Today, many companies are reporting that their number one constraint on growth is the inability to hire workers with the necessary skills.

Simply put, unsustainable debt is helping to keep too many poor countries and poor people in poverty.

It's good for young people to be angry about something.

When times are tough and people are frustrated and angry and hurting and uncertain, the politics of constant conflict may be good. But what is good politics does not necessarily work in the real world. What works in the real world is cooperation.

In today's knowledge-based economy, what you earn depends on what you learn. Jobs in the information technology sector, for example, pay 85 percent more than the private sector average.

My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn't sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.

[My mom] had this amazing attitude in the face of everything, including when she got cancer.