Overcoming Adversity

What It Takes is a podcast series featuring intimate, revealing conversations with towering figures in almost every field: music, science, sports, politics, film, technology, literature, the military and social justice. These rare interviews have been recorded over the past 25 years by The Academy of Achievement. They offer the life stories and reflections of people who have had a huge impact on the world, and insights you can apply to your own life. Subscribe to the What It Takes podcast series at iTunes.com/WhatItTakes

Hailed as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world, "South Africa's Athol Fugard has won international praise for creating theater of "power, glory, and majestic language." In more than 20 plays, written over six decades, he has chronicled the struggles of men and women of all races for dignity and human fulfillment. Born and raised in the Eastern Cape, he founded a multiracial theater company in the 1950s in defiance of the South African government's apartheid system. When he and a black colleague appeared as mixed-race brothers in his play The Blood Knot, it was closed after a single performance. In the 1960s, his work found an audience in other English-speaking countries, but after he appeared in The Blood Knot on BBC Television, the government seized his passport. Since the downfall of the apartheid system, Fugard has been honored by his country's government and by critics and audiences the world over. An Honorary Fellow of Britain's Royal Society of Literature, in 2001 he received Broadway's Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. His novel Tsotsi was adapted into the film of the same name, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 2006. He has appeared as an actor in the feature films Gandhi and The Killing Fields. In 2014, he returned to the stage for the first time in 15 years to act in his play Shadow of the Hummingbird at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. In this podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, he speaks of his youth in South Africa and his early adventures as a merchant seaman. Rather than dwelling on the persecution he suffered as an advocate of racial equality in his country, he focuses on the most basic and satisfying emotions that have informed his life, including the love of other human beings and of nature.

This podcast features two of the visionaries of today's world of Internet commerce and social media. Reid Hoffman has been called "the most connected man in Silicon Valley," the "Uber-investor" who "has had a hand in creating nearly every lucrative social media startup." He was the originator of the PayPal online commerce tool and is the founder and Chairman of LinkedIn, as well as an early investor in Facebook, GroupOn and Airbnb. Joi Ito, a social media entrepreneur in his own right, is now Director of the MIT Media Lab. A techno-prodigy and onetime nightclub DJ, he founded the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd., and was an early investor in Kickstarter, Twitter and many other innovative Internet companies. One of the world's leading advocates of Internet freedom, he has described his vision of a decentralized political structure, mediated through the Internet, in the widely-disseminated essay Emergent Democracy. In this podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, the two friends engage in a freewheeling discussion of today's media landscape, with personal observations of the industry's leaders and a tantalizing peek at its future.

In the late 1960s, it was already known that hormones such as adrenalin, histamine, dopamine and serotonin stimulate specific responses in the cells of human beings and other organisms. But the mechanism by which cells perceive and respond to these hormones was shrouded in mystery. In 1969, Lefkowitz successfully attached a radioactive isotope of iodine to a form of the hormone adrenaline, enabling him to track its movements within an organism. By 1974, he observed the hormone interacting with a specific protein in the cell wall, the first of many such "G Protein coupled receptors" (GPCRs) he would identify in the next 15 years of groundbreaking research. In 1986, he and his associates at Duke University Medical Center succeeded in cloning and sequencing the gene for one of these receptors and found that it responds to adrenaline much as receptors in the eye register light. He has since identified a superfamily of receptor proteins that circulate back and forth through the cell wall, triggering the appropriate response to hormones and other stimuli. Roughly half of all medications in use today depend on the action of the receptors Dr. Lefkowitz discovered; they are used to treat everything from diabetes to depression. His discovery has been recognized with nearly every honor in American science, as well as the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This podcast combines excerpts from the Academy of Achievement's 2014 interview with Dr. Lefkowitz with highlights from his address to the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco.

This podcast features two of the visionaries of today's world of Internet commerce and social media. Reid Hoffman has been called "the most connected man in Silicon Valley," the "Uber-investor" who "has had a hand in creating nearly every lucrative social media startup." He was the originator of the PayPal online commerce tool and is the founder and Chairman of LinkedIn, as well as an early investor in Facebook, GroupOn and Airbnb. Joi Ito, a social media entrepreneur in his own right, is now Director of the MIT Media Lab. A techno-prodigy and onetime nightclub DJ, he founded the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd., and was an early investor in Kickstarter, Twitter and many other innovative Internet companies. One of the world's leading advocates of Internet freedom, he has described his vision of a decentralized political structure, mediated through the Internet, in the widely-disseminated essay Emergent Democracy. In this podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, the two friends engage in a freewheeling discussion of today's media landscape, with personal observations of the industry's leaders and a tantalizing peek at its future.

