Beyond Wealth

astronomer Carl Sagan devised an ingenious illustration. He called it his “Cosmic Calendar.” And it provides a lesson in humility. Here’s how it works: Imagine that the 13.7-billion-year history of the universe is compressed into one calendar year. The Big Bang occurred in the very first second of January 1, and the current moment is the last secon

“Anything else you worship,” argued David Foster Wallace at a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, “will almost certainly eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. . . . Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, an

Last week, I read journalist David Lipsky’s recently published collection of conversations with David Foster Wallace, the brilliant young writer whose Infinite Jest made the Time list of 100 All-Time Greatest Novels. (Wallace battled depression for years and, tragically, hanged himself in 2008. It was a tremendous loss for his family and friends, b

The local library offers all the world’s greatest books—with no waiting list. (If you’re unsure where to begin, pick up a guide like The New Lifetime Reading Plan.) Most enduring works can be downloaded for free. For a few dollars, you can own high-quality, digital recordings of the world’s greatest music performed by the finest symphony orchestras

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich . . . to study hard, to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common—this is m

Pythagoras, the sixth-century bc philosopher and mathematician, asked that his followers take time, before going to sleep each night, to pose three questions: What have I done? Where have I failed myself? What responsibility have I not fulfilled?

As physicist Paul Davies writes in The Goldilocks Enigma (Allen Lane, 2006): Somehow the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but also its own comprehension. Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make not just life, but understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are able not merely to watch the show, but to unr

Knowledge is learning something every day. Wisdom is letting go of something every day.)

Norman Vincent Peale got it half right. Positive visualization helps you get what you want. Negative visualization helps you want what you get.

Yet every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.