In the U.S.A., technical innovations come out of universities and the research produced by Ph.D. students. We don't have that happening in India.

I remember when AOL was small and they were growing like mad. Consumers were coming on in droves because they made it easy to connect to the Internet. That was the single biggest innovation of AOL; when grandmas were signing up, AOL had arrived.

I guess the most seminal moment going early way back was my father died when I was 3 years old. I was raised by my grandparents, and my mother went back and got a degree.

You learn that different people are made differently, and they have different ways to reach to their goals. Some people reach their limits of what they can produce and create, and that doesn't necessarily make them bad. It is just that they may not be right for that role in that instance.

At age 14, my paternal grandfather fled Poland to escape the pogroms that killed tens of thousands of European Jews. He worked full-time for a cobbler in Boston, making his way to California and eventually starting his own business in Taft - the Goldman Oil Supply Company.

For the longest time we looked at the career as a ladder, right, that there was one way up. I want to make sure that in Michigan we think of skills as rock climbing, that there's a different path for everyone. And each has dignity and each has the ability to make a good living here.

It's not what you achieve, it's what you overcome. That's what defines your career.

The cardinal rule for any performer is that they should know themselves before they enter the spotlight, and I didn't. I was just Neil and I did what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to get married, so I got married. I was supposed to get a job, so I looked for work.