockpit, I am mentally prepared for what the car is. I don't have to physically drive it to remember what it is doing.
When you actually take the time to go over to somebody's office and personally thank them - whether their office is in a cockpit of an airplane, or in a break room - that's an actual manifestation of interest in them. You need to take the time to show the people around you who work for you that you're interested in them.
Many pilots of the time were the opinion that a fighter pilot in a closed cockpit was an impossible thing, because you should smell the enemy. You could smell them because of the oil they were burning.
Your cocktail shaker can be smooth chrome or hammered aluminum. It must both conduct cold and look sophisticated at the same time.
Do whatever rejuvenates you. It might be a cooking class, cocktails with the girls, or just private time with the hubby. We all have our moments where we run out of steam because we've given everything we've got to everyone else. Whoever decided that was a good thing? It's not. Everyone needs to refuel.
Honestly, the way I make music, you know - it's like, I don't want to sound cocky or anything, but I try my best to make time with music that doesn't have an expiration date.
At the end of the Beatles, I really was done in for the first time in my life. Until then, I really was a kind of cocky sod.
Misconception Number 1, the public always thought, 'Reggie has a massive ego; he's narcissistic, he's cocky, he needs everyone to look at him all the time,' because that's what the media told them. Wrong. I could handle the attention. I didn't let the attention affect my performance. But I never needed the attention.
I always pick myself up by doing a dance session. I turn on really good music and have a lot of food and mentally I just take that time to cocoon and rebuild myself.
In my humble opinion, the ages 22 to about 27 are the most critical years of your adult life. It's your time to gestate in the cocoon of becoming.
If you help a chicken out of an egg, most of the time that bird will die. If you help a moth out of a cocoon, it'll die because they don't go through that struggle and maturation. I can give you a fish for the day and you'll eat a day, but if I teach you to fish, you'll eat for a lifetime. Maybe even start a business.
The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.
Young people have to learn in a cocoon filled with false optimism. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they grow up with very little sense of the pitiless passage of time.
It's become easy for Americans to live in a cocoon of monolithic ideology and thought. It's time to embrace diversity of thought and diversity of experience.
Now if you play video games all the time and you're a real gamer, you're not going to use the Game Genie, you're not going to use the codes.
By the time I got into Juilliard, I was working at a Target distribution warehouse. It didn't make anything, it just shipped things, and my job was just to stand there and look at the security codes on the back of trucks and see if they would lock, and check them in.
