While you're learning guitar, figure out the drums, too. Not only does it help you have great timing, but it helps you understand how a band works.

Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.

You don't really write a hit song - you write a great song, and then, if the public decides it's a hit, they take over from there. The song becomes its own monster.

Even if we had the No. 1 video on MTV, and we had money and everything else, I think we'd always have more to do. I don't ever want to wake up in the morning and say, 'What are we gonna do today?' I'm afraid of that. I don't ever want to wake up and feel like we've conquered.

While working hard for my career, I looked after my family and have been there for my mother and in-laws when they needed me around. They reciprocated in kind with their unconditional love and support for my career.

Have you ever noticed some people are able to stay organized while getting a massive quantity of work accomplished, while others appear to be busy but never actually produce results? Time management is the key to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

To recruit staff, I traveled all over the country talking with people who had been working on one or another aspect of the atomic-energy enterprise and people in radar work, for example, and underwater sound, telling them about the job, the place that we are going to, and enlisting their enthusiasm.

I've always liked the idea of being a father. And I've always romanticised it, because I lost my father when I was young. In a way, all of the complications that come with my career are about that.