doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate. - Morgan Housel

Someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy. But the only data point you have about their wealth is that they have $100,000 less than they did before they bought the car (or $100,000 more in debt). That's all you know about them.

We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that's the (self-edit: only) information we have in front of us.

When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird? Rockefeller was a strange guy. But he figured out something that now applies to tens of millions of workers. Rockefeller’s job wasn’t to drill wells, load trains, or move barrels. It was to think and make good decisions. Rockefeller’s product — his deliverable — wasn’t what he did with his hands, or even his words. It was what he figured out inside his head. So that’s where

Comfortably living below what you can afford, without much desire for more, removes a tremendous amount of social pressure that many people in the modern first world subject themselves to. Nassim Taleb explained: “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.” I like that.