When I go talk to people, and just to switch things up, I don’t just say I’m a hurdler, I say: “I overcome obstacles for a living.”

Own the fact that you’re many things in life, don’t just be an athlete, don’t just be an entrepreneur, don’t just be a coach, an ally, a brother, employer, and so on.

You are more than your elevator pitch […] “Hi I’m X, I’m a man or woman of many things. and let’s chat.” That sparks curiosity.

I'm never like, "You have to know me," no, it's your work that has to do the language to talk, not you as a person.

It was me they wanted to work with, not the camera, not the techniques, not the rational part. No, the emotional part.

"Til the end of the world" was playing, Bono was walking on the stage, and suddenly he made a move to me. . . . He became closer and closer and suddenly he pulled me—and I'm a big guy and he's short—up stage. Suddenly in front of 40,000 people, I was there, like, what the hell.

So I put on my lens, I put in a certain film, and I look through my lens and I still remember the moment I looked through the lens and said, "This is my life. This is what I want to do; this is it."

Nowadays you buy a digital camera and you say, "Oh, I'm a photographer." That's not the way it works. The way it works is becoming a photographer, it's your own skills, not the camera, because everybody can learn the manual.

Maybe it’s time for a Berlin Manifesto: How to use 10% of our creativity to re-design the world in a better way?

If you don’t have hope, if you don’t have any kind of positive alternative, I think you come up with something which is sort of ‘OK, I give up. The world is like this.’

¿Qué estarías haciendo ahorita si no tuvieras miedo?

A pesar de que somos herederos de un gran tesoro natural, también somos los grandes destructores de este tesoro.

And if you end the day not doing anything except caring about yourself, that's one more day lost to making this a great community.

Stay engaged. Don't become so focused on what your specific career is that you forget that there's a community you live in.

I want to see us move past the politics of fear, which is driving so much of what's happening in Charlotte, in North Carolina, and across this country.

It was important, even if we didn't win, that a view point be expressed that reflected a lot of North Carolina.

I saw a relationship between what I did for my full-time job and I did as a contribution to the community. This need to take all of the diversity out there, and all of the opinions out there, and as a mayor try to assemble and hear everybody and then see if we can craft a creative solution.

The greatest satisfaction for me is when I visit the project after it's been designed and I can walk into that space and just look around to see if what they told me way back in the beginning is how they're actually using the space.

I design buildings for people

It's going to be tougher fighting a battle that really dwells in people's hearts.

They had a responsibility to do well adn then to achieve and to reach out to make the promise real for others who might be less fortunate.

You just can't sit back and be satisfied in your own achievement, the promise the promise the promise has to be made real for a whole lot of [people] who had not be inspired maybe by their life circumstances.

If there was a theme running through my childhood it was always that the promise of America was going to be made real for you.

its all about exploring the unknown

The goal of our design studio is to create innovation and to break the barriers within companies.