I reluctantly signed up for a journalism major, thinking I needed a fall-back way to make money should my career as a novelist fail to take off. As I started to try on journalism, including doing internships and working at the campus paper, I found I actually liked it. So I started to want to be a journalist.

If you want to stand out, find a way to be either high fidelity or high convenience in whatever you do. If you're halfway in between on both measures, you're not going to make people feel very excited about you.

I'm that tech writer who gets on stage and plays funny tech songs. I wouldn't want that to be all I'm known for, but it's a bit of a differentiator.

We learn more about how human brains work. And that leads us to ideas about how to make human brains work better.

I knew I wanted to be a writer from as far back as I can remember. That was my talent. Lord knows it wasn't math.

Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

Eventually, we need to have computers that work differently from the way they do today and have for the past 60-plus years. We're capturing and generating increasingly massive amounts of data, but we can't make computers that keep up with it. One of the most promising solutions is to make computers that work more the way brains work.

In the long run magazines can't be a convenience play - the Web has stolen that. So magazines have to be high fidelity - a fantastic experience - to thrive. Magazines will survive the Internet age, but only the ones that give people an experience they just can't get anywhere else. A magazine will have to be truly loved to make it.

Anybody can develop a certain amount of talent at something. However, the supremely talented - the superstars - are people who have married a gift of brain wiring to those thousands of hours of practice, usually in favorable circumstances.

The explosion of the Web and digital media from 1995 to 2000 shook companies more profoundly in a shorter time than anything since the end of World War II.

Some people seem to have extreme natural wiring - a talent that seems to come out of nowhere. Like a music savant or prodigy. The uplifting news, though, is that many talented people don't have such natural wiring - but they forge a talent through thousands of hours of what's known as deliberate practice or deliberate performance.

Who wins and who loses depends on when you measure it.