If a product's future is unlikely to be remarkable - if you can't imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product - it's time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.

The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way.

The danger of the Web is that you can go from idea to public announcement in under ten minutes.

Canoeing was hard and scary, and the wind could blow you across the lake if you did it wrong. After a year of not doing it right, I could talk to people and get them to sit up straight, take different kinds of chances, to breathe differently, to engage in the moment in the boat. And I changed them, and I changed me in the process.

There's a lot of work being done through the innovation arm of the World Bank, at the World Bank Institute. There's a lot of work that we at the Rockefeller Foundation are doing and funding towards that end, and increasingly, the U.S. government is getting engaged.

In America, you keep on hearing productivity is low; secular stagnation, it's a new normal. It's just not true: We've had multiple wars; we're not educating our kids. We had government shut downs, badly-spent money, failures in the health system, failures and an extreme amount of regulation - that's why we're going slow.

Activity in politics also produces eager competition and sharp rivalry.

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.