People with good work habits have to-do lists that are reasonably prioritized, and they make themselves do what needs to be done. By contrast, people with poor work habits almost randomly react to the stuff that comes at them, or they can't bring themselves to do the things they need to do but don't like to do (or are unable to do).

I pay about a third in taxes, I give away about a third, and I follow the law.

You should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don't know what the future is going to hold.

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.

What I'm trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand there's inflation and growth - it can go higher and lower - and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your total portfolio that gets you balanced.

I believe that our society's "mistake-phobia" is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning.

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).