What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid

curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at

random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up

entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always

asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of

drying up, curiosity be... See more

The word "aptitude" is misleading,

because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of

aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests

are often acquired tastes.

If you're small, you're in a position where it's to your advantage to be weird—you can have a point of view that the big tech companies never could. In the world of chairs—you're not going to build a cheaper chair than Ikea. Why not build something they couldn't—like a more interesting one?

In a recent series of studies at Cornell University, psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Clayton Critcher asked participants to think about what they'd be doing if they weren't in the lab: Some were asked to think about leisure, others about obligations. Then, all participants completed a jigsaw puzzle. Afterward, they were asked if their minds had w... See more

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently

trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having

fun. That's why he's so good.

"Boredom has at its core the desiring of satisfying engagement but not being able to achieve that," Eastwood said. "And attention is the cognitive process whereby we interface with both the external world and our internal thoughts and feelings. So it falls logically that attention must be at the core of the definition."

Problems should come from success, or being on the brink of success rather than being invented by some intellectual quest.