But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?

Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.

When people are in severe pain, there's an expression, you're a "pain person," and what that means is that nothing else matters.

When parents have college savings accounts for their kids, their kids show higher social and cognitive performance.

In total, by giving people $30 bonus, Intel lost almost 5 percent of productivity. That's a lot. Now, think about it. You give money because you think this would increase motivation. It actually decreases motivation.

The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "Uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations.

We can think about how we reduce the pain in paying. So, for example, credit cards are wonderful mechanisms to reduce the pain of paying. If you go to a restaurant and you are paying cash, you would feel much worse than if you were paying with credit card. Why? You know the price, there's no surprise, but if you're paying cash, you feel a bit more guilt.