Anthony Metivier's Blog, page 36
December 17, 2015
Dave Farrow Talks About Focus, Fatigue And Memory Expertise
[image error]In this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast, Guinness World Record Holder Dave Farrow talks about developing focus, overcoming study fatigue and how advanced memory abilities can make you an expert in anything.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
* Why the Ancient Greeks are not the only source of powerful memory techniques.
* An amazing focus method for people with A.D.D. that’ll also work for anyone!
* How to beat any world memory record and maintain the information over long periods of time.
* The important of accuracy in memory and how to develop it fast.
* How Dave memorized 59 decks of cards, totally 3068 cards.
* The important difference between a memory championship and memory competition.
* The nearly magical power of pegs as a powerful alternative to using a Memory Palace.
* The secrets of bring longevity to memory without having to cram or spend tons of time reviewing.
* A stunning and colorful alternative to the Major Method, especially for people with dementia using an arrangement like this (you can create your own version):
1 = red
2 = orange
3 = yellow
4 = green
5 = blue
6 = purple
7 = brown
8 = silver
9 = gold
0 = black
* Exactly how to memorize the Major Method (sometimes called the Major System) using “mnemonics for mnemonics.”
* How to use memory techniques to “fill in the gaps” of anything you missed from a lecture.
* How to deal with being accused of cheating when you use memory techniques to ace every test.
* How to rebalance your brain after intense periods of learning so that you can maximize every minute you invest in your studies.
* How to study with zero fatigue, no matter what field you’re in (medical, legal, etc.)
* The relationship between the focus created by athleticism and what you need to maximize your scholastic studies.
* Why having a short attention span has little to do with the Internet Age and everything to do with our primal ancestors.
* The best places to study so that you have the space and the freedom of mind to get the most out of your memory.
* How to combine focus bursts and mnemonics to blaze through learning a language – even supposedly difficult languages like Chinese.
* Why you need to avoid memory techniques taught by people unqualified to explain them.
* How to find out your primary way of making imaginative connections so that mnemonics work for you at the highest possible level.
* The power of irony, oddity and personification as alternatives to action and imagery in your approach to memorizing information.
* How Dave used memory techniques to become expert in everything needed to build the animatronic FarrowBOT with fully articulated hands. It truly is the robot that memory built.
* The secret keys to developing motivation and passion so that you can make maximum gains with your memory over the long haul.
* … and much, much more!
Photos From Dave Farrow’s 2015 Canadian Memory Seminar And Tournament
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The 2015 Seminar and Memory Tournament took place on October 17th in Toronto, Canada at the Ontario Science Center.
Please feel free to read the full . You can also grab the Dave put together with Chester Santos for more information about being a memory competitor or putting together your own competition.
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At the competition, anyone can take turns being either a competitor or a judge. It’s amazing how quickly complete beginners pick up the mnemonics and get stunning results just minutes after receiving instructions in how to memorize vocabulary, numbers and playing cards. Even the most skeptical utterly surprised themselves!
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As you can see, I was having the time of my life overseeing some of the matches. It was actually a challenging experience because judges have to make some tough close calls. If one competitor makes a mistake, the other competitor can claim the point and then go on to rack up even more until they’ve exhausted the amount of vocabulary, numbers or playing cards they were able to memorize.
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These competitors are memorizing lists of vocabulary that they are seeing for the first time. A camera captures everything and detailed records of the results are recorded by the judge.
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At the end, everyone walks away as a winner just for taking up the challenge of exercising their imagination and memory abilities and it is a thrill to get a photo with the “Farrow” of Memory himself, Dave Farrow.
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Further Resources And Information Mentioned During The Interview
Dave Farrow article on Wikipedia
Eric Dinnerstein’s World Memory Statistics
PAO notes on the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast
December 3, 2015
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
[image error]Let me ask you something:
If you had the cure for cancer, to what lengths would you go to get it into the hands of the people?
I’m guessing you would not rest until you could see the world freed from the disease in all its manifestations.
Matteo Ricci did not have the cure for cancer, but he did have the next best thing: A simple recipe for eliminating forgetfulness.
Not only that, but Ricci’s recipe helps with memorizing entire books and large volumes of vocabulary. Most impressively, Ricci developed a means for memorizing how to write in Chinese.
Yes, you really can memorize how to understand and sound those crazy characters, and even memorize the stroke order.