On May 1, 2011, President Obama and his national security team gathered in the White House Situation Room to watch a commando raid taking place half a world away. As the mission unfolded, the President was in continuous video contact with the senior military officer directing the operation from a base in Afghanistan, Admiral William McRaven. To this task, Admiral McRaven brought three decades of experience in special operations. The first officer to graduate from the Special Operations and Limited Warfare program at the Naval Postgraduate School, he has held commands at every level of the special ops community, from leading a single SEAL platoon, to his final post as Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). His experience includes commands in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, leadership of SEAL Team Three, and of NATO's special operations command (SOCEUR). At USSOCOM, Admiral McRaven oversaw and coordinated elite forces from all branches of the nation's military, including such storied outfits as the Navy Seals, the Army's Green Berets and Delta Force, and the Air Force Special Tactics Squadron. The success, that night in 2011, of the raid that eliminated Osama bin Laden without a single American casualty was due, in no small part, to the unique expertise of the man who organized and executed the plan, Admiral William McRaven. Earlier this year, Admiral McRaven retired from the Navy to become Chancellor of the nine-campus University of Texas system. In this podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, Admiral McRaven addresses a profoundly simple question, "How do you change the world, when so much lies beyond your control?" Recalling incidents from his own life and service, he demonstrates that we all have opportunities to perform numberless small acts of encouragement, courage and compassion that can have repercussions far beyond our own lives.

Kiri Te Kanawa created a sensation in 1971, when she made her debut as the Countess in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Audiences were captivated by the lyric splendor of her voice and the exquisite tenderness of her interpretation. Soon she was a leading star of the operatic stage. Today, she is one of the most famous sopranos in the world. Born in New Zealand of Maori and European ancestry, she enjoyed a career as a popular singer and recording artist while still in her teens. At 20, she moved to London for serious operatic study, and was discovered by the conductor Sir Colin Davis. Since then, she has sung in the leading opera houses of the world, and as a guest artist with the world's major orchestras and the greatest conductors of our time. In addition to her many operatic recordings, she has recorded several albums of classic American popular songs. She was seen, as well as heard, in the 1979 film of Mozart's Don Giovanni, and by a vast international television audience in 1981 as the soloist at the royal wedding of HRH Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. In 2004, she created the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation to provide financial support for outstanding New Zealand singers and musicians. Dame Kiri's last operatic performance was playing the title role in Vanessa with the Los Angeles Opera in late 2004. She continues to sing in concert halls throughout the world, enchanting audiences with her vocal beauty and natural serenity. She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1982.

The poet and playwright Wole Soyinka is a towering figure in world literature. He has won international acclaim for his verse, as well as for novels such as The Interpreters. His work in the theater ranges from the early comedy The Lion and the Jewel to the poetic tragedy Death and the King's Horseman. Born in Nigeria, he returned from graduate studies in England just as his country attained its independence from Britain. Many of his plays, including Kongi's Harvest and Madmen and Specialists, are bitter satires on the dictatorships of post-colonial Africa. In the late '60s, his opposition to a repressive regime in his own country led to his imprisonment in solitary confinement for nearly two years, an experience he reflects on in the memoir The Man Died and the verse collection A Shuttle in the Crypt. His works in all genres deploy a rich poetic language, steeped in European mythology and the Yoruba spiritual traditions of West Africa, interests he fused in his masterful study Myth, Literature and the African World. In 1986, he became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner, has become an international publishing phenomenon and a modern classic. This tale of childhood innocence betrayed, set against three tragic decades in the history of Afghanistan, gave readers around the world an insight into the human truth behind the headlines. This unforgettable book is the product of Khaled Hosseini's own life experience. Born in Afghanistan, his family fled to the United States when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. In the U.S. Khaled Hosseini became a successful physician, but he longed to tell the world something of the life he knew before his country was consumed by war. He rose at four o'clock every morning to work on The Kite Runner before a full day of seeing patients. Following the enormous success of his first book, a second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, soon joined it on the bestseller lists. In addition to his thriving literary career, Dr. Hosseini now serves as a special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, assisting displaced persons in war zones around the world. In this podcast, recorded at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, he reflects on the journey that led him from his homeland of Afghanistan to exile in the United States, through the process of learning a new language in his teens and becoming a doctor and an author.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proved him wrong. And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools." Frank McCourt was already retired when he published his first book at age 66. Angela's Ashes, a memoir of his impoverished boyhood in Limerick, Ireland, shot to the top of the best-seller lists and remained there for over a year. Angela's Ashes won McCourt the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It was still topping the paperback lists when McCourt's second book 'Tis hit the bookstores, and the best-seller lists. A third bestseller, Teacher Man, recounts his years teaching in the New York City public schools. "After retiring from teaching I wanted a second act, not a rocker in Florida," McCourt says. After a lifetime of helping young people find their own voices, Frank McCourt has found his own, and millions of readers have found a friend to treasure.