Wall Street is at best ambivalent. The size of the accounts is nothing big. How many Wall Street firms do you know that are running after people with $5,000 accounts?

We can't count on the Fed to inject this level of liquidity that we saw last year.

I am a great believer in the OHIO principle: Only handle it once. When you read an e-mail, decide whether or not to reply to it, and, if you need to reply, do so right then and there. I have found that about 80 percent of all e-mails, whether internal or external, do not require a response.

Mandatory auditor rotation is designed to address a potential conflict of interest between a public company and its auditor. Because an auditor is hired and paid by the public company it audits, the auditor's desire to maintain a good relationship with its client could conflict with its duty to rigorously question the client's financial statements.

From the law firm's perspective, billing by the hour has a certain appeal: it shifts risk from the firm to the client in case the work takes longer than expected. But from a client's perspective, it doesn't work so well. It gives lawyers an incentive to overstaff and to overresearch cases.

The quality of American patents has been deteriorating for years; they are increasingly issued for products and processes that are not truly innovative - things like the queuing system for Netflix, which was patented in 2003. Yes, it makes renting movies a snap, but was it really a breakthrough deserving patent protection?

No matter what your career aspirations are, you should begin by thinking carefully about why you are engaging in any activity and what you can expect to get out of it.