Most pharmaceutical workshops were shut down during the great cultural revolution. Without manufacturing support, we had to extract herbs ourselves using household vats etc. The team worked very long hours every day including the weekends. Due to lack of proper equipment and ventilation, and long-term exposure to the organic solvents, some of my team members included myself started to show unhealthy symptoms. This, however, did not stop our efforts.

We thought that there were certain possibilities, in terms of physical movement, in terms of community, and in terms of what dance could address in our society. And those were the issues that we went after. And we worked with a great deal of rigor. Which is to say, we were very, very dedicated. We worked six days a week, we worked at least six hours every day. We did not perform much at all. It was really about the experience of learning and exploring and growing, for five years.

A good coach is somebody who has a clear concept of what they want and what they love in the game, is capable of expressing it in an understandable way, and is able to obtain it on the football pitch. They're also someone who loves to help others. This means something more than just going out and coaching a session, they really try to understand who a player is and find the key to helping them. All players have different problems, and we have the capacity to help them solve them. That's why this is a very interesting aspect of being a coach, we have the chance to be capable to influence people's lives.

Those lactate sessions were the worst. I'd be in a lab on a turbo trainer and I'd do four 30-second efforts at 100% effort. It sounds so innocuous but the difference between 99% and 100% is huge. You can finish at 99% and you'll be hurting but if you push a tiny bit more – and that's the bit that makes the difference to your training – your legs just grind to a halt. It's like your engine is seizing up. My coach would unclip my feet and pull my leg over the saddle so I could just slide off onto a mat and curl up in a ball.

One of the things that Michelle and I are proud of is that we came through the White House with our souls intact. Everybody has heard: Power corrupts. I do think if you are placed in such an artificial situation, and your office has great importance, there is a tendency for people to want to please you. To not be as honest with you. We fought against that.

And democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you're not going to get what you want.

You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits. … I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia.

I believe in this country. I believe in the American people. I believe that people are more good than bad. I believe tragic things happen, I think there's evil in the world, but I think that at the end of the day, if we work hard, and if we're true to those things in us that feel true and feel right, that the world gets a little better each time.

And finally, change requires more than just speaking out -- it requires listening, as well. In particular, it requires listening to those with whom you disagree, and being prepared to compromise. When I was a state senator, I helped pass Illinois's first racial profiling law, and one of the first laws in the nation requiring the videotaping of confessions in capital cases. And we were successful because, early on, I engaged law enforcement.

Part of what separates us from the other creatures on earth is that we make up stories. We are storytellers. And we can tell bad stories and we can tell good stories. We can tell stories that lead to division and hate and war. Or we can tell stories that lead to cooperation and peace and progress.