The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness

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.

A takeaway here is that few things matter more with money than understanding your own time horizon and not being persuaded by the actions and behaviors of people playing different games than you are.

There are a million ways to get wealthy, and plenty of books on how to do so. But there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.