Dollars and Sense

Once you have a mug, you don’t want to give it up. But if you don’t have one, you don’t feel an urgent need to buy one. What this means is that people do not assign specific values to objects; it often matters whether they are selling or buying.

Now the payment streams reversed: instead of charging astronomical licensing fees, record companies paid DJs to play particular songs.* The first type of mistake businesses often make is that they misjudge the relationship between two products, seeing them as substitutes when they are, in fact, complements. In hindsight, we see things more clearly,

The clearer we can be in our own minds as to our true passions, the more we can start to see money (and the socially sanctioned praise it brings with it) from a realistic perspective. Money is a mechanism or a means that, at best, enables us to do the things we love, nothing more or less. It is not, or should not, be a route to liking ourselves, or

“We discovered an excellent dish at that restaurant and we never try anything else, to avoid regret.” “The salesperson showed me the most expensive car seat and said it was the safest, and I could not bring myself to buy the cheaper model. It felt like a taboo tradeoff.”