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.

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.

Chunking makes our brains more efficient. The more you can chunk something, the faster and easier you can process it. Wayne Gretzky had chunked hockey like no one before or since. Talented people have supremely chunked whatever they become talented at doing.

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.

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.

Fidelity is the total quality of an experience, including a sense of exclusiveness and aura. Convenience is simply how easy something is to get, which often means a low price and ubiquitousness. A super-fidelity product or service would lose its luster and quality if it's pushed too hard toward convenience. A super-convenient product or service would start to get expensive and exclusive if it moved toward higher fidelity, which would naturally undermine its convenience.