Do you think you are successful? Ambitious? In this era, when our economic ecosystem stares in the face of fabulous failure, our own personal successes and ambitions can become much more powerfully luminous to each of us. My own lens on ambition was profoundly refocused about 15 years ago when I visited India and took the opportunity to meet a spiritual philosopher - a budding Deepak Chopra, if you will.

Are you kidding me? Those words reverberated in my head upon reading a recent column in this magazine. The piece, "Don't Give Up Just Yet" (October 2008), reported on a major study conducted by Yankelovich and Sequent Partners that revealed what was posited as a silver lining amidst the storm clouds facing traditional media today: Despite their rapid migration to new media, consumers like - and are more responsive to - advertising in traditional channels. The author, J. Walker Smith, suggested this finding might be a reason not to lose faith in old-school media quite yet.

When i first heard the premise of mad men it made me, well - mad. Set in 1960s New York, the sexy, stylized and provocative amc drama follows the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue advertising, an ego-driven world where key players make an art of the sell.

In honor of the month that brings us valentine's day, I'm dedicating this column to creating a meaningful connection - between your left brain and your right brain. Though not exactly a tale of romance, you may find your customers showing you some love as a result.

Remember the days when technology belonged to adults? Parents would shop for it, buy it, install it, and caution the kids not to break it. Today, children are the technology experts. They are teaching their parents about new technologies and how to use them. They are the digital natives, and they are leaving the rest of us behind. In some ways, technology is the new generation gap.

Long before constructing 108-inch flat-screen, liquid-crystal display televisions became de rigueur among electronics companies, the picture box was, indeed, just a box.

Hal Holbrook looks as if he is going to cry. The 89-year-old veteran actor may have good reason. He stares directly into the camera, delivering his lines with the gravitas he might employ when playing a u.s. president informing his nation's people they have only hours to ive before a meteor destroys the earth. He pauses melodramatically between each clause, his voicecatching - at times, even breaking - and invites you to linger on his glassy eyes, welling with tears.

Live, from the Internet ... it's Saturday Night Live (and everything else once relegated to the boob tube). The Hulu-YouTube-MySpace world of viewing video and commercials anytime on any screen is ready for primetime. Television, the living room shrine to a fading broadcast age, has become just one of countless screens in a broadband universe of smartphones, iPods and iPhones, video game consoles, laptops and cable set-top box servers. Students no longer lug tv sets up to their dorm rooms, because they can connect monitors to high-speed networks for any video imaginable.

Turning the old axiom on its head, digital signage is proving that what goes up must go higher. Walgreens' new signage system at One Times Square is the biggest video display ever built. "We took inspiration from the traditional billboard style, along with a healthy dose of influence from Blade Runner and Minority Report," says Greg Tribbe, managing director for the display's designer, the Gilmore Group.

I don't know the process most editors of monthly magazines use to write their columns, but I will confess that I normally wait until my copy deadline is imminent, and write about what happens to be on my mind at that time. I know what you're thinking: It usually reads that way. Sorry about that. But this month I'm writing about something that's been on my mind for nearly 30-years, or maybe even my whole life.