Discourse Part 3 page 14

In Descartes Method Part 3 it seems that Descarte was mainly talking about his life and the idea that living to make a fortune or living to learn something in order to better establish your financial position, was not a life worth living for him. He says on page 14 section (22) "My third maxim was always to try to conquer myself than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world, and generally to accustom myself to believing that there is nothing that is completely within our power except our thoughts, so that, after we have done our best regarding things external to us, everything that is lacking for us to succeed is, from our point of view, absolutely impossible."  The section that I bolded above really stands out in terms of what he is saying, not just because I bolded it, I believe what he is saying is that we can only do so much in our lifetime and spending it on expanding any fortune is a waist of time depending on our positions. We must concentrait on bettering ourselves and others around us while in the meanwhile expanding our knowledge of life so we do not become ignorant of the things more important than money and material things. After a certain point in our lives where we can literally see that there isen't any further we can go we must stop because as he says it is "absolutely impossible".