| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | The first day of kindergarten. I can remember exactly what I wore on that day, and I recall how excited and fearless I was about the experience of going to school. Despite being the first classroom I ever set foot in, I can remember my kindergarten class in such vivid detail. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | My sister. While we had the same sibling rivalries as any family, we were always good friends and shared the same values and worldview. While we now live in different parts of the country and only get to see one another around holidays, we still share the same sense of humor and enjoy reminiscing about our shared experiences growing up. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I admire personal responsibility and kindness perhaps more than any other set of qualities. People who have these traits easily earn my respect and trust because I feel they're necessary ingredients to being a model citizen. None of us is perfect, but being willing to own one's mistakes and shortcomings, while also being courteous towards one's fellow creatures, is a winning combination in my mind. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | When I was a teenager, my family and I went camping in Yellowstone one summer. We had been hearing about sightings of grizzly bears in the area, and so on some unconscious level, we probably had bears on our minds for most of that first day when we arrived. Late that night after we had all gone to sleep in our tent trailer, my mom woke up after hearing a bear right outside. She started screaming to try to scare it away, and so the rest of us, now waking up, started screaming and yelling as well. This went on for about ten panicked seconds before we quieted down and realized that the noise my mom heard was just the sound of the heater sputtering out. To this day we still laugh about the absurdity of the situation and how silly we all must have looked in our sleeping bags as we hollered at the top of our lungs. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | I would make it a point to be on the road for most of the year, since I get such enjoyment out of travel. For me, the great satisfaction comes not from being pampered at exotic resorts, but in visiting far off corners of the world that are so utterly removed from my everyday sense of the world. To this end, I would travel to remote places like the Canadian arctic, the Ethiopian highlands, and islands of the South Pacific. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | In the spirit of teaching one to fish rather than giving one a fish, I would want to inculcate an entrepreneurial instinct in my children. Rather than give them an allowance, I would give them ideas, inspiration, and resources to help them find ways to earn money on their own and to become confident in their ability to do so. The confidence and self-sufficiency that this would instill in them would do more to make their lives easier than any monetary gift I could give. |
