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All of them have one thing in common. A thirst for learning. All of them. I wrote a lot about them. One of them was named Chouchani, crazy characteristics, morally character. I met him in France. And, like him in France, I went to four children's homes, orphanages. And again, I studied with him for 2 years. Then one man here, Saul Lieberman, a great, great Talmudic scholar. One of the greatest, 17 years. So those who help me think and try to give my soul a certain form, and a certain direction, they really were my heroes.

Some of them are totally unknown. Sometime it was a beggar in Barcelona who simply, I remember, came up to me, asked for money that I didn't have. I was very poor and I showed him, I didn't understand Spanish. I just opened my pockets and showed him my pockets are empty. And he smiled and he said to me, thank you. And I learned something from that. You always have something to give if you possess nothing. If you are who you are. If you don't lie.

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I've been so fortunate to be able to work with so many people, particularly over the last seven years. I think some of the front-line heroes, like this amazing woman, Mama Carol in South Africa, who we met who takes care of 300 young orphans out of her two-bedroom house, and just how she's been creative enough to find a way to do that. And the love she gives to those young people is just amazing. So, people like that who have just committed their whole lives to others and driving change constantly inspire me.

I have a wonderful board member named Jane Tewson, who started Comic Relief in the U.K. Her whole passion in life is, "How do we listen, learn from people from the front lines?" "And how do we never, ever accept the unacceptable?" She's gone on to start Time Back, Pilot Light -- a number of initiatives that are catalyzing change in the world.

Certainly, I've had the great gift to work with The Elders. People like Nelson Mandela, who always consistently focus on what's right for humanity, no matter what it is. That's his sole modus operandi. You have someone like Archbishop Tutu, who all he cares about is lifting that message of one common humanity. You have Ela Bhatt, who has generated millions of jobs for people -- women in India; or Mary Robinson, I think from a female perspective, is one of the most incredible role models that I've ever met. She just committed the last three weeks of her life to be in North and South Korea, and to be in the Ivory Coast -- constantly focusing on how they can drive change in the world. And Richard, who I've had the privilege of working with now for 12 years -- his sincerity and his constant commitment to doing what's right. Again, he goes back to the same kind of modus operandi as Jane of never accepting the unacceptable; if you see something, you can't not do something about it.

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In music? I could list a lot of inspirations. I'll list an obscure one first, so that people might be aware of him. There's a composer who lived in Mexico City named Conlon Nancarrow, and he was really interested in the timing of music, and he was interested in really exotic timings using mathematical principles. And at the time he was working, which was in the mid 20th century, computers weren't yet able to make music so he couldn't use computers. So what he did is he hand-punched paper rolls for player pianos. He had this sort of bunker-like space in Mexico City where he'd play these piano rolls with these extraordinary rhythms and these amazing sort of effects and amazing emotions. And I was just totally enthralled with the guy. I used to hitchhike down to see him from when I was really quite young and he was huge for me.

And there's so many others. Of those who are not alive, I could mention – oh, I don't know, a lot of the usuals. I guess in the Western tradition I always liked William Byrd and then Bach and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and Scriabin was a big one for me. Really, really into Scriabin and Stravinsky and so many others. Bartok. I had the very good fortune to work with a lot of the living composers, and I'd mention Terry Riley and Philip Glass and Steve Reich and Ornette Coleman and many others. I was really very lucky to be able to work with a lot of people.

I've known a lot of people in the rock 'n' roll world and I've played a little bit as a sideman for rock acts once in a while. I've known Peter Gabriel and the guys from The Grateful Dead and whatnot, and it wasn't ever my thing really. I'm a little more into jazz, funk, blues – really going into the original black tradition in America. I also like the more intellectual jazz or sort of fancy piano playing and big band music.

Something about rock was kind of always sort of in the middle, and not quite in any place. One of the things that haunts me is that it's almost like the weather. There was this competency and melody that sort of blew over rock 'n' roll at a certain point in the '60s and '70s where you have the songbooks particularly from the Beatles but also from Joni Mitchell and Dylan, Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, so many. And just this amazing sense of melody that came up which was really a thing of its own. If you really look at the songbook part of it, it's not rock 'n' roll exactly. Those are melodies that are almost more like folk melodies, and they can be performed as rock or not. And I've always been interested in where that came from, because then it went away, and it's really hard for people to write good original melodies now. They can once in a while, but you hear it very rarely and I'm always interested in exactly what was going on with that.

