Oh, my granddad was ahead of his time. He was always in favor of education. My dad and mother were too, but Granddad was very aggressive in that. You know, as he used to say, “You’ve got to fill your head with new ideas so you can use them later to improve your own status and that of the neighborhood.”

I think he was a great philosopher. He had a wonderful theory that you live in the “now,” which I think is important. Along with living in the moment, you also have to assume the responsibility that goes along with it, and you don’t take your position lightly. But it also means that you get the full value of the moment that you are living, so you don’t look back on your life and say, “If only I hadn’t wasted time, if only I had done this.” You do the best you can. It was wonderful to be able to go home after a performance, and think, well it wasn’t maybe so good, but it was the best I could be at that time.

I thought often during my years in the White House of an admonition that we received in our small school in Plains, Georgia, from a beloved teacher, Miss Julia Coleman. She often said: "We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles."

And I think it had something to do with my grandmother and my mother being nurses, and my mother once said to me, “Once you see people bleed it’s hard to believe there’s much difference in race.

I had a teacher who was a great influence on me, when I was in boarding school at Loomis, Jim Wilson. He was my economics teacher and he was also my dorm head. I didn’t know what economics was before I took this course. I was really moved by the course. I was moved by him. That’s probably one of the reasons I chose the field of business.

When I went through school, I was in a hurry. I was an economics major as an undergraduate, and I was a finance major in graduate school. I was in a hurry to succeed when I got out in the business world. I’m sorry I didn’t take more courses in the humanities and in history and in the arts.

And that’s what’s given us the ability to say no. It’s one of the most important things at the end of the day, being able to say no to an investment. Even if you’ve done a lot of work, work will never hurt you.