There is giant untapped potential in disagreement, especially if the disagreement is between two or more thoughtful people

Principles are what allow you to live a life consistent with those values. Principles connect your values to your actions.

In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.

Pull in your belt, spend less, and reduce debt.

To have an idea meritocracy, one needs to do three things. First, they have to put their honest thoughts on the table, for everyone to look at and everyone to work through. Second, they need to have thoughtful disagreement, by which there are quality exchanges, in which there's open mindedness and the realization that no one has all the right answers. And you can work through that and get to better answers because good collective decision making is better than any individual decision making. And third, you have to have ways of getting past the disagreements if they remain.

Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.

People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony.