Join Goodreads

and meet your next favorite book!

Sign Up Now
More on this book
View notes and highlights from other community members.
4%
Scarcity captures the mind.
9%
Just as in the thought experiment above, the group with tighter deadlines was more productive.
9%
When time is short, you get more out of it, be it work or pleasure. We call this the focus dividend—the positive outcome of scarcity capturing the mind.
10%
The focus dividend—heightened productivity when facing a deadline or the accuracy advantage of the blueberry poor—comes from our core mechanism: scarcity captures the mind. The word capture here is essential: this happens unavoidably and beyond our control. Scarcity allows us to do something we could not do easily on our own.
11%
Focusing on one thing means neglecting other things.
11%
Focus is a positive: scarcity focuses us on what seems, at that moment, to matter most. Tunneling is not: scarcity leads us to tunnel and neglect other, possibly more important, things.
12%
This is a basic feature of the mind: focusing on one thing inhibits competing concepts. Inhibition is what happens when you are angry with someone, and it is harder to remember their good traits: the focus on the annoying traits inhibits positive memories.
12%
Focusing on something that matters to you makes you less able to think about other things you care about. Psychologists call this goal inhibition.