I gave up accounting. I went in for about six months writing ad copy. I was fired from that, and then another guy and I did a kind of poor man's Bob and Ray kind of syndicated radio show. Then I decided to stick it out and see what happened. I'd give it a year, a year became two years, and then two years became three years, and then along came the record album.
I was lucky enough to win the Davis Cup in my first year in 1999. I won my first slam at the U.S. Open in 2001 and became world No. 1 later that year. By the age of 20, I'd done it all.
I loved my time on 'The Mindy Project' so much. It was only supposed to be half a year. It was really only supposed to be one episode, and then it became three episodes, and then it became half a year, and then it became a year and a half, and then it became two years.
At the end. First start off and do your youth thing In Hollywood and then go to New York later. But it wound up being later, later than I thought it was going to be.
I decided to start a YouTube channel a while ago and it kind of failed because I stopped posting and forgot about it. So a few years later I decided I wanted to make one for real with a team behind me. So that's what I did and I love it!
The continent is incredibly exciting. When I first went there, it consumed me, and I instantly felt like I wanted to be engaged one way or the other, whether on a philanthropic level or business. I'm lucky to say today that I do both. In terms of African Wildlife Foundation, I started working with them roughly around 2009, on the ambassador level. Then I joined the board and was exposed to deeper issues that the Foundation was combating on the continent.
I went to SG Formula and became Formula Renault 2.0 Champion. I went then to ART in Formula 3 and became Champion. Then I stayed with the team in GP2 Asia Series, and again, I became Champion. Then the first year of GP2 was really great. I was P4 at the end of the season, which was a fantastic result.
These first few years, it's more trying to figure it out. What's going on in the NBA? Where do I fit in? Then my second year, I'm a player. 'Can he actually start?' I played pretty well my second year. My third year, now I gotta solidify myself. Now I'm here, and it's about winning for me.
I learned so much in the year after Flickr was acquired. People forget, but Flickr launched in February 2004. And a year later, the deal was done with Yahoo, and we closed it in March of 2005. It was really independent for a relatively short period of time.
I remember, my first season was 1999, and I must have crashed about 13 times in that first year. But then, in the second season, you crash about half as much and then, in the third year, even less again.
I had my first professional fight was in 2001 in Venezuela - it was also my first international trip away from Brazil. It was a great experience. Then in 2005, I went to Finland and won. The next year there was a tournament in Brazil with three fights in one night. I was the underdog and won all three fights.
I came to America at the age of 17 as an exchange student, and a year later, I was a student at Dartmouth. I would say that the rather weak foundation of my Christianity was effectively battered at Dartmouth. I've had mostly a secular career. But I became intellectually interested in Christianity again in my mid-30s.
I never dreamed I would be a Goodwill Ambassador, and for UNESCO. Perfect organization. It is apolitical and it's about education, science and culture. I mean that is what I live. That is what UNESCO is really about; it's all about bringing human beings together with one common goal, which is to move human kind forward.
At the start of first terms, presidents invariably have a measure of goodwill.
The key thing in my becoming a writer was going on a Arvon Foundation residential writing course. I took with me a really messy twenty thousand words of something that later became After You'd Gone, my first novel. My tutors were Barbara Trapido and Elspeth Barker.
With every song, all the elements have to work. First, the beat has to be great - you start there. You start with the music, and then the ideas follow. Then you start thinking of rhymes, and then you record it, and sometimes - this happens to me a lot - it doesn't come out as good as it did in my head when I first wrote it.