A CD these days is not all that convenient, and it doesn't bring enough fidelity to make you put up with that inconvenience. So, nobody buys CDs anymore.

Anybody can develop a certain amount of talent at something. However, the supremely talented - the superstars - are people who have married a gift of brain wiring to those thousands of hours of practice, usually in favorable circumstances.

Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

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.

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.

Every purchasing decision involves a trade-off between what I call fidelity and convenience. Fidelity is the total experience of something - how great the experience is. Convenience is how easy it is to get something. A live concert is a high fidelity way to experience music; an MP3 file is a high convenience way to experience music. Depending on the situation, one or the other is probably pretty appealing. What's not appealing is something that offers neither.

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.