Exactly what my parents left me: the knowledge of the difference between good and bad and right and wrong. Everything else is entirely up to them.

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

A bushel of self-confidence.

I’d like them to inherit my optimism.

Thank goodness, too. Because that was a long-term investment in myself.

deli counter attendant (I was terrible at this and hated smelling like cold cuts after work, despite how much my dog liked it), FedEx warehouse grunt (great exercise, though not very mentally stimulating), and parking booth attendant (get paid to read books? Yes, please! Until the robots replace humans, that is).

Being an entrepreneur was the best decision I could’ve made, because not having a boss gave me the freedom to make my family a priority without compromising my work.

I'm lucky now because I get to see firsthand someone who is one-of-a-kind at her craft

That really crystallized for me what some really passionate founders who could write some code could do to change things, and this gave me the confidence to say, “You know what? They can do this. We can definitely do this.” ... So without a doubt, Reddit would not exist if it weren’t for Masters of Doom.

Growing up, I had the words “lives remaining: 0” written on the wall of my room. If life were a video game, that’s how it’d indicate this is the only chance left.