A half-hour before bedtime, I remind myself that I now deserve to prepare myself for a good night's sleep. You can't focus on your work if you're sleep-deprived even if you have a fascinating job.

Education isn't a magic pill. There is no magic pill. But the closest we have is practical expertise and relentless drive.

The lack of crispness comes significantly from a societal change in what's valued: a replacement of bold individual initiative with collaboration, consensus, teamwork etc. All that team-involved decision-making often leads to tepid solutions and a slow-moving organization.

Few people make a living as a public speaker but many people build it into their career. A career is like a suit of clothes: to look its best, it must be tailored and accessorized. So whatever career you choose, let's say it's social work - you can, for example, ask your boss - if you can give talks at housing project community centers about the social services available.

You need to create a 30-minute buffer between the end of your work time and sleep time.

I believe that a core problem with undergraduate education, especially at research universities like Harvard, Stanford, NYU, etc, is that most teaching is done by PhDs, who by temperament, training, interests, and rewards are researchers first. So they spend most of their time and energy probing a snip of a field's cutting edge. In my view, the attributes needed to be a transformative undergraduate instructor are pretty orthogonal to that. It would seem that undergraduate education would be superior if there was a separate track for teaching faculty.

Sometimes, low-level jobs are challenging even to someone with CEO potential.