There are certain creative jobs where you know you are the person on the line, and there are few guarantees that you're going to be able to crank out hits every year. For the most part, it's a roller coaster. You look at Fox, you look at NBC, you look at ABC, and they've been up and down over the years and in every different position. So if you are somebody who is not afraid of risk and you love the creative process, it's great. Why would you not do it?

We learn by making mistakes. If you genuinely want to have a multifaceted career that takes you into multiple industries, then I think you have to be willing to fail.

I made multiple leaps where there were no guarantees that I was going to be successful. By the way, I was not always successful. But I think if you go into something new with an open mind, and you let people around you know what you don't know, for the most part they're going to link arms with you. So you can't plan a career so closely that you never make a move unless you know that it's going to work. There's always going to be risk involved in change.

I think oldest children have a different mentality or know that there were different expectations of them, and I was not only the oldest child - I was the oldest grandchild of 18 grandchildren. I definitely grew up feeling like there were a lot of people who expected me to do something. But it was a very conservative family, very conservative neighborhood. I'm talking mid- to late '60s when I was growing up there, and so if I had stayed in the Boston area, I think my life would have been radically different.

The platform is either an enabler of creativity or it's a block.

There are certain creative jobs where you know you are the person on the line, and there are few guarantees that you're going to be able to crank out hits every year. For the most part, it's a roller coaster. You look at Fox, you look at NBC, you look at ABC, and they've been up and down over the years and in every different position. So if you are somebody who is not afraid of risk and you love the creative process, it's great. Why would you not do it?

In many ways, I went through a lot of my adult life thinking about, "What's next? What's next? What's next?," and always having my eye on tomorrow as opposed to what's happening at this moment. That experience forces you to really focus on the moment.