My biggest fear is doing the same things 10 years from now. That would be a failure. It's something you have to constantly reassess, and asking yourself what you are going to do next makes it a good, long full journey.
I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer.
I have a lack of fear, whereas in the past the fear of failure was a powerful motivator. Anyway, I have great expectations for the future, but I just don't know if I'm the monarch of all I survey.
If the whole process of learning from failure means discarding stuff that's not working, but in fact, our natural reaction is to keep going, to throw more money behind it, to throw more emotional energy behind it... that's a real problem.
In Britain, by contrast, we still think that class plays a part in determining a person's life chances, so we're less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it's much easier to be a failure in Britain t...
I wanted to be a columnist so badly that I took a huge pay cut to leave Forbes, which wouldn't give me a column, and join Newsday, which wanted my column for its Sunday business section.
By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.' It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, go...
My training really was at the 'New York Times,' you know. When I got there, I was literally supposed to stay there for five weeks, and I got lucky like nobody, you know, like nobody's business.
For all of the woes besetting our business, I believe with all my heart that newspapers - whether they are distributed to your doorstep, your laptop, your iPhone or a chip implanted in your cerebral cortex - will be around for a long time.
The dearth of business activity on the traditional day of rest makes Sunday an ideal time to declare insolvency. Bankruptcy petitions are time-stamped to the minute, instantly dividing a failed company's dealings into pre-bankruptcy transactions and ...
I knew I wanted to be a journalist ever since I was a teenager. While it is interesting and gratifying to be on the business side and to see how that all works, the main reason I kept a business role here was to protect the editorial integrity of Sal...
A good column is one that sells paper. It doesn't matter how beautifully it is written and how much you admire the author... if it doesn't sell any papers, it's not a good column. It's a terrible yardstick to use, but in the newspaper business, that'...
Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day - race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.
In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the g...
In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes ...
The advent of the Internet exposed the fact that the old business model for newspapers was broken. The world wide web fundamentally changed the media eco-system, challenging established journalistic practice in what is known as the mainstream media: ...
Selling cookies helped me to realize that you needed to have a certain way to communicate with people. You also needed business skills. You knew you needed to sell a certain amount of boxes, so that gave me some business sense.
At almost forty years old, I assumed my career on camera was over. And I was certainly given that message by all the TV managers and news directors who passed on me when I was trying to get a job back in the business.
To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn't just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations - it's also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and runnin...
When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me - when I was an 8-year-old. They're in shorts and T-shirts. And it's not just on airplanes. It's in business offices, teachers' lounges, and churches.
I always want to have San Francisco as my home and my base. I'm a business reporter - that's what I do and what I enjoy - and I don't know another place on the planet that would be as fascinating to cover.
