There is something I call social intelligence. You can do a lot in life on your own and you can do all kinds of stuff, but if you're really bad with people, if you're really naive or aggressive and push people away, if you don't know the political environment you're in, it invalidates all the things you know. You're not going to get anywhere.

To me, no matter what we do, we all strive for that experience.

Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.

When you have any kind of success in life, that's like the most dangerous moment that you're in because you're going to tend to think wow, I can just keep repeating what I've done. I'm a great person. People love me. All of the sudden they're giving me all of this attention. You get drunk on it and you lose your sense of balance and your sense of detachment. I know it's happened to me.

Understand: A person of power instills a kind of fear by deliberately unsettling those around him to keep the initative on his side.

To be strategic in life is like any skill whether it's basketball or learning a language, it takes effort and practice and I think most people don't think that it's something that they could just do, you know, naturally.

If you're consumed only with the big dream, you're going to die because you won't be able to feed yourself or you're going to be losing your job, so you'll just be sitting in your room dreaming, but if you're only holding onto the crap jobs that keep you just above of the water you're going to be unhappy. You're going to be burnt out, washed out.