The Freakish Willpower Of A Memory Wizard
As an Italian Jesuit priest and missionary, Ricci’s memory techniques were so powerful that some of the people in China who heard him recite their books forward and backward thought he was a wizard. In some cases, people saw him as a religious threat because Ricci also believed he had the ultimate salve for the human condition: Christianity.
Indeed, as Jonathan D. Spence suggests in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, “by impressing the Chinese with his memory skills, Ricci hoped to interest them in his culture; through interesting them in his culture he hoped to draw them to an interest in God.”
Talk About Ambition!
Although Ricci’s proselytization had only middling results in China, he was a friend of memory techniques, and we can learn a lot from him about how to use mnemonics at a much higher level.
He wrote about his approach to memory and quoted the scholars from whom he learned the Memory Palace technique in a book called Jifa.
But as with all interesting lives, Ricci’s was filled with drama. Along with his many thrills, chills and spills, this “wizard” of the dark mnemonic arts we can learn …
The Many Dangers Of Using Memory Techniques
The first danger with using memory techniques is that as your memory grows stronger, so do your powers. You may even find that special new powers grow, abilities that you did not anticipate.
And, as all fans of Spider-Man know …
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
This is certainly true, but those of us living today can probably ignore the idea that using mnemonics fuses your brain with the cosmos. But it was a common concern in the sixteenth century, the flames of which Giordano Bruno had no problem fanning.
But for Ricci’s contemporaries, the threat was real. Being accused of magical powers regularly led to imprisonment, disfiguring torture and public execution. Often all three.
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We can also probably dismiss the idea that rosemary helps with memory improvement, something promised by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance, pray you, love, remember.”
Other than that, the rest is golden. Drawing on Spence’s book about Ricci, we can now turn to …
Matteo Ricci’s 5 Memory Palace Tips For Total Memory Mastery
1. Cultivate eloquence by using familiar buildings.
Ricci grew up during a time when fortresses were taking on more prestige than cathedrals in European cities. This historical circumstance meant that Ricci could use the best of both worlds.
And you can too by visiting the most modern architecture where you live and the oldest remaining buildings. You can transform these buildings into well-formed Memory Palaces simply by following a few simple principles. This free Memory Improvement Kit teaches you each of these, so grab it now.
The great thing about many civic buildings is that they’re well-planned. You can also usually find a floor plan on one of the walls. If not, a guard or other official will probably know where it is and let you take a photograph for later reference.
Get Freakishly Insane Results With This DIY Memory Palace Strategy
Or, for very good practice, you can sketch out a floor plan of the building yourself. This activity translates your immediate impressions through your muscles and other representation systems directly into your memory, and if you can start memorizing information before you leave the site, all the better.
For more ideas about the kinds of buildings that make great Memory Palaces, check out the How To Find Memory Palaces episode of the Magnetic Memory Method podcast.
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The most important point Ricci draws out is that familiarity breeds eloquence when it comes to creating top-notch Memory Palaces. As he noted in his letters, even the biggest and most chaotic cities he visited during his travels became small and manageable in his mind through familiarity.
For us, this means spending more time visiting the homes of our friends and maximizing the value of all the Real Estate surrounding us. Even the most sprawling metropolis can provide you a tightly organized system of Memory Palaces if you take it just one corner cafe at a time.
This “Best Friend” Secret May Be The Best Way To Get Ahead With Memory Techniques Ever
2. You Don’t Have To Use Memory Palaces On Your Own
Memory improvement takes places in your mind and your mind alone …
Or does it?
Not for Ricci.
As Spence unearths, Ricci and his friend Lelio Passionei created Memory Palace systems together while studying in Rome. Twenty years later, Ricci still reflected on these Memory Palaces. No doubt they were even more memorable to him than others because he did not create them alone.
If you’re creating Memory Palaces all alone, you could be limiting your success. Check out this post on how to play memory games using your childhood with a friend to maximize the potential of your memory and the Memory Palaces you want to use.
3. Flexibility is king
All memory techniques involve encoding information, storing it, consolidating it and then decoding it when you want access to it later.
But many people think that using a Memory Palace and visual memory techniques requires creating perfect images. They sweat and labor and fight with their minds to come up with 100% accuracy.
The Best Way To Prevent Failure Is To Stab
Perfection In The Heart And Leave It For Dead
Not only is 100% accuracy not necessary. It also rarely works. There is rarely a one-to-one correspondence between what you want to memorize and the images you use to memorize that info.
