thoughts from 'inner economist'

Scarcity of attention -- In our everyday life, umpteen things fight for our attention.  Hence we need to force ourselves to keep paying attention at every moment and not fall into the humdrum of daily routine.  

We must cultivate a habit of making such mental training a habit, so that we critique, analyse fast in this age of information overload.  It is too easy to go with the flow and do as you are told, which leads to the lack of mental exercise.  We must force ourselves to distill key feature of what is presented to us in the moment without delay, and keep at such until it becomes a habit, a second nature.  And especially so because while some things / services are there to make you happy (because customer satisfaction = returning customers), some things in life are not there with such a primary purpose of satisfying you.  Hence there is a need to pay attention and derive your own takeaways - i.e., engage your mind to think and analyse fast when you are presented with the facts/artifacts/proposals etc.