There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.

When you're in pain, tomorrow doesn't exist - just the pain - and the only thing that you want in the world is for it to go away.

You can think about life as a battle between you and a doughnut shop. The doughnut shop wants you to eat another doughnut and pay the money, and you want to do it in the short term, but in the long term it's not good for you either financially or from a health perspective.

Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that's something you can't spend on something else.

When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it - meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.

Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you're not prepared for that, it's going to be really terrible.

...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.