It's 5 P.M. at the office. Working fast, you've finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of your colleagues have left yet, so you stay another hour or two, surfing the Web and reading your e-mails again, so you don't come off as a slacker. It's an unfortunate reality that efficiency often goes unrewarded in the workplace.

Most people get overwhelmed by the insignificant decisions of their lives. I'm urging people to minimize the time spent on these when they're not critical to their most important goals.

America is the only major country that tries to ascertain who was the first applicant to invent the product or procedure. This may seem fair, but long proceedings to determine precisely when each party conceived an idea result mostly in keeping innovations from hitting the market.

The most important thing is to talk to people that have jobs that you might like and to see what they say the job involves.

I want people to see me as the entrepreneur, the boss, the public figure, the person who motivates.

Moving forward, hopefully the platform my career has given me will allow me to continue to be a voice in culture, whether that's doing lectures on campus or writing books or whatever that looks like. I feel like that's really the lane that I uniquely connect with.

I had a unique circumstance in which my career was associated with George W. Bush, who went straight to the top. I went to work for him in October of 1993. So my whole identity in national politics is associated with this president, and you know, I kind of want to leave it that way. It's not tugging at me to go do the '08 cycle.

I'm lucky that I have whatever I had that makes me have a successful career, if you will.