Which teacher, parent, coach or friend most made you who you are, and what did you learn from them?

I had some amazing teachers and coaches. I had a history teacher in the eleventh grade in American history named Norman Schmitt who was wonderful. He just made American history burst forth, and I was entranced by it. I always liked to study and get good grades, but there were always kids smarter. I might be in the top — oh, I don’t know — six percent of my class, but that meant there were five percent that were smarter, and indeed they were. I also had an amazing track coach, ironically named Jack Armstrong, very much like an all-American boy, and indeed, he was. When we ran competitively, we were second in the country in the AAU junior championships. His teams — as a testament to him, rather than any of the individuals like myself — when I graduated from high school, until that time, he had been 107 and 2 as a record in dual meets, which meant that he went through many different generations of kids, and the kids always mysteriously ended up being enormously capable, which was a testament to him. He would have all kinds of wonderful ways of motivating people. We used to train in the winter as well as the summer. We trained outdoors in the freezing cold, ran sprints and middle distances on frozen parking lots, which is a real challenge as the wind’s whipping and you’re wondering if your legs are going to go out from under you. No matter how miserable you felt, he would be there smiling, and as you rounded the location where he was, he’d say, “You’ve got to make some deposits on training day to make some withdrawals on meet day,” and he was very cheerful because, after a while, you were wondering why were you going through this level of agony. So I realized what I was doing was making these horrible deposits of sort of bashing myself physically, so when it was time to actually compete, it was effortless. So I’ve learned many lessons from great inspirational people. But that seemed totally practical to me, unfortunately, and I hated every minute of it, but I liked the winning when we had meets. That was just an example. But the camaraderie on the team was fantastic.

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.

He was a little guy who was a great football player at Georgia Tech, and he just was indefatigable. He just would never, ever say die. He absolutely proved to me that persistence was a very big part of making it in life. I never forgot that lesson.