What you need instead of verisimilitude is flexibility and trust. Don’t let yourself get caught up in the rabbit hole of perfectionism.
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Ricci, as Spence tells us, often made adjustments, getting things just right enough to trigger the right memories at the right time. It’s almost like getting a car engine running just well enough to get it on the road until it can either repair itself or coast based on that initial momentum. When it comes to mnemonics, that’s usually all you need.
Do The Right Work
Ricci did this not only in his mind but in his religious teachings as well. Indeed, to communicate the larger ideas of Christianity, Ricci often adjusted the Gospels so that the visual pictures he had fashioned could do, as Spence puts it, “the right work.”
Our takeaway as memory enthusiasts is that it really all comes down to flexibility and letting your mind fill in the blanks once you’ve got mnemonic imagery that is good enough to do the right work.
4. Information Can Be Broken And Put Together Again
Ricci had the mind of a strategist. Instead of trying to memorize Chinese ideographs as a whole, he would allow them to be as complex as he found them, but cut them into pieces so he could better create images for them.
By doing this, he had an easier time compounding multiple meanings onto the same ideograph.
Spence gives the example of “yao,” which may mean to want, to need, shall and fundamental. To fit all of these possible meanings into the single mnemonic image he placed in his Memory Palace, Ricci saw a Muslim tribeswoman from the Xixia territories. She has fundamental beliefs that oblige her to do certain things. In other words, her fundamental beliefs require that she wants, that she needs and that she shall.
Once created, Ricci places this image of the woman in his Memory Palace so “she will stay there, in the quiet light that suffuses the Memory Palace, calm and unmoving, for as long as he chooses to leave her.”
How Do You Stack Up When It Comes
To Breaking Things Down?
The point being that most, if not all pieces of information can be broken down into multiple components. Even the smallest words, in a language like Chinese Mandarin, can be separated to learn better and memorize tone structures.
The Magnetic Memory Method for language learning takes this approach a step further by using Bridging Figures that we can apply to numerous similar word pieces and the various combinations they make with other sounds to form complete words.
Using the MMM, you can also trigger both the sound and the meaning of the word using the actions and interactions of the Bridging Figure in your Memory Palace.
Cool Stuff Or What?
5. Study As Many Memory Masters As You Can
It was common during Ricci’s time to quote from a number of different sources. We still do this in many books today, but in the world of memory, you’d be hard-pressed to find too many references to books written by other memory trainers. Many want you to think that they’ve got the best “system” and no one else exists.
That’s fine and dandy for branding and marketing purposes (though it’s ultimately destructive in the age of the Internet). Luckily, Ricci had no such concerns, nor did Spence. Here are just a few of the many names who come up:
Hear Be The Root Of All Eloquence
Cypriano Soarez. De Arte Rhetorica.
Spence thinks Ricci first learned about Memory Palaces in this book. Cypriano connects the structured placement of images to help recall information to the eloquence of the thesaurus (thesaurus eloquentae), which he calls the “root of all eloquence.”
In this book, Pliny apparently cites a number of memory experts, passages that Ricci translated and placed in his own book.
Frances Panigarola. Ars Reminiscendi.
War. What Is It Good For? Absolutely …
Mnemonics?
Ricci may have met Panigarola personally, a man said to have used one hundred thousand stations in a very large number of Memory Palaces. He apparently used a lot of puns to make his images memorable. These images tended to reference current political disputes and wars between nations.
Tip: Since wars involve a lot of historical figures and over-the-top activities, the history of war is a ripe source for exaggerated imagery and intensely memorable personalities.
We can also see that many of the mnemonists of Ricci’s era tended to use mnemonic imagery appropriate to their times. We, on the other hand, can use the Internet to examine swaths of history and come up with images as old as cave drawings and as new as Banksy. We’re in the finest moment of all times to be fully and completely visual. We are rich.
Guglielmo Gratarolo (sometimes spelled Gratoroli). De Memoria Reparanda.
The Weirdest Way To Use Emotions To Make Information Memorable
Gratarolo’s key tip is that the images we create should be so powerful that they “move one to laughter, compassion or admiration.” We could add to this disgust, fear and even anger. As people who need to remember, we need all the help from our emotions we can get.
Gratarol0 also appears to have been the first to use something akin to what we now call the Person Action Object technique (PAO).
