Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion. Opinions are easy to produce, so bad ones abound. Knowing that you don't know something is nearly as valuable as knowing it. The worst situation is thinking you know something when you don't.

Don't be a perfectionist, because perfectionists often spend too much time on little differences at the margins at the expense of other big, important things. Be an effective imperfectionist. Solutions that broadly work well (e.g., how people should contact each other in the event of crises) are generally better than highly specialized solutions (e.g., how each person should contact each other in the event of every conceivable crisis).

Meditation helps you stay in a calm, clear-headed state so that when challenges come at you, you can deal with them like a ninja - in a calm thoughtful way. When you're centered, your emotions are not hijacking you.

I'd like to be clear that a number of people find me intolerable, and they don't hesitate to say so - which they and I cherish.

If you have the power to see things through somebody else's eyes, it's like going from black and white to color or two dimensions to three dimensions.

I also believe that everyone needs to think independently and make their own decisions on what makes the most sense.

I'm just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.