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.

I'm that tech writer who gets on stage and plays funny tech songs. I wouldn't want that to be all I'm known for, but it's a bit of a differentiator.

Babies have not yet chunked anything. They aren't doing any high level thinking. All they're doing is sucking in all the data they experience in the world around them, and remembering it, raw. It's basically what extreme savants have happen in their brains.

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.

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.

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.

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.