Babies have not yet chunked anything. They aren't doing any high level thinking. All they're doing is sucking in all the data they experience in the world around them, and remembering it, raw. It's basically what extreme savants have happen in their brains.

Super fidelity requires constant investment and discipline, but great companies know how to do that.

Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

From about ninth grade on, I knew I was a writer at heart. I had fantasies of being a great novelist, but I thought that seemed like an iffy way to try to make a living. So I tried journalism while in college, and really liked it. But even in journalism, I've always pursued ways to be somewhat literary, whether writing a column or writing books.

Every purchasing decision involves a trade-off between what I call fidelity and convenience. Fidelity is the total experience of something - how great the experience is. Convenience is how easy it is to get something. A live concert is a high fidelity way to experience music; an MP3 file is a high convenience way to experience music. Depending on the situation, one or the other is probably pretty appealing. What's not appealing is something that offers neither.

Chunking is the ability of the brain to learn from data you take in, without having to go back and access or think about all that data every time. As a kid learning how to ride a bike, for instance, you have to think about everything you're doing. You're brain is taking in all that data, and constantly putting it together, seeing patterns, and chunking them together at a higher level. So eventually, when you get on a bike, your brain doesn't have to think about how to ride a bike anymore. You've chunked bike riding.

If you want to stand out, find a way to be either high fidelity or high convenience in whatever you do. If you're halfway in between on both measures, you're not going to make people feel very excited about you.