“After designing a memory location on conventional lines, he then positioned in each an object – a chamber pot, a box of salve, a bowl of plaster were his first three examples – and then had separate figures, each based on individuals he knew well and each carefully named, jolt the scene into mnemonic action. Thus in rapid sequence Grataroli presented his friend Peter as picking up the chamber pot full of urine and pouring it over James, Martin putting his finger in the ointment box and wiping it over Henry’s anus, and Andrew taking some plaster from the bowl and smearing it over Francis’s face. If one could link these vignettes by pun, analogy, or association of ideas to given concepts, one could be guaranteed never to forget them.”
That Truly Is Disgustingly Unforgettable!
Ignatius Loyola. Spiritual Exercises.
Loyala stressed that Jesuits be mentally present at Christ’s death. “No violent detail is to be avoided,” he wrote, quoting Ludolfus of Saxony.
By focusing on the extremities, the priests would not only better remember the Gospels. They would strengthen their overall abilities with memory techniques.
Host von Romberch. Longestorium Artificiose Memorie.
Romberch described entire memory cities to be divided by categories such as shops, libraries, slaughter yards and schools. How specifically this kind of division should work is not clear.
Nor is his suggestion to use “memory alphabets.” These were to be based on the logical combination of humans, plants, animals and objects.
Of all Ricci’s contemporaries, Romberch seems to have been most closely aligned with the Magnetic Memory Method. The ability to use general methods to create specific systems for specific memory purposes is perhaps the most profound approach we have.
Hater’s Gonna Hate …
Not everyone in Ricci’s time held memory techniques and mnemonics in high esteem.
In Of the Vanitie and Uncertainties of Arts and Sciences, Cornelius Agrippe said that the “monstrous images” required by mnemonics dulled the mind. He even went so far as to suggest that mnemonics “caused madness and frenzy instead of profound and sure memory.”
Erasmus and Melancthon agreed and Rabelais went out of his way to mock memory techniques. In Gargantua, the title character learns to memorize bizarre books of grammar and the commentaries written on them by Bangbreeze, Scallywag and Claptrap.
The Worst Thing You’ll Smell All Day
Although Gargantua can recite these books backward and forwards, Rabelais does not present the skill in a virtuous light. Instead, Gargantua “became as wise as any man baked in an oven” and when speaking to him about his memorized knowledge, “it was no more possible to draw a word from him than a fart from a dead donkey.”
Those who mocked memory techniques and the ability to use a Memory Palace really missed out.
But Their Loss Is Our Gain …
… and their mockery contributed to the preservation of these extraordinary techniques for learning, memorizing and recalling anything.
The Enduring Tragedy
Sadly, Ricci spent so much time in China, but apparently wasn’t aware of the countless Chinese mnemonists capable of memory feats that made his abilities pale in comparison. So although we get a wealth of information in his writing about the Western mnemonic tradition, Ricci could not expose us to the untold treasures of the Chinese memory wizards as part of his extraordinary career.
For this reason, I’ve been inspired to start learning Mandarin Chinese. Two weeks deep into the language, my results using several Memory Palaces to memorize Pimsleur dialogs has been even more successful than anticipated.
I’ll be talking more about exactly what I’m doing, so stay tuned and be sure that you’ve got my free Magnetic Memory Method Memory Improvement Kit so that you’re subscribed for notifications and can learn the techniques to use along with me.
And like Ricci …
Use Knowledge To Change The Entire World For The Better
Until next time, keep busy learning and practicing the art of memory. And as always, keep Magnetic.
November 26, 2015
Jonathan Levi On ADD, Education And His TEDTalk Memory Palace
In this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method podcast, the host of the Becoming Superhuman podcast and the bestselling Become a SuperLearner video course and book shares a ton of actionable knowledge with you about learning quickly, efficiently and in ways that honor your memory instead of taxing it.
In this incredible hour, you’ll learn:
* The importance of developing your visual memory.
* How the process of using a Memory Palace can change over time – and become even more powerful when you have the best practices under your belt.
* How to create a powerful Memory Palace – even if it’s just minutes before giving a major presentation.
* How to use the most shocking locations in your personal history to memorize anything (graphic content).
* Why it’s never acceptable – and also never necessary – to have crappy grades in school.
* How Jonathan deals with ADD, both with and without medication.
