Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Deborah Lee James, Secretary of the U.S. Air Force. To read the complete interview, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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What were your early years like?

I grew up in Rumson, N.J., the youngest of three children in my family. In many ways, though, I grew up as an only child because my siblings were substantially older than me.

So from my earliest memories, it was just me and my mother, because my parents divorced when I was about 5 years old.

Were there glimmers of a future Air Force secretary when you were younger?

There really weren’t. I was very shy. And when I was in seventh and eighth grade, I was subjected to a certain degree of verbal bullying, which made me turn even more inward. I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence.

I got better when I went to high school. There was an influx of new kids from another town, so I made some new friends, got involved with some of the clubs, took on a few leadership positions and began to blossom a bit more.

There were a couple of things that really inspired me in those high school years. My older sister worked for American Airlines, and she got once-a-year free passes that the family could use. So she opened up the world to me, with different cultures and languages.

And I went to Argentina for a summer as an exchange student and lived with a family and became quite fluent in Spanish. I had the unbelievable opportunity not long ago to go to Argentina as secretary of the Air Force, and I was able to reconnect with this family 40 years later.

Did you have an idea of what you wanted to do after college?

I had a dream and a passion that I wanted to be a diplomat, and got a master’s degree in international affairs and public policy. Then I went to Washington, D.C., and applied to the Foreign Service. I got turned down and crashed. I went to bed for several days and cried. I was 23 years old, and I had just spent seven or eight years focused on a dream that blew up.

I finally got out of bed and said to myself, well, I have to have a job. So I started applying to other federal agencies. I did want to be in government service. That was in 1981, and the Defense Department was hiring.

So I landed my first real job out of school in the Department of the Army, which was not my heart’s desire. But I threw myself into it, and after a few months remarkable things started happening for me.

Like what?

This whole area of defense and national security, which I never knew or cared about, was really interesting and important work. And I had a great boss who took an interest in me, became a mentor and opened some doors.

From that first job, every single job I’ve had has been in defense — sometimes in government, sometimes in the private sector. And now I’m secretary of the Air Force. How cool is that? What a privilege. And it all started with a great big failure and a dream that was never realized.

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To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews of hundreds of business leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.