What you should do is wait until the end of each month, and then say, "OK, how much money do I have? How much do I need? Let me send the rest to retirement."

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

I don't think we should go around life and being miserable all the time and feel the pain of paying. It's a question of what categories we want to spend more on and what categories we want feel that we are spending too much on and we want to cut down.

The things that motivate us are to help other people, to feel that we're useful, to feel that we're getting better, to feel that we are kind of living to our potential, to get a sense of meaning. All of those things are positive.

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.

That’s a lesson we can all learn: the more we have, the more we want. And the only cure is to break the cycle of relativity.

The people who need to overcome temptation to the highest degree have the hardest time doing it.