The key to power, then, is the ability to judge who is best able to further your interests in all situations. Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.

Understand: people will constantly attack you in life. One of their main weapons will be to instill in you doubts about yourself – your worth, your abilities, your potential. They will often disguise this as their objective opinion, but invariably it has a political purpose – they want to keep you down.

Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter

I've always been intrigued by fighter pilots and strategy because it occurs in like, milliseconds, you know.

A lot of people in college go astray because they choose something that doesn't really, really connect to them. And if it doesn't connect to you, you're not able to put in that 10,000 hours that people talk about. You don't have the focus. And you start off in life on the wrong foot and you never get back.

I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.

I believe that everything happens for a reason, and what seems bad at first might in fact be something of a blessing.