I never dreamed about being an actor, because that was out of reach. Coming from a small town that was big in farming, and also big in clothing factories, you don’t dream about being a professional football player or an actor.
I was a little different. I still say I’m a little different, because success to me is not having the most money, or having the biggest car or the biggest house.
The hardest thing I had to overcome in life? I think racism. That’s so difficult because I don’t think anyone can ever understand it. It’s not that people don’t want to understand it, but they don’t want to touch it.
That person has to be accountable for himself. I think that’s what we have to do in society today is to be accountable for yourself. I think we have the tendency to always want to live someone else’s life.
Success is just being happy. And I try so many different things. I do a lot of different things. Because I think God has helped me to love myself. I know who God is, and I love God.
My God given talent is my ability to stick with training longer than anybody else.
My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
Lets not push it under the rug, or push it to the side because, no matter what, it’s going to keep coming up. You know, if you never deal with that dirt up under the carpet, it’s going to get larger and larger, and it’s going to keep coming up.
If you train hard, you’ll not only be hard, you’ll be hard to beat.
If I had to come up with something that just came to me, I think growing up in a small town, I want knowledge. I still think today, knowledge is one of the keys.
When I feel good about myself, things start happening for myself. When you look up, you go up.
I don’t read a lot of the sports, because I think people sometimes either build it up, or you have this guy that hates sports that is going to write bad about it, so I figure I’m not going to read it. Because I’m not going to let him put an idea into my head.
Growing up, I started developing confidence in what I felt. My parents helped me to believe in myself. I wasn’t the best looking guy, I wasn’t the best athlete in the world, but they made me feel good about myself.
God, my parents, my wife. I don’t have a lot of friends, because I’m always moving around. I don’t drink, so I don’t hang out in bars. But they’ve been very big in my life. Because they have helped to encourage me.
Football, that’s just athletics. But in the business world – doing everything – people are competing. So you need good work ethics, and I think it helped me to develop good work ethics, being in a small town.
Coming from a small town it was tough to dream big. When I grew up in a small town in Georgia, my biggest dream was one day to be able to go to Atlanta.
Believing that no one is better than the other. You know I grew up in the South. My senior year there was a very big racial tension.
Because my parents, growing up, they worked hard. Everyone in my family woke up early in the morning. I used to see my mother and my father go off to work, and come back and, no matter what, they had time for the kids.
All these older kids here, and I’m the only one from a town that’s so small, if everyone breathed at the same time, you’d run out of oxygen. Man, there is nothing there.
I’d usually read the Bible a lot. Read little short Bible stories. And today, whenever I give speeches, I bring up a few of those Bible stories, because those are inspirations to me.