Save for impressing strangers at parties, knowing (and being able to recite) a bunch of facts isn’t all that useful. Why? Because we live in an age where facts can be found in our pockets in less than 30-seconds.

On this note, I love the story about Albert Einstein being asked how many feet are in a mile. The genius drew a blank...

“Why should I fill my brain with useless facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?”

If you are doing creative work (and I consider Einstein’s work to be creative), you’re far better off getting good at generating ideas rather than memorizing facts. Memorization requires an exorbitant amount of cognitive energy. If you were to spend your days attempting to memorize every digit in PIE after 3.14, you would have very little mental bandwidth available to generate new ideas.

Because ideas are original, they can’t be birthed from memory. They’re birthed from thinking, yes, but a sort of detached thinking that looks more like play.