Punishment for doing your job well is an unparalleled professional pressure.

My breadth of football experience, my injury history, and my all-or-nothing goal to become one of the best linebackers in the NFL, combined with all I'd been learning about the game's neurological effects on the brain, convinced me I'd be wise in choosing another career.

If I was a marginal guy or a practice squad player or a career-long special teamer, you take a hell of a lot less hits in those roles.

I couldn't really justify playing for money, and I think what I wanted to achieve put me at too great a risk, so I just decided on another profession.

When I look at founders and CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, these are companies that are creating extraordinary social good and extraordinary economic and educational empowerment, all within with context of a for-profit model.

I didn't do any football stuff when I was a kid... Mostly baseball and basketball the whole time. That's all I did. I played football starting in seventh grade. As I got older, I started playing a little bit more. Then in high school, I really fell in love with it.

With my parents, when I was younger, I always had to do two things. If I was acting, I always had to do a sport or something on the arts side of things along with that. That way, if one fell apart, I always had something else to fall back on.

I'm going to take full advantage of whatever time I've got on this earth. I'm going to get my money's worth. You can bet your butt on that.