James Snyder

I'm an actor, and I think some of us who are drawn to this work know what it is to desperately want to be loved and validated: to be good at something and not be able to do it; to come in second on countless projects; or told that you were the first choice, but the part went to that guy who had that TV show in the '90s.

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

I always wanted to be a surgeon, because I had a lot of admiration for my father, who is also a surgeon. I also wanted to be a heart surgeon. That was motivated by the fact that my young aunt, a sister of my dad, died in her early 20s of a correctable heart disease.