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So there's been a series of people that have really been important to me, intellectually. They've been kind of mentors to me. The first was Marvin Minsky. Claude Shannon, the guy that invented the bit. Richard Feynman – very important to me. Actually, Alan Kay, has been very important to me as a role model. I remember I first met Alan Kay when he gave to give a lecture at MIT to the distinguished lecturer series. And he showed up in a tee-shirt and sneakers. And I thought, wow, that's cool. That's the kind of distinguished lecturer I want to be. And he talked about this crazy idea he had of making a computer that was only this big. And he talked about how the way to predict the future was to invent it, he said. I thought, wow. That's what I wanna do.

And so I didn't really understand what Alan did in those days. But I kind of watched him and I would say, he was very important because he wasn't really a professor. I'd never seen somebody who was doing stuff that was that interesting that wasn't a professor. And I realized after a while he just kind of invented it himself. He invented what he was. And so we've become great friends since then. Actually, his office is just right over there. And so he's one of the people that really shaped me.

Marvin Minsky is certainly another person that really shaped me. I remember the first time I walked into Marvin's office, and actually saw him in his office. And he wadded up a piece of paper, and threw it at the trash can. And it went way over the trash can. And he looked confused. And he said, "Oh, it's one-half MG squared." But Marvin, probably more than anybody else, taught me how to think. Taught me that really, all the received wisdom needs to be questioned, and that science has been a process of throwing away the old ideas. So he taught me disrespect for all the ideas that I was taught. That everything can be taken apart. Everything should be questioned.

And then Richard Feynman actually taught me a lot of details about how to do that. Because Richard would always like to say, "What's the experiment? How do we find this?" He didn't want to read it from the textbook. He wanted something that he could actually do.

Richard Feynman used to work at Thinking Machines. He used to come out there for summers. And he and I used to eat spaghetti together because it was the only thing we could cook. So I would go over to his apartment. We'd get a bunch of spaghetti. And he would cook the sauce, and I would cook the spaghetti. But I noticed that when you break a spaghetti stick, it actually doesn't break in half. It breaks into three pieces. You can try this yourself. Now, why does that happen? Why doesn't it break in half?

So I asked Richard, "Why doesn't – what's the physics of this?" He's like, hm. And he'd sit down, and try to make a calculation. And he tries breaking some spaghetti. And he says, well, maybe it's because of this. And then we tried breaking spaghetti under water to test out that theory. And then we tried to break the spaghetti, holding it different distances, and see at what distance it really does three pieces. And we tried breaking two pieces of spaghetti.

At the end of it, we had broken spaghetti all over the place. We never did figure out why spaghetti breaks into three pieces. But it was experiment, experiment. It was experiment, model, experiment. And that way of finding things out by looking at what they actually do, that was, I think, something that shaped me. Interestingly enough, I'm now – because I've told this story, and people have heard about this story – I've received many mathematical theories from scientists all over the world as to why does spaghetti break into three pieces. And I do believe, now, I kind of understand it -- finally. But Dick Feynman and I never understood.

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The heroes in my life that influenced me are: My father. My father got up and went to work every day. My father loved me – loves me. He's alive. My father took care of his family. When I first went into the ministry and I got up to preach for the first time, there was one person more nervous than me. It was my father. My hero. My father introduced to me to what it is to be a black man in America. My father taught me about love of community. He would say to me, "If an African American," a negro at that time, "opens a store in the community, you make sure that you go and spend some money there. You might not like the service. You might not like the products, but at least go."

When I was growing up, my father was the one that said, "You hear that name?" The name was Patrice Lumumba. He said, "Remember that name." My father was the one, and his brothers, who told me about Jomo Kenyatta, and kept these names coming before me. So my father. Without question, Benjamin Elijah Mays, who was the president of Morehouse College. He was a man of intense integrity, a man of great brilliance and genius, a man of courage. When I was 12, 13, I would go to hear him speak. My mother would take me to a luncheon that she and some of her friends attended regularly, about once a year. And he was a speaker on at least three occasions, and I was mesmerized by his oratory. He was brilliant, and as a 12-year-old you could see the brilliance. So by the time I really started listening to Martin Luther King, Jr., I had already heard his college president.

