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

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

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

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he wrote, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.” Of course, vanishing into the woods isn’t a realistic option for most of us. Some might even say it smacks of running fr

“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

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

Emily Dickinson said it about the printed word, but it could as easily apply to the other arts as well: There is no frigate like a book To take us lands away, Nor any coursers like a page Of prancing poetry. This traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of toll; How frugal is the chariot That bears a human soul!

diagnosis. But his music lives on through his recordings and the memories of those who heard him. I encourage you to join that circle. A good starting place is The Jazz Channel Presents Kenny Rankin. And especially his heartrending version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” (Watch the DVD once and you’ll have to own it.) This is what it means to ha

I know of no better nutshell statement of the path to finding one’s true calling in life than the simple formula given by Aristotle: Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation. These two, your talents and the needs of the world, are the great wake-up calls to your true vocation in life. To ignore either is, in som