No. I mean if you fail 70 percent of the time, you had a great year. You're dealing with failure seven out of ten times as a hitter.

I had such failure for the first ten years in Silicon Valley. General Magic — over a billion dollars invested in 1990 dollars! Could you imagine what that is today? The best team in the world. We were told we were gonna topple Microsoft and all these companies.

I tried for a Ph.D. scholarship to work with Cedric Mims, but was told to apply again later because he already had a "scholar" and would take only one student at a time. … The following week a job in the Department of Experimental Pathology at the Moredun was advertized in Nature. We sailed for Britain in early 1967, on a very slow and cheap ship.

So we had to take this special exam and I flunked it. Erv Upton passed it, and I was scared. I figured if I failed it, I wouldn’t have any chance of getting in. So I failed it beautifully. ... And so it was the first year of this general college, which gave an Associate of Arts degree after two years, and that was expected to be a terminal course. It turned out it wasn’t.

I don’t think that is tough, because if you have an idea of something meaningful to communicate, you can move forward on that. You might not be successful in communicating what you want to communicate, but at least you have an idea of something that needs to be said, or something that you think should be said, and I think you go from there.

Being surrounded by my friends and family. Just listening to them interacting, laughing, sharing. It is the culmination of everything I could have hoped for.

Loyalty. Not fawning, but a loyalty based on our shared love and history that fosters compassion and forgiveness.

I don’t think that is tough, because if you have an idea of something meaningful to communicate, you can move forward on that. You might not be successful in communicating what you want to communicate, but at least you have an idea of something that needs to be said, or something that you think should be said, and I think you go from there.

My college years, when everything was possible and I felt physically invulnerable.

Dishonesty. It destroys relationships. It’s something celebrities especially have to guard against because people are prone to tell you what they think you want to hear rather than the truth.