Today it’s economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something that is also beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.

If you create something, whether it's a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it.

I think people get satisfaction from living for a cause that's greater than themselves. They want to leave an imprint. By writing books, I'm trying to do that in a modest way.

Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme.

All of us want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, something that matters.

But in the end, mastery involves working and working and showing little improvement, perhaps with a few moments of flow pulling you along, then making a little progress, and then working and working on that new, slightly higher plateau again. It's grueling, to be sure. But that's not the problem; that's the solution.

There's an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts.