I can work my butt off and create an album that's wonderful, but if it's never played and never given the outlet, it won't succeed.
When you have films like 'Bourne' that succeed, not only does it beget sequels, but it begets people taking chances.
Good leadership is to know when to go, and you only succeed as a good leader if you've transported someone else in and the company gets stronger. Then you've succeeded as leader.
My role is to try to remove the impediments to entrepreneurs' chance to succeed. It's about improving the business climate to give people a better chance of succeeding.
I get the impression that most Chinese entrepreneurs are so focussed on doing what they need to do to succeed in the Chinese market - which is a big enough challenge even for the established players - that nobody is thinking much about the longer run or the bigger global picture.
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.
If you are going to be a writer, you have to have self-belief, every writer gets rejections, they say the difference between a successful and unsuccessful writer is an unsuccessful writer gives up, if you keep going you will succeed.
If you have the right horses and the right team, that's the way to succeed. But you have to work, and you have to improve. Every year, you must get better.
Since I was 18, I've been under orders from magazines and newspapers - chiefly The New York Times and Rolling Stone - to step into the lives of musicians, actors, and artists, and somehow find out who they really are underneath the mask they present to the public. But I didn't always succeed.
The only way anyone's going to succeed is to build the product.