I was raising a child full time, sharing the responsibility with his mom. He lived with me half the time, so I chose not to go away and make certain movies.
There were two movies that asked me to go to Australia or New Zealand for long periods of time. One was 'Lord of the Rings' and one was 'The Matrix.' But I was actively involved at that time raising my family, and I couldn't really take that time out.
My mom has always been a huge inspiration. She was a single mom raising two kids in New York. Now that is full-on all the time.
When I was growing up my mom was home. She wanted to go to work, but she waited. She was educated as a teacher. The minute my youngest sister went to school full-time, from first grade, mom went back to work. But she balanced her life. She chose teaching, which enabled her to leave at the same time we left, and come home pretty much the same time we came home. She knew how to balance.
It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.
Half the time, people will be abusing me on Twitter, and half the time, somebody will be praising me. So either it will go to my head, or I will take it to my heart. So better I stay away from it.
Depending on whom you ask, time is money, time is love, time is work, time is play, time is enjoying friends, time is raising children, and time is much more. Time is what you make of it.
I always say to people that working full time and being a mom is probably the hardest job, because as a mom you think about your child 24/7.
My partner, Nik, is a full-time dad and I am working on Phenomenal full time. Nik was in tech forever, but he decided to take some time to think about his next steps after we had our second child.
If I go to a restaurant, which I do often, I know what I want, and it's not on the menu half the time. Half the time, they have to adjust the menu or what they got in the back, and they'll make it for me.
When you get into this business you have to grow up quickly. But I wouldn't say I've lost any of my childhood, I've always been a mature child. My Mom says I've been like that since I was little kid. I make time for my friends and I make time for things that other kids do. This is a business and I knew what I was getting into. I make time for being a kid, but I also know when to put on my business hat and go for the business.
One of the things my mom used to do - I don't know why she chose me, but she chose me out of her six children to take to the African-American church that was in the town that we lived in Springfield, Missouri. And we would go to the church, and we would sit in the back row, and we would listen to all of the spirituals in the hymns.
The last time I saw my mom was in 1997. My mom started getting sick, and my mom finally passed away in 2002. My mom was my world. My mom was everything to me. We didn't have money. We didn't have a whole lot of materialistic things, but one thing I can truly say, that my mother loved me and all of her children unconditionally.
My mother told me Homer Ditto was not my father. Nope. Mom had had a fling with some other guy who was my dad. Some dude who didn't stick around too long who Mom was happy to get rid of. She chose Homer, and Homer chose me, so he lent me his name even though I didn't have his blood.
I don't go to conferences quite as much as I used to: having a child and movin away from the university leaves me with less time, but I've tried to balance things out - not just spending time with Linux all the time, but having a real job and a real life at the same time.
Art, like real estate, is half science, half gut. We go to a lot of art fairs. We have two full-time art experts who help me make all the decisions about how to build the corporate and personal collection and what we put in our developments. We don't let interior designers pick art for us.
For me, the greatest source of frustration was trying to work with a willful child when there was something else I wanted - say, to get the child to go to bed so I could have my own time. Just the promise of the time, and feeling that promise slip away, was enough to introduce a whole other element of stress into the encounter.