My 6 Rules of Money

In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He wrote: No one—not a single person out of a thousand—said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want.

What they did value were things like quality friendships, being part of something bigger than themselves, and spending quality, unstructured time with their children.

But before you abandon all hope, I have good news: satisfaction is possible—just not with the old formulas. We need to toss out all that bad math and use this one equation instead, which incorporates the wisdom of Siddhartha and Thomas and the best modern social science: Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want Your satisfaction is what you hav