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.

The most important thing is to talk to people that have jobs that you might like and to see what they say the job involves.

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

Priorities are the yearly goals that I'm most interested in achieving, then they become operationalized through weekly goals.

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.

I've seen people spend days, if not months, researching and gathering data, but only at the end did they finally figure out what they were really looking for; then they have to redo a lot of stuff. If after a day or so you force yourself to put together your tentative conclusions, then you'll have guidance for the rest of your research.

You have various institutions like law firms and accounting firms which bill by the hour. I'm really against that. You have an incentive to go slowly, be there as long as possible, to over-research things and over-staff.