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I’ve come to find that I trust short news stories very little. The little segments that you hear on news breaks on the radio or on cable news programs are often so short that all you hear are a few selected elements of a story and that rarely gives you the full picture, and most of it is completely useless and uninformative.

Over and over again, I find that the real story doesn’t become apparent until you dig in a little bit – much longer than a shouting-filled interview segment or a news blurb.

I’d rather spend an hour learning about one issue with some depth than spend that same hour learning only a selected little piece of a bunch of different stores.

How I Kept Saving Even During a Job Loss It’s all about keeping your eyes on the prize. (@ get rich slowly)

Recently, I found myself browsing through a book called Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman. The idea behind the book is that an optimistic approach is the best way to handle the problems that life throws at us.

I was particularly struck by Seligman’s comparison of how optimists and pessimists handle problems.

In Seligman’s view, pessimists respond to negative events by explaining them with what he calls “the three P’s” – permanent, personal, and pervasive. If you fail at something, it’s because of something you can’t change (permanent), some inherent characteristic of yourself (personal), and/or something that is woven into the fabric of life (pervasive). In other words, a pessimist views failure as a normal outcome and fighting to overcome failure is pointless because of the three P’s.

Right at the start of my professional career, an old friend of mine sat down with me and gave me some advice that I didn’t pay much attention to at the time, to my regret. I thought enough about it to jot it down in my journal a couple times during the late summer of 2002, but I didn’t really pick up on what he was saying.

This friend of mine told me that there are two things you can spend your money on. You either spend your money on assets, which he defined as things that bring a return on that money, or you spend it on liabilities, which he defined as things that don’t bring a return on that money.

Liabilities, he told me, aren’t necessarily useless. A lot of a person’s living expenses are liabilities – food and clothing are both liabilities because they don’t bring a return on the money you spend.

Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where [...] you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the music that you really love, even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects. – Joseph Campbell

I love playing tabletop games. There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around a table with friends new and old, playing a game together. The puzzle of the game makes my brain cells work a little, but the social interaction with the people around the table makes it sublime. For me, that’s one of my “bliss stations.” It really brings me joy.