In the spring of 1984, I was crushed not to make my Little League All-Star team. I will not go into too much detail, but imagine all your best friends were invited to a one-month party, and you weren't. You could watch it from afar but never get past the fence line. It was an early and abrupt welcome to adolescent loneliness.

I treaded water academically and spent much of my summertime as a camp counselor. It seemed a fun thing to do for a person in no way prepared to commit to a career path.

I saw the first 'House Party' - not the other 10. I love pop culture references. If you saw 'Moneyball', watch it again, looking for all the Clash posters.

In the mid-1980s, there was a grassroots desire for American culture. Maybe it was not a definite harbinger to what was to come in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it certainly gave a heads up to the global merging of the retail culture.

Skills-building opportunities should be extended to people outside of the mainstream talent pool. That might include at-risk youth, veterans returning to the workforce, or immigrants struggling to make a life for themselves in a foreign culture. The process for creating wealth must begin with creating opportunity for all.

The United States is at a critical juncture in time. Our government is riddled with historic debt, and the limited resources of philanthropic and non-profit efforts cannot meet the scale of social challenges we face with necessary force.

In a way, I felt like I arrived before I was making money at it, because I'd established that I just wanted to act.

The thing I'm most proud of is that I've raised a lot of money for certain charities - breast cancer and the Caldecott Foundation and the NSPCC. But as far as my self-esteem is concerned, doing 'The Graduate' for 11 months was fantastic.