one way of getting me to read the rest of an article is to have the first paragraph be a capsule summary of a large swath of my life

"In this lecture I shall focus on situations involving repeated decisions with time-inconsistent behavior. Although each choice may be close to maximizing and therefore result in only small losses, the cumulative effect of a series of repeated errors may be quite large. Thus, in my examples, decision makers are quite close to the intelligent, well-informed individuals usually assumed in economic analysis, but cumulatively they make seriously wrong decisions that do not occure in standard textbook economics." -- George A. Akerlof, "Procrastination and Obedience," American Economic Review, 1991.