The single most powerful element of youth is our inability to know what's impossible.

Each of the bracelets I wear is from a long trip I've taken. One is from Nicaragua. One is from Nepal. One is from Guatemala. One is from Laos. They don't come off. I walk into a lot of very high-level boardrooms now, and I present to distinguished conferences, but these bracelets remind me of the places I've been and the people I've met.

My journey began with a single pencil. While traveling through India in 2006, I asked a boy begging on the streets, 'If you could have anything in the world, what would you want?' and he answered me with two words: 'A pencil.' Luckily, I had one in my pocket, and in the second it took me to give it to him, a defining dream was born.

The most abundant resources that we possess amongst the 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States are passion and knowledge, yet our most scarce resource is collaboration.

I'd buy joke books and try doing them at school; I always had jokes. That would be my go-to thing at parties: I'd be able to get through them if I just told enough jokes. Otherwise, I wouldn't end up talking to anybody.

I hope to focus on what I'm passionate about because I think I'd do them best job on them - education, urban education, women and children's issues and literacy.

Parents matter, buildings count, curriculum choices, materials, resources - all these things are important in a top-class education. But, in the end, it comes down to the teachers.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.