The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves.

By the late '90s, those who were paying attention perceived the Internet as a 20-foot tidal wave coming, and we are all in kayaks.

The worse the news, the more effort should go into communicating it.

You have to understand what it is that you are better at than anybody else and mercilessly focus your efforts on it.

I'm a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet.

You need just the right amount of ambition . . . If you have too little ambition, you don't push or work hard. If you have too much ambition, you put yourself ahead of others, elbow them out of your way.

If the brutal facts are not faced by leaders, the brutal reality sets in.