My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

For me, making architecture is the same as thinking. For more than thirty years, I have been making architecture by going back and forth between ideals and reality, between the fictive and the substantive. My hope has been and continues to be, not only to solve realistic problems, but also to pursue the ideal by overlaying speculative imaginings.

Running CiRA with some 250 staff, I have come to spend less time discussing their data with my colleagues and students, and have been absorbed by my duties as the "chief executive officer" of CiRA, including devising strategies to advance both basic and applied research and to obtain sufficient funding. Anxious about the lack of financial resources for the future to allow us to continue hiring research support staffers, I even ran the full Kyoto Marathon in 2012 to raise online donations from the public. It was hard but helped us raise more than 10 million yen.

I decided that my attention would be in the dining room. I haven’t cooked in 28 years at Chez Panisse. ... I didn’t intend to be out of the kitchen. ... Now I’m in a different world and I contribute to the collaboration of the kitchen and I’m always working with a group of colleagues who inspire me, but I really miss being actually in the solving of the performance, that effort to really come up with dishes that are delicious and right.

The task of finally making a decision to hang up my racquet felt a lot more difficult than winning seven matches in a row in the Australian heat. It took me several agonizing months to finally come to the decision that my chronic injuries will never again let me be the tennis player that I can be. Walking away from the sport, effective immediately, is the right decision for me and my family.

As hard as it's been to come to this decision, I am at peace with it. I have no regrets. I was not supposed to be here in the first place, remember? Not many people believed in my talent and my abilities, yet I found a way to persevere, to prove them (and sometimes myself!) wrong.