What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you're creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.

Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.

...[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.

Money are very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota?

We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things — our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we’re not going to do better.

Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there's a good reason for that.

Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea - whether it’s about politics or sports - what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology - rigid and unyielding.