More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don't is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively

Ironically, people who suppress the mini-confrontations for fear of conflict tend to have huge conflicts later, which can lead to separation, precisely because they let minor problems fester. On the other hand, people who address the mini-conflicts head-on in order to straighten things out tend to have the great, long-lasting relationships.

Almost everything is like a machine.

When you're faced with a choice, you have one of three choices that you can have. You can have those with power decide. You can have one man, one vote. Or you can have believability-weighted decision-making.

Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.

A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn't dramatic.

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.