Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.
Attention is psychic energy, and like physical energy, unless we allocate some part of it to the task at hand, no work gets done.
Giving something your time isn't the same as giving it your attention.
Brains are an asset, if you hide them.
It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge. And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth.
Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.
With knowledge now the key raw material for creating all economic wealth, the new power struggles will reach deep into our minds and our personal lives. That's why we believe the only empire that will survive in the 21st century will be the empire you build within your own mind.
Your ego-depletion seems problematically difficult to assuage.
The richest minds need not large libraries.
Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources - psychologists call them working memory and executive control - that we use in nearly every activity.
Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.
The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.
The conscious mind can only pay attention to about four things at once. If you've got these nagging voices in your head telling you to remember to pick up the laundry and call so-and-so, they're competing in your brain for neural resources with the stuff you're actually trying to do, like getting your work done.
Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches.
I don't want to say that the poor are inherently cognitively diminished, but at the end of the day of making difficult, tough decisions, it's very hard to have the energy to think about things with the right mindset.
Knowledge and know-how are the real sources of value and riches. You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you can set for yourself.
