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've learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective.

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

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

I found that whenever I encountered a situation, rather than just reacting to it, it was tremendously useful to think carefully about how I should react to it and other situations like it. Besides providing me with more thoughtful responses in each of these cases, approaching things this way provided me and others with guidance on how to deal with similar situations when they came up in the future.

Don't worry about looking good - worry about achieving your goals.

I believe that understanding what is good is obtained by looking at the way the world works and figuring out how to operate in harmony with it to help it evolve.