I wasn't straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals.
Acting happened to me. If I had pursued it, I think it would have been like someone going to a bar, desperately looking for love and not finding anyone.
I wasn't predicted to be anything. I just followed an inner spirit, and it put me in the right place and the right time. I didn't want to be the mayor of Atlanta. I didn't want to run for Congress. I didn't want to work for Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to work close to him and be a writer and write about the movement.
I never said to myself, 'Get to the NBA, be an All-Star, make a $100 million contract.'
Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.
I can't say that I grew up saying, 'Someday I want to be vice president of the Lakers,' because that's not how it happened. I work for our family business, and that happens to be the Lakers.
As far as the path of [Bill] Goldberg and all his ultimate success, I don't think any of that was planned. It was all organic. All of it was so different.
The older I get, the happier I am with the way my career has gone. Although, in many ways, it's been through no design of my own.
The first video I shot for "A Zip and a Double Cup"â€"I have two versions, a remix video and a the originalâ€"because I wasn’t really trying to do anything. I just came home and got kind of high and shot a video in the parking lot. I just shot the video how I wanted to do it and posted it online and the next day it went crazy.
I have made a career of bumbling around places, stumbling on landmarks and generally being quite haphazard and shambolic about the way I go about things.
It never occurred to me that I'd have a dance company.
I'm left handed and I'm playing a right handed kit... That's why everyone thought, 'Wow, he's a genius,' but all I was doing was trying to play backwards... It's one of those mad accidents, you can't learn it.
Our ultimate goal is to stay in business. We are not here with a specific plan. That's kind of how our entire career has evolved. We will figure things out as we go along.
Let Me Love You' is one of my favorite records from my catalogue. It's one of those songs that just happened magically.
Films were never in my budget. Didn't occur to me till much later. I hoped for a long, good life, which I've had and I'm having as an actor. I didn't expect the rest.
We need to have a better balance between a deliberate strategy and staying open. Because in the end, most of us end up being successful in a career that we never imagined we would be in at the beginning.
We never knew we'd have kids playing pro football or going to Super Bowls. That wasn't ever a part of our plan in raising kids, so we really feel blessed.
Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.
The truth is I've just never had any kind of plan at all for my career, which is probably not a very flattering thing to admit. I don't know that I'd ever planned to be in this situation. I'm still just an idiot, really really stupid. It's not like I'm now a genius because this has happened. I just got hugely lucky.
I think 'Lost' was really a pioneer in the use of the kind of connection between a television show and the Internet, and the Internet really gave fans an opportunity to create a community around the show. That was something that wasn't really planned; it just sort of grew up in the wake of the show.
I didn't intend to make one solo record, much less two. It's really a matter of seeing how it goes.
Sometimes there are really happy mistakes.
My musical career was an accident.
I played a lot of sports and it's the plays in basketball that weren't worked out that are the ones that are just fantastic that you remember. We don't know the power that's within our own bodies.
I never planned my career. I never planned to be president of Harvard. People would have thought I was crazy, probably, at the age of 8 or 10 or 20, if I had said that. So what I would say to people planning their careers is to be ready to improvise. Be ready to follow up on opportunities as they unfold.
