It would be pretty awesome if we all had plenty of mental energy to stay motivated and disciplined all day long, to be highly productive and highly creative whenever we needed, and to always feel vibrant and optimistic about the future.

However, the more you try to control elements of your life – whether it is to improve your health, wealth, social life or whatever – the more apparent it is how finite and scarce this “mental energy” can be.

In particular, it seems that whenever we use willpower – in any form and for any reason – we are using up resources from this pool of mental energy, much faster than the pool is replenished.

Psychologists have carried out plenty of experiments that strongly appear to confirm this model of willpower – Jason Shen and Sebastian recently put together a great post about it here: http://sebastianmarshall.com/developing-willpower-by-jason-shen which is very much worth reading if you haven't already!

Psychologists have also shown[1] that decisions on matters that affect us can deplete the same mental resource as willpower. In some sense, these decisions and willpower are the same:

This September I was a competitor in the Mental Calculation World Cup, and much of what I learnt there about the mind and skills may be interesting for a wide audience, including readers of Sebastian's blog.

To set the scene, it’s the world’s toughest arithmetic competition, held every 2 years. Around 30-40 people from all around the world qualify to compete, some of whom dedicate much of their lives to arithmetic, while others – such as myself – have careers in other fields, such as software or education.

Usually when people hear about mental gymnastics, such as arithmetic or memory, the story is about some particular savant with a single-minded obsession for numbers. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the entrants were exactly the opposite, with many interests, almost treating life like one giant party.

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About a year ago, I stumbled upon this competition – and some past scoreboards – after an idle Google search, and wondered whether I could train myself up to a similar standard. At first, it seemed unlikely – I was making too many mistakes. One of the tasks is to solve multiplications of the form: 84505395 x29817723, without writing down anything except for the answer. If you make an error in any of the one hundred and twenty-seven steps, then your answer will be wrong. Perhaps I needed to concentrate better?