I often repeat to them something that — not my mentor, but a senior scientist at the NIH — said to me once. We were having lunch together. I was despondent, despondent because nothing had worked. I had been there a year. And this guy said to me, “Look,” he said, “do you know the difference, Bob, between an average scientist and a world class scientist?” I said no. He said, “Here’s what it is.” He said, “For the average scientist, maybe one percent of their experiments work. But for the world class guy, the world beater, it could be as high as one-and-a-half or two percent.” And then that really stuck with me because it’s really true.

I had lots of teachers encourage me. And I still know some of them, my high school teachers. But one of them encouraged me. She said, “Well, what do you want to do?” I said, “I want to be a doctor.” And she asked me where I wanted to go to school, and so I named all the Florida public universities which seemed within reach, financially. And she said, “Well, maybe you ought to apply to Duke, and maybe you’ll get a scholarship.” And I did both those things. I applied and got a scholarship.

It goes back to that music teacher when I was 12 years old. After the third lesson, I was singing some popular country song of the day. I forget the name. I think it was a Hank Williams, no, it was too early for Hank Williams, I guess. Whatever the song was, I didn’t sing it like the artist had sung it on the radio. And she said, “You’re a song stylist.” She said, “Always do it your way.” And from the age of 12, I didn’t forget that.

And my sister, whose name is Ruth Stapleton, was a famous evangelist. She wrote four or five books, and she would give lectures to 50,000 people at a time. She and I had a long walk in the woods on my farm, and she said, “Jimmy, quite often, when you have a blow to your pride and a horrible defeat, you can either give up, or you can look on it as a way that God opens to you to do different and even better things.”

Being happy is not a constant. But I am very happy when I am spending time with my family and my friends, and going on hikes with my dogs.

My mum, because I have seen how she has struggled and how she wants to continue to grow.

I realized that the biggest obstacle was my mind. It was the biggest obstacle, and if I could get out of the way of myself, I would grow. So every time I had that attitude, I changed it, and I’d say, “You can. Today you can, and take it one day at a time, and today, I’m going to get up and I’m not going to think about the other six days of this week. I’m going to get up right now, and I’m going to go to the gym, and I’m going to learn about my boxing, and I’m going to be in the moment.” You know, in anything, you hit a wall, and then you have to break through it, and I just had to get out of my own way.