With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.

Money actually becomes even more difficult than other things because it's very hard to imagine what the benefits are to saving. So, imagine that you see a new bicycle, a new pair of shoes, or something today. You know exactly what you are giving up if you are not buying it, what are you gaining in the future if you are not getting it. So, you are giving up the bicycle today, what is it in the future? What will happen if you send another $1,000 to your retirement fund? What difference will it make? It is very, very hard to figure out.

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

I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier. We're less productive as individuals. We're less productive as companies, and we're more miserable.

Imagine you owe on five credit cards, you owe five debts. So which debt should you pay first? And the answer is very simple: You should pay the one with the highest interest rate first. But that's not what people do.

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

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