If you've got to work for the rest of your life, you'd better do something you'll enjoy.

You have to worry about where the business is headed long-term.

It doesn't do Costco any good if nobody can afford to buy anything.

You could raise the price of, say, a bottle of ketchup to $1.03 instead of $1, and no one would know. Raising prices just 3% per product would add 50% to your pretax income. Why not do it? It's like heroin: You do a little and you want a little bit more. Raising prices is the easy way.

You just can't get too focused on worrying about what's going to happen in the next quarter. You have to worry about where the business is headed long-term.

You take an educated gamble. If you don't occasionally make a mistake, you're not doing your job.

If somehow a proclamation were made that C.E.O.'s could only make a maximum of $300,000 a year, you would not have any shortage of very qualified men and women seeking the jobs.