I like high school and college writing textbooks and find them very helpful. Whenever I'm stuck and seem to have no ideas, I open one up and turn to the back. There I'll find questions like, "Have you had any experiences with an alcoholic or a sailor?"
At 12, I was, like, 6-2. At 13, I was, like, 6-5 or 6-6. I had always stuck out as a bit of a freak, so athletics gave me a chance to make friends and, I guess, find my 'cool' vibe, if there's such a thing when you're in high school.
Everybody has to find it whatever helps. Religion is very helpful for people. A good friend is very helpful. A priest is very helpful. A rabbi is very helpful. You just have to find it. But when you get depressed or when you face a crisis, don't feel you have to do it alone.
When I went to high school in Australia, I was exposed to textbooks that outlined evolutionary ideas - such as ape-like creatures turning into people. I recognized the conflict between evolutionary ideas and a literal reading of the book of Genesis.
Some people just seem like they are up to no good. Like, in high school, I was a good student and got straight As. It was very strict, and you couldn't do well there unless you studied very hard, but every time there was any trouble, I was the first person they would be talking to.
I remember the mentoring experiences of some teachers that I had, like a second term home room teacher in public school that really was very helpful to me.
I'm about the only person in my family that's made it to 24 without being married. That's the way it works where I'm from. Most people, if you find someone to marry in high school, you do that, and if you don't find that, then you find someone in college.
Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school ... not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and [in] all my Earth science books when I was a student - I had to give the wrong answer to get an A.
If I'm doing something I do like to take it to the limit. I've got a high ceiling. A wide threshold for seeing what those boundaries are for myself. I'm very resilient inside. I find things that I like and do and boy, I do like to stick to them. I'm not necessarily a guy who gets addicted to more of certain things, but if I find something I like to do, I like to stick to it.
I knew I wanted to go to college and I wanted to study it acting, so I just looked for the best school that I could get into. Luckily, I had very supportive parents. I went to a conservatory that is basically drama school. You take one English class and one history class for four years but you don't take any other science or anything like that. It's strictly, from 7am until night, all acting. It's a lot. Some people find it too much, but for me I was preparing for a career and I never really looked back.
I've learned that I don't want to be as open or public about relationships anymore. In my first relationship, I thought I could hold on to the normalcy of just being like "Yeah, we're dating," just like if it were high school and I was telling my friends. But in high school, there aren't articles written everywhere when you break up and you don't have everyone in the school coming up to you and asking what happened or sharing their opinion with you. It didn't feel like ours anymore, it felt like everybody else's.
I was, throughout school, in the theater program. Through elementary school, junior high, high school, and then J.J. Abrams, my closest friend in the world, we were living together. He was writing, and I was trying writing; I wasnt getting paid for it like he was, but I always had the acting bug.
I acted out a lot. I was very nerdy. I was very isolated, which I made up for by kind of talking and trying to entertain people and get them to like me, so I did theatre and improv in high school and college, but always as a hobby.
I had never dreamed about the NBA like some guys did. I was a non-scholarship player at an NAIA college. I played on the Boys and Girls Club team in my freshman and sophomore years of high school before I made the high school team. I was our backup center in college.
What you can't teach someone is how to find the door. You can't give someone a door to another universe. You can tell them that the door exists, and if they're stuck in the hallway you can be like, "You're stuck in the hallway," but you can't open the door for them.
I like to engage the public because when I was in high school, I had all these questions about anti-matter, higher dimensions and time travel. Every time I went to the library, every time I asked people these questions, I would get some strange looks. Nobody could answer any of these questions.
People go to college to find who they are as a person and find what they want to do in life, and I kind of already know that so it would be like I'd be taking a step back or something.