I consider myself a frequent flyer, flying roughly 200 times a year on mostly mainstream airlines.

There is no prize in sales for second place. It's win or nothing. The masters know this and strive for - they fight for - that winning edge.

The key in mastering any kind of sales is switching statements about you and how great you are and what you do, to statements about them, and how great they are and how they will produce more and profit more from ownership of your product or service.

I grew up in an upper-middle-class town with a population around 12,000. My high school held around a thousand kids. All smart. We had a strict dress code. If you wore blue jeans to school, they sent you home.

I was a technology reporter. And I think everybody who covers tech at some point or another feels like a little kid with their face pressed against the glass looking in at the candy shop and going, 'Wow, it looks so cool and so much fun.'

It's often hard for us to imagine going without some of our luxuries like travel, dining out, or Internet, much less our basic necessities like food and water. But try for a minute to imagine how life would be with such deprivations.

From the late '70s to the early '90s, I wrote anything anybody would pay me for. This ranged from articles on how to clean a longhorn cow's skull for living-room decoration to manuals on elementary math instruction on the Apple II... to a slew of software reviews and application articles done for the computer press.

It's time to take decisive action to stop American and other multinationals from aiding and abetting the wrong side in the global digital arms race.