Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way.

Since the only way you are going to find solutions to painful problems is by thinking deeply about them - i.e., reflecting - if you can develop a knee-jerk reaction to pain that is to reflect rather than to fight or flee, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving.

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That's a beautiful deleveraging.

For every mistake that you learn from you will save thousands of similar mistakes in the future, so if you treat mistakes as learning opportunities that yield rapid improvements you should be excited by them. But if you treat them as bad things, you will make yourself and others miserable, and you won't grow.

To test if you are worrying too much about looking good, observe how you feel when you find out you've made a mistake or don't know something.

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.

Success is not in obtaining the thing. Because there's always another thing. And then you look back on it, and for me, through my evolution, yes I have success by most measures - but for me, when it comes to the greatest joy of reward, there's an emotional element and there's an intellectual element. Emotionally, my greatest joy was the personal relationships I've had. That was the greatest joy. Intellectually, my satisfaction was that I do feel I've evolved well and I'm doing my best to contribute toward evolution.