I knew I wanted to be a writer from as far back as I can remember. That was my talent. Lord knows it wasn't math.

If you spot a market where the only choices are at either one end or the other - high fidelity or high convenience - there's probably a big opportunity at the other end. That was the opening for Federal Express, for instance. When it started, there was only one mail service in America - the US Postal Service, which was high convenience. Fred Smith created a high-fidelity mail service.

The explosion of the Web and digital media from 1995 to 2000 shook companies more profoundly in a shorter time than anything since the end of World War II.

Some of what we're learning suggests a balance between exposing children to new things, yet giving them a chance to repeatedly experience something they enjoy, which builds "chunks" of information in their brains.

Chunking is the ability of the brain to learn from data you take in, without having to go back and access or think about all that data every time. As a kid learning how to ride a bike, for instance, you have to think about everything you're doing. You're brain is taking in all that data, and constantly putting it together, seeing patterns, and chunking them together at a higher level. So eventually, when you get on a bike, your brain doesn't have to think about how to ride a bike anymore. You've chunked bike riding.

Super fidelity requires constant investment and discipline, but great companies know how to do that.

Talented people can predict with great accuracy what's about to happen just a tiny bit ahead of their competitors. It might be two seconds ahead, or two hundredths of a second, or two days. Napoleon on an eighteenth century battlefield had something more like a two-day advantage. Wayne Gretzky in a hockey game was probably a second ahead of everyone else on the ice.