Borges: How to Remember Everything You Read

Key wellness / self-care / productivity strategies highlighted

• Reframe “remembering” as selective forgetting

  • Forgetting isn’t a failure—it’s a necessary function of the mind.
  • Trying to remember everything can become harmful (described as “paralysis”).

• Let forgetting reveal your values

  • What you forget tends to reflect what you care about (your priorities and identity).
  • Instead of blaming memory, examine what your attention is rewarding.

• Optimize priorities to improve what stays in mind

  • If your priorities are misaligned (you focus on what’s not truly important), you’ll tend to remember the wrong things and let important ones slip.
  • Actionable takeaway: “Readjust your priorities and your memory will follow.”

• Avoid note/organization obsession

  • The speaker objects to productivity content that promises you can “organize notes so you remember everything.”
  • Notes/notebooks are presented as thinking spaces, not just storage systems.

• Use the Borges lesson to reduce cognitive overload

  • Perfect recall without the ability to generalize makes everyday life unbearable and thought impossible.
  • The video implicitly encourages mental simplification: generalize/abstract so thinking remains possible.

Core idea in one line

• For better cognition (and arguably wellbeing), prioritize what matters and allow forgetting of what doesn’t.

Presenters or sources

• The video narrator/speaker (unnamed in the subtitles; cites multiple works and discusses his channel/Substack)
• William James (American philosopher and psychologist)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Montaigne (Michel de Montaigne)