* How to cope with listening to boring lectures.
* Why traditional education needs to change and what the future of education will look like.
* How to speed up the slow pace of learning as an independent learner on the road to autodidacticism.
* How to use stories in order to memorize and make what you have to say memorable.
* The magical power of tension and distress when learning, memorizing and recalling information.
* How to deal with feeling uneasy about things you don’t want to do and why this kind of action creates such powerful results.
* Why people don’t use memory techniques, even if they’ve mastered them.
* The connection between slouching and bad memory habits.
* How to build confidence in your memory for better conversations and social performance in practical situations.
* How to shape the muscle of your mind in order to increase raw memory ability.
* How to make using mnemonics second-nature.
* How to safely do N=1 experiments on yourself (and why self-experimentation may be the most important activity you ever engage in).
* The danger of doing exercises that aren’t optimized for endocrine.
* The rampant evils of estrogen in everything from your food to your cologne.
* Why there is no such thing as being in the “normal range” and why you need to go much deeper when exploring your own health.
* How to be more attractive to the opposite sex – even if you’re a weird and introverted memory enthusiast.
* Why you have a moral obligation to share what you know with the world.
* Jonathan’s core values and why you shouldn’t waste your memory on appointments and other small details.
* How to create deep knowledge in ways that create dense connections between the neurons in your brain.
* How to harness the power of dual-coding in your use of memory techniques.
* How to share your knowledge ethically as you navigate the changing educational landscape in the 21st century.
* … and much, much more!
Further Resources, People And Items Mentioned In the Podcast
Jonathan Levi Talks About Becoming A SuperLearner on the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast
USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis On Memory, Tenacity, & Conquering Anything
Extreme Memory Improvement: How Nelson Dellis Pushes The Limits Of Recall For The Good Of Humanity
Loren Cordaine of The Paleo Diet
Branding You: How to Make $1000 A Day Selling YOUR Knowledge
November 19, 2015
7 Minimalist Ways To Boost Success In The Face Of Soul-Crushing Overwhelm
[image error]Let’s face it – you’re burned out.
Work is killing you. Your Kindle app is bursting with unread books. Your credit card is melting from the heat of buying stuff you want but do not need. And that circles back to the job or entrepreneurial pursuits you need to keep the devil’s circle spinning.
Here’s the good news:
There are specific habits that can get you off of that wheel. They are easy and mostly inexpensive to do. They give you insight into your situation and can spring you from the prison of burnout faster than you can imagine.
The best part is that these seven techniques are also minimalistic. There’s almost nothing to them. And the “zen of almost nothing” is a great way to get started dealing with overwhelm.
1. The Shocking Truth About Meditation
Daily meditation feels good and creates many benefits ranging from stress relief to increased creativity and improved critical thinking.
The only catch is that taking time for this simple practice can be difficult to remember. And that’s somewhat strange, given how good it can make you feel, even after only five minutes of practice.
One way to make meditation a regular practice you won’t forget is to place a mat beside your bed. When you wake up, sit for even just a moment to connect with your surroundings.
You don’t have a spend a penny on your mat either. Just fold up a blanket, and for extra comfort, place a pillow on top of that. In this way, you can keep your ankles off of the hard floor and give some balance to your spine.
Many people think meditation is difficult. But it’s easy to do and gets even easier when you approach it without a lofty goal, like enlightenment. As Alan Watts said, the best way to approach meditation is “sitting just to sit.”
If you can make this simple approach to meditation a regular practice, even with thunder and lightning jolting through your soul, you have a chance at developing better balance in your life within a week or less.
2. How Taking A Simple Walk Can Protect Your From Harm
Many hold walking as a form of meditation. But walking also releases regulatory chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine and norepinephrine. These chemicals not only create pleasure, but can also help reduce any physical pain you might be suffering.
And you can make walking even more soothing for yourself. Take some MP3s of calming music that you resonate with and focus on immersing yourself in the sound and rhythm as you walk.
Match your movements to the music and pay attention to the feeling of the world around you. It’s only important that the music you choose reduces overwhelm – not increase it.
And if you are interested in meditation, take a break and sit on a bench in a park. Just to sit.
3. How To Practice Vegging Out (In A Positive Way)
Well, not exactly “vegging out” in the traditional sense.
Practicing Shavasana has a funny catch to it. You will always lose the game. No matter how good you get at the stillness, your body will eventually force you to move.
