Losses have propelled me to even bigger places so I understand the importance of losing. You can never get complacent because a loss is always around the corner. It's in any game that you're in - a business game or whatever - you can't get complacent.

I find myself going to places where I really have no business speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.

The 9-9-9 plan would resuscitate this economy because it replaces the outdated tax code that allows politicians to pick winners and losers and to provide favors in the form of tax breaks special exemptions and loopholes. It simplifies the code dramatically: 9% business flat tax 9% personal flat tax 9% sales tax.

The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation and the great goal of the conservative movement as it rose to triumph in the 1980s was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA the EPA and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.

In the social business marketplace brands that hope to build loyal and growing communities do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to build and engage around it.

In today's social business marketplace Facebook is one of the best places for nonprofits to be discovered and connect with a larger audience on the basis of shared values. So to get started a non-profit should launch a Facebook page and invite your existing real world community to connect your cause and their networks.

The social business marketplace is effectively forcing brands to engage with consumers on the basis of something that is meaningful to them. More often than not this takes the form of some core value that finds expression in a non-profit cause.

Perhaps the most effective way to describe the approach a brand must take is to think of themselves as social cartographers. By that I mean that brands must simultaneously inspire engage and maintain a series of conversations taking place within certain cultural landscape specific to their business goal.

Not since the digital revolution in the early '90s has technology placed such a comprehensive burden on business employees and individuals to reinvent their business plans services and products and themselves to keep pace with the changing marketplace.

Americans chose a free enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home.