“There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.”

Radical transparency fosters goodness in so many ways for the same reasons that bad things are more likely to take place behind closed doors.

The big question is: When will the term structure of interest rates change? That’s the question to be worried about.

Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.

People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don’t know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediments in the future.

Remember that experience creates internalization. Doing things repeatedly leads to internalization, which produces a quality of understanding that is generally vastly superior to intellectualized learning.

Forget about what the technology is. Just understand the motivation behind it.

The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you’ll be.

I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity and to despise the lack of it.

Successful people ask for the criticism of others and consider its merit.

What matters most is that the people you work with share your values.

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.

The media has the power to create an entrenched perception of reality that’s incorrect.

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.

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.

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.