Avoid random motion.

Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.

I wasn't cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.

Satisfaction doesn't come in moments but in periods of time.

Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that's a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn't the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.

Take a bit of the future and make it your present.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

We're living the Next Big Thing. It's a little like living in the time when electricity was in its early stages. It took decades for electricity to change the landscape. We're in the early stages of recasting our commercial lives, our professional lives, our health practices, everything.

You have to pretend you're 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can't hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.

Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don't let anyone tell you different.

You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them. You're not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again -- you can't step into the river again at the same place and the same time -- but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake.

Status is a very dangerous thing. I've met too many people who make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address, because that's for everybody else but not them. It's hard to fight the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.

What you're seeing today is a very, very rapid evolution of an industry where the milieu is better understood by people who grew up in the same time frame as the industry. A lot of the years that many of us have spent in business before this time are of only limited relevance.

Risk is the cost of aggressive objectives.

It's not enough to make time for your children. There are certain stages in their lives when you have to give them the time when they want it. You can't run your family like a company. It doesn't work.

Assume any career moves you make won't go smoothly. They won't. But don't look back.

A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.

Technology is both an end in itself and a means to other ends. When you figure something out and make it work, there is pleasure and excitement. Not just because the technology is going to do something, but because you created something with its own inherent beauty, like art, like literature, like music.

Denial can blind.

It is a very important truism that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is. We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people.

When you have cancer, there's always a finite chance that it will recur, so talking about the whole experience in past tense is a little presumptuous. So yes, I have faced the prospect of dying, of having a specific cause of mortality hanging over my head for the rest of my life. But I don't think the experience changed me, not that either I or anyone close to me has been able to spot.

All art is in some fashion escape. It sucks you out of your own life. It absorbs you.

Retirement is a process. You have to figure out the new rules, and you have to figure out what works under the new rules.

The most powerful tool of all is the word no.

There's never enough time.

Originally published in the May 2000 issue