Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.

1. Mortimer Adler on drudgework
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to work simply for the money sometimes.

“Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.” – Mortimer Adler

I’ve turned the regular fluctuation of gas prices at the gas station fairly near our home (the one mentioned yesterday) into a game of sorts with my oldest son.

Simply put, we’ve started tracking the data.

We watch for the price of gas on that sign each time we drive by it, then we mention whether it has gone up or down recently.

Whenever I spend time thinking about my life, I get caught up in a lot of ideals. I think about writing a great novel. I think about some volunteer projects I’d like to work on. I think about the house I’d like to build and the great travel I’d love to do in the next ten or fifteen years. I think about my own physical fitness and I think about riding in RAGBRAI.

These are wonderful dreams. I enjoy taking little steps toward them because, honestly, I usually enjoy the process.

Fridays are typically “Ask the Readers” days at Get Rich Slowly, but today I’m doing something a little different. I’ve made a couple of big revelations lately, and those have generated a lot of questions. Today, I’ll answer a handful of these questions in order to give an outline of how I’m managing my money.

There’s a lot to be said about the discipline it took to be conscious spender (and saver) even after a windfall. How did you do this?

Readers will scarcely have given any thought to the fact that they have never lived in the system of government argued for by Madison, Jay, and Hamilton in the Federalist Papers.