0:11 I want to share with you something my father taught me: no condition is permanent. It's a lesson he shared with me again and again, and I learned it to be true the hard way. 0:27 Here I am in my fourth-grade class. This is my yearbook picture taken in…

Raj Panjabi was nine years old when civil war broke out in his native country of Liberia. His family fled, eventually resettling in High Point, North Carolina. Raj dreamed of going to medical school and, as a student in 2005, he returned to Liberia. He was…

0:11 So there's this thing called the law of unintended consequences. I thought it was just like a saying, but it actually exists, I guess. There's, like, academic papers about it. And I'm a designer. I don't like unintended consequences. People hire me because…

Michael Bierut is a partner in the New York office of Pentagram, a founder of Design Observer and a teacher at Yale School of Art and Yale School of Management.