And so I eventually went to Morehouse College. His book Born to Rebel, I helped to do research. I was a student there. He had retired as president at Morehouse. He said, "Calvin, I want you to go out and see if the churches of Atlanta are still segregated." I didn't realize how much courage that took to go to church. They were in fact still segregated. We were stopped by the police on several occasions, a fraternity brother and myself. But this man inspired a generation of men and women to dedicate their lives to educating young black men. Now, Mary McLeod Bethune did that and Mordecai Johnson, who happened to have been a Morehouse man, did that.

You could name some others, John Davis down at Virginia State, but the epitome of this was Mays. And I will never be able to break free of that influence. I mean, What I do now – I'm pastor of a very large, very old congregation. I'm president of a college of 4,500 students, graduate programs. I travel the country speaking on various topics. I'm engaged in ministry 24/7. And that comes out of an appreciation for the hard work of my father and the love for the integrity of a man like Benjamin Mays.

Samuel Dewitt Proctor. Well, first there was Dean Lawrence Jones – Lawrence Neale Jones. He was the dean of the Union Theological Seminary in New York when I arrived. Lawrence Jones was a guy who knew how to love you. When I walked onto the campus at first, he saw me walking. He said, "Buttsie, come here," and he gave me this bear hug. He was a big guy. He hugged me close and he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Dean, I don't know. I'm here at seminary. I'm not sure." He said, "Go to Abyssinia. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. just died. They've got a new man over there named Samuel Proctor. He's looking for a fellow who has no experience whatsoever." I said, "That's me."

The dean loved my family. And he was a scholar, so the first paper I ever wrote for him after being in his class, there was red ink all over it. Matter of fact, there was more red ink than there was mine. He said, "You baited me and then faltered." So basically he took me to task for trying to slide by. I never lost that. I never forgot that. But he was always, "Buttsie, how's Pat?" That's my wife. "How are the kids?" One child I had with me, and then the others were born. I preached his funeral. Man. Great guy, loved the church. He taught me what it meant to be a minister. He said, "In the 21st Century" -- far thinking, future -- "a minister's gonna have to be dually competent. It won't just be enough to know the Bible and preach. You'll have to know law. You'll have to know finance. You'll have to know development. You'll have to know something else." By God, he was right.

Testimonial:

Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor.  I read that book when I was in elementary school and it was kind of then, when I was in elementary school, there weren’t very many women doctors. I didn't even know one. And to read a book that a woman could be a doctor was really kind of interesting to me. I guess maybe that planted a seed, and I thought she must be something really exceptional to do that. So that was inspiring to me. My mother and father both inspired me because they were very hard working people. They had lived through the depression, and they had worked very hard to give their kids a college education - so all three of us were able to graduate from college. And so their ability to have a goal and to work hard to achieve that goal was inspiring.

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Oh, I think definitely Paul Rand. He's someone who I met when he was 81 who influenced my ideas about design. He's a very playful man. He lived a long time. I liked how I realized if you live a long time, it's really good. I was at his studio and he received this letter in the mail and he said, Look at this letter. I said what is it? He says Dear Mr. Rand, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I love your design of the CBS logo. And he said, I didn't design that, I designed the ABC logo, but you know when you live as long as me they think you design everything. So I love that.

I loved Ikko Tanaka, who was the Japanese Paul Rand. Contemporary who loved his staff as a family. He'd make lunch for them. He would treat them all as his family, no levels, no master kind of relationship. I adored that.

Technology space, of course, Nicholas Negroponte, the first person to synthesize design and technology. One of my favorite Nicholas moments is when he was at the new media lab extension and he was saying, You know, John, most architects, think in plans, two-dimensional space plans. He said that you walk into any of these three-story bays, every diagonal in three dimensions is perfectly thought out. No technologist would say anything like that. That's a real designer. Lastly, Richard Saul Wurman, the enigma, the person that carries all the knowledge in his head and all of the emotion in his tears. Wonderful, interesting person.

I find myself thinking a lot about Gandhi and Mother Teresa. I think they’re both leaders that really employed their own morality and passion and mobilized a lot of people towards lofty goals, and set such great examples.

I also recently read a biography about Eleanor Roosevelt. One thing that I think these three remarkable individuals had in common was their outspokenness– the value that they placed on speaking the truth. I also noticed that the three of them took time to themselves everyday whether it was through prayer in the case of Mother Theresa, meditative silences for Gandhi or brisk solitary walks in the case of Eleanor Roosevelt.

And I can only hope that someday that can translate into my being able to emulate at least certain aspects of their amazing lives. They’re really inspirational people.