Bobby Bones

I've built a career on the survival skill I honed early on: being a smart aleck who is good with a fast comeback.

For me, success isn't even about money. It's about getting to do what you love and supporting yourself. Everything that comes after that is bonus, unless your only goal is to be rich. If that's your goal, you're going to find out that once you have a little bit, you want a lot. Then once you have a lot, you want a lot more.

I think my career has been instances of me trying to figure out ways to get around doing it the right way because I don't think I have the tools to do it the right way. There's a talent to that.

At 13, I volunteered at the radio station. My first job was cleaning up when I was 17, and before I really started, they fired people for stealing station equipment, and I was on the air.

We can all pick a goal and find a reason to do it. Then some of us can actually do all the little things over and over again. That's definitely a harder step. Doing it again? That's where it gets to be a beast, when you have to repeat. It's the hardest part of it all.

That's what the grind is, doing all the little things knowing that something may not come out of it. It probably won't. But the goal is to get a shot at it.

I'm not a guy who looks for signs in the universe to tell him things. I believe that if you search hard enough for the answer you already know, you will find it.

I felt like it was the space that I could be the most authentic of anywhere because of how I grew up. Even though some of the songs and some of the texture wasn't what I like, I felt like country music was more authentic, in general, than anywhere else.

My grandmother adopted me for a while, and I was bouncing around a bit. I was always helped by the PTA and church groups with food and Christmas presents. It's a hard cycle to break, because when you don't have the resources, it's almost impossible.

My mom got pregnant when she was 15. She dropped out of high school. She died in her forties, but before she died, she went back and finished high school.

There are tons of talented people, and they might not even be the most talented, but they're the ones who were so resilient and learned in loss that it was winning by losing.

Charlamagne Tha God on 'The Breakfast Club' is, in my opinion, the best personality on the radio right now. We talk weekly. We couldn't be any different format wise, but we have a very similar background and approach.