Although we can never fully repay our veterans, on Veterans Day we thank our veterans for their selflessness and commit to do what we can to improve the quality of life for our veterans and military families in communities across America.
I have always said I want to work harder so I can develop, learn, grow, and improve. I love to play football, and when I come on the pitch, I want to do my best to help the team. It's up to the coach the position I play.
I am here just to learn, to improve, to help my team improve.
I want to improve and learn and get better. To do that, I have to keep putting in good performances and help my team-mates around me.
There are always things to improve on. I want to improve on my defense, and you can never be a perfect hitter. I want to focus on just playing more and being able to improve on all parts of my game.
I never want to be satisfied. I never want to be like, 'OK, this is good enough.' I always want to get to the next level and help the team improve.
To honor our national promise to our veterans, we must continue to improve services for our men and women in uniform today and provide long overdue benefits for the veterans and military retirees who have already served.
I don't want a team that escapes from reality and escapes from the truth. I don't want people who are always escaping, who always have a story and are always conniving. An ostrich tries to escape from the truth. Isn't an ostrich the thing that puts its head in the sand? But guess what's sticking out when he does it? It's ass, that's what. I don't want a team like that......Because when you have a team like that and trouble comes, that team will not face the trouble.
I do engage veterans. I meet with the veterans' service organizations monthly. It's a direct, no-holds-barred discussion. I travel to their conventions, where I speak to the veterans membership. I do travel. I've been to all 50 states. When I do, I engage veterans locally. So I get direct feedback from those veterans.
I want people to take the initiative to find veterans that need help, veterans that are suffering and in need of assistance reintegrating from combat back into society, into normal family lives and jobs. We need to take a real boots on the ground approach to helping veterans in need.
I'm never really just satisfied with where I'm at. I always just want to get better, improve more, learn as much as I can because obviously I have a lot to learn and a lot to get better at so it's all about improvement to me.
The distance between number one and number two is always a constant. If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you. That is a big lesson. I cannot just expect the organization to improve if I don't improve myself and lift the organization, because that distance is a constant.
Veterans have the skills employers want - discipline, motivation, leadership, and the ability to work on a team. They have made the U.S. military the most effective and respected in the world.
I want to improve as a player, but it's all about the team.
The issue of torture, connected to American soldiers, is not somewhere most people want to linger. We may not want to confront this issue so much in the U.S. because of how we want to think about our veterans. There's the sense that we want to think of our veterans as - if they're damaged, damaged by something glamorous, like a firefight.
The University of Southern California has a wonderful social work department, and I was thrilled to find out that they have a whole veterans' initiative program there. They approached me, and I set up a scholarship that would go to a military-oriented person to learn techniques and skills to better help veterans.