Rationing Attention

Rationing Attention

A different perspective:

extracting value from porn is more straight forward than extracting value from a video about particle physics.

People in sales are often very good at extracting value from wide ranges of content - they expose themselves to a wide range of ideas and learn how to talk with people with different interests as a living. They know how to survive on an omnivorous diet of content.

We need to ration our attention not because our time is limited, but because our ways of life are so specialized that we are unable to extract value from resources that do not fit certain specifications. We live within niches that reward the creation of value that matches the expectations of that specific niche.

What if the world changes at a rate where these niches are invented and abandoned faster than one can specialize?

I propose the opposite: the most important skill of the future is the enterprise of adaptation: to spend minimum effort and time to extract value from readily available information and satisfactorily respond to needs before they change or disappear.