OFF the CUFF

  • “I live a really pretty normal life,” Danica Patrick, the NASCAR driver, told “Off The Cuff”. “People usually just ask if I am Danica Patrick. My favorite is when they say, ‘have you ever been told you look like?’ And I'm, like, ‘yeah, I get that all the time.’ And I walk away. And if I'm standing with somebody I'm, like, ‘They just asked the wrong question.’”

    In 2005, Patrick became the first woman to lead the Indianapolis 500 race. In 2008, she became the first female driver to win an IndyCar race. She’s the first woman in NASCAR history to win a NASCAR Sprint Series pole – in February she secured the top spot for any race in the sport’s premier circuit.

    “For me it was really more about the team than me. So it was good to do. And if anyone's going to be on the pole, I hope it's me. But it's not exactly a difficult lap to make. So more than anything, it's the honor of being able to drive that car,” she said.

    She’s made a rocky debut as a Cup regular – she’s currently ranked 30th in the points standings. Last week, her boyfriend, fellow NASCAR driver Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. drove his car into the side of hers. The love tap caused her to collide with another vehicle, and ended her race.

    Returning home with Stenhouse after the race, she told the Associated Press,“there were a few silent moments, for sure. Or many moments.”

    “Ricky and I talk about racing a fair amount, sure,” she told “Off The Cuff”. “But usually I'd say we both probably do what we've always done after a race. You kind of debrief about what happened and you recap what happened. And then you move on from it.”

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  • Stumped on a Second Career? What Brian Boitano Would Do

    By CNBC | Off the Cuff – Thu, May 30, 2013 7:04 AM EDT

    “Building a second career is difficult to do in America. People pigeonhole you,” Brian Boitano, the 1988 Olympic figure skating champion told “Off The Cuff”. “It is really hard. So it really has to come from a genuine place.”

    Boitano, who continues to perform in ice shows, has built a second career as the host of a cooking show on Food Network, and Cooking Channel, and he’s the author of a new cookbook,“What Would Brian Boitano Make?”.

    Aside from the whole knife-edge analogy, Boitano sees a correlation between his two passions: skating and food.

    “There are layers and layers of things that go into skating,” he said, “you have to decide what music you're going skate to. You have to work on your jumping. You have to work on your artistic ability. There's the lighting, the costumes.”

    “When it comes down to food, you have to decide which what menu you're going to make, then break it down to recipes,” he continued. “It’s how it looks on the plate, and how it tastes, and the crunch, the

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  • For millions, he will forever be remembered for performing “The Miracle on the Hudson.”

    January 15, 2009 - US Airways Flight 1549 had just taken off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport headed to Charlotte, NC. It didn’t make it there. Instead, the plane was safely ditched into the freezing river that separates New York from New Jersey.

    For the first 100 seconds of the flight, it was just another mundane trip for Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who had flown for more than 42 years and logged 20,000 hours in the air.

    But then he saw the birds; a flock of Canada geese, each weighing about 10 or 12 pounds, with a wingspan stretching from four to six feet.

    As the plane was making its ascent, the birds were sucked into the plane’s engines, forcing the captain to make an emergency landing. With no airports easily available, he turned the plane, and headed for the Hudson River.

    “It felt as if the bottom had fallen out of our world. I could feel my pulse and my blood pressure shoot up, my

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  • Zaha Hadid: You Don’t Have to Be Polite to Succeed

    By CNBC | Off the Cuff – Tue, May 21, 2013 11:10 PM EDT

    One of the world’s 100 most powerful women. One of the world’s most influential figures. One of the greatest architects alive. Those are just some of the accolades given to award-winning Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid.

    In 2004, Hadid was the first woman and the first Muslim to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize—a recognition often called the Nobel Prize of architecture. Her buildings are futuristic and fluid–the Aquatic Centre at the 2012 London Olympics is one of her best-known works.

    But for much of her early career, Hadid was a “paper architect” whose work was considered too radical and impossible to build.

    “I didn't get the support from the establishment…there was definitely prejudice,” Hadid told “Off The Cuff.” "The fact I was a woman and an Arab made it, on one hand easier, on the other hand very difficult. Nobody was used to having a woman in the profession; nobody was used to having a foreigner. On the other hand, I was also very privileged, and I had a lot of support because I was a woman."

    In 1995 she won an international competition to build an opera house in Wales. One local politician claimed her winning design was based on Islam’s holy city of Mecca, and that it might incite a fatwa. The design was dumped.

    “That was really terrible. I knew when it was going on, that I would be stigmatized for years. Just because I was an Arab, they assumed that this would be a religious building,” she said. Hadid is a non-practicing Muslim. “It was kind of endless misunderstandings about what I was,” she said.

    Hadid grew up in Baghdad, but hasn’t lived in Iraq since the late 1960s. Her family left after the rise of Saddam Hussein. “I would like to go back. It’s perfectly safe for me to go back. But it's an emotional issue, which is that I left Iraq … my parents were there, and my friends, and now, I don't know anybody there,” she said.

    Middle Eastern politics have had an effect on her work—a number of her projects have been put on hold, delayed by the Arab Spring.

    “We had two big projects in Egypt—they stopped. I am quite sensitive to politics, because you know, as an Arab, an Iraqi, all your life, you are very conscious of it,” she continued. “If something is about to go wrong, I can sniff it, but you have to have a positive attitude, otherwise, everything could go wrong.”

    Hadid is the top woman architect in the world, frequently portrayed in the media as “difficult” and a “diva.”

    “If you're a woman, and you have an opinion, you're difficult. But if a guy has an opinion, he's a good guy,” she said. “I could be not polite, and maybe I'm not very diplomatic. People in power, they're so used to people kind of playing up to them. I don't think there was any need for me to overdo it by being over-nice. But there are people who are part of the system, who are going to flatter you, and compliment you. I don't do that.“

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Pagination

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About Off the Cuff

Ever wondered what your boss eats for breakfast? Or why he or she works 24/7? Off the Cuff takes you outside the boardroom to show you what high-impact leaders do off the clock. Every week, corporate tycoons will answer questions about what they like (and loathe), what makes them get up in the morning, what inspires them, and what makes them the most proud.