As we continue to read less and less and watch and listen to ever-increasing amounts of content--and the younger you are, the less you read-- it's becoming clear that new types of communication skills are going to be essential for any kind of success in our schools, our businesses and our lives. Not to mention our politics because, say whatever else you will about his messages, The Donald is a master communicator and it's no accident that he left the dirty dozen and a half in the dust.

It's getting to be graduation season again. Every year I'm asked to speak and the temptation to save time by repurposing my prior talks is substantial -- especially because I'm personally convinced that those prior words of wisdom were not only invaluable, but timeless as well. But being consistent (or lazy) requires you to be just as ignorant today as you were a year ago and I'd like to think that -- even at my advanced age -- I've learned, re-learned and unlearned a few new and important things.

The bond between the best entrepreneurs and their businesses is often so tight and all-encompassing that they can make the easy mistake of confusing who they are as people with what they do for a living. They lose sight of some of the more important things that distinguish earning a living from having a life. And because they take the ups and downs of business so personally, there's virtually no separation between work and what little time is left for the rest of their life (not to mention family and friends). Everything suffers as a result.

We're constantly rushing from one thing to the next. All of us, all of the time. The days are ever longer and the nights are even worse. I call it a life of "playing the entire game in overtime." You might be kidding yourself and calling it masterful multi-tasking, but I'd say it's mostly just a mess. We're constantly trying to make time for everything and we're discovering that not only is this an impossible dream, but we end up spending too much of our time on the urgent, rather than the important. We lose sight of what really matters in our lives and businesses. Our inboxes (calls, emails and especially texts) are driving us instead of the other way around. You'll never get into the flow if you're fighting non-stop fires all day long.

For the last year or two, it's been fairly easy for the naysayers to continually predict the imminent demise of Facebook. The latest rants focus on the alleged slippage in the sharing by FB users of their "personal" news and details. For me, even if true, this falls somewhere between "who really cares anyway?" and "TMI" to begin with. There's plenty of this kind of crap to go around and we should all actually be grateful to hear that the over-sharing is abating even if Kayne and the Kardashians are still killing us with just their shameless alliteration alone.

I can't tell you how often I'm in a conversation or presentation with a major corporation's senior management team and the first topic to arise is frustration with a lack of effective internal communication and information sharing.

Technology columnist Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times recently argued that the UBER model doesn't translate very well and can't be reliably  applied to the thousands of businesses that have rapidly appeared in virtually every industry claiming to be the "UBER" of whatever. He thinks these companies are being started and run by people who are either irrational or sadly deluded and that a massive shakeout looms. There's one UBER and that's UBER-- end of story. He's not entirely wrong, but his view is too simplistic.

There's no question that there's a power and many advantages to being the first mover in a new market, along with a like number of potential downsides that require careful navigation. I've written about both aspects of this "advantage" previously and it remains a complex area to figure out. See http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/first-mover-advantage-maybe-but-be-smart-about-it.html.  And I also appreciate that the conventional wisdom suggests, in almost every tech-based or tech-enabled business, that markets over time will tend to become "winner take all" or "winner take most" in which a single player dominates. See http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/future-of-content-marketing-simplereach.html .

Not every solution or app needs to set the entire world on fire or to be built on a platform just slightly less grand than the Taj Mahal. It's not always "smart" to build your app to run on the hottest and newest smart phone and nowhere else. You might get some buzz and some early adopters, but being in the shiny new thing biz isn't the path to building a big business when ready access and broad availability trump haptic feedback, VR capabilities and other gee whiz features. Mass ultimately always matters--there are millions more Fords than Ferraris-- and when the real value and design of your business is to touch and impact as many people as possible, the lower the bar to use and adoption, the better.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling you get when your intuition pays off and people behave exactly as you predicted (and hoped for or dreaded) or when things turn out precisely as you expected. You could also call these moments the result of educated guesses or extra-sensory perceptions. However you describe the process, the exhilaration’s exactly the same. It’s always a rush to be right.