But in this game, losing is a good thing. As you experience the relaxing feelings of stillness, you’re also studying your impulses and your need to react to the same thoughts and desires that lead to overwhelm in other areas of your life.
As you practice Shavasana over the coming weeks and months, try extending the periods of stillness longer each time. You’ll find that by extending your reactions in Shavasana, you’ll also be able to slow how you react to overwhelming elements of life too.
4. Do This With A Pen And Paper Every Day
When life hands you a car crash, we tend to react to the overwhelm by piling on worry, concern and more stress.
The way around this is to buttress yourself in good thoughts before tough things happen. That way, you’ll have a reference guide to which you can refer.
To complete this simple exercise, get a notebook and focus on writing down things you genuinely appreciate. Be specific. If you’re grateful to have a computer, list it. If you enjoyed the smile of a stranger on your walk, make a note of it.
And commit to doing this every single day for at least three months.
Please don’t think this daily writing habit is silly or will itself contribute to your overwhelm. In 59 Seconds, a book by Richard Wiseman, the author gives scientific studies that demonstrate the validity of journaling gratitude.
But you don’t take the word of science for it. Give it a try and you’ll find out on your own. Within as short a period as one or two days, you may find that you’re already feeling happier about your life and this new recognition of how things are for you will buttress you against future troubles that really can be overwhelming without a daily defense practice in place.
5. Have Two-Tiered Positive Goals You Can Achieve Now And Later
You’ve probably heard of SMART goals. They are goals that are:
* Specific
* Measurable
* Achievable
* Realistic
* Time-related
These are all great guidelines to keep in mind when making your goals, and they are designed to reduce overwhelm.
As a bonus to the SMART concept, my friend Daniel Welsch down in Madrid adds on two other components that work well. He notes two kinds of things he wants to achieve:
* Goals that cost nothing (like spending more time with a loved one)
* Goals that cost $1000
The former can be scheduled immediately. The latter can be worked towards and earned. It doesn’t have to be $1000, but the benefits of having a monetary goal in mind are huge.
After all, you’re going to work one way or another and saving up for a specific goal that costs money not only engages you in your work in a more meaningful way. It also lets you give yourself a gift for all that you do.
The trick is to make sure that your goals in and of themselves reduce overwhelm while leading to even greater states of calm and freedom in the future.
6. How To Make Your Favorite Poison A Cure
It was often said in Ancient Greece that the cure is always a poison, and the poison is always a cure. In fact, the word “pharmacy” partially descends from this concept (Pharmakia).
Computers are like that too. At the same time you can use them to achieve miracles, you can also let them run you into the ground.
Set specific limits. For example, no matter what, hit the off-switch at 10 p.m. and stick to it. Then go for a walk and sit on that bench.
Of course, everybody knows that setting limits is tough, but the benefits of doing so reduce overwhelm and open you up to receiving so many good things in life that cannot be achieved when you and your brain are chained to a machine designed to bombard all your senses.
7. How To Reduce Overwhelm While Chilling Out With Friends
Social media has many positive aspects. But it’s not a substitute for real life contact. It doesn’t cause your brain to create any of the healthy and helpful chemicals that social interactions bring. And in fact, keeping up with all those posts and liking all those likable links can bake your brain.
You also don’t get the challenges your brain needs while using social media. These include being asked questions and asking questions in return, complete with the body language and innuendo that only real life contact can offer. That said, like meditation, social contact needn’t have a lofty self-improvement goal. It can be valuable in and of itself just as something to do.
But if you do want something specific to do with your friends, tell them about your minimalist plans to bring more balance into your life. After all, they’re helpful for everyone else too.
And teaching something helps you organize information in your brain, leading to streamlined thoughts and crystal clarity that also help reduce overwhelm in your mind.
So what do you say? Are you ready to get out of the soul-crushing loop that you’re in and bring in some new habits that will help you reduce overwhelm and boost your success? I hope so, because the truth is that you can free yourself from the suffering of burnout, one small positive habit at a time.
November 11, 2015
How Motivation Affects Your Memory When Learning A Language
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In this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast, time management and motivation expert Camilla Hallstrom of 99 Smart Ideas teaches you how to use powerful psychological tools to make finally crossing that language off your bucket list simple and fun. Take it away, Camilla!
Have you ever started learning a language only to find yourself still no better than a beginner years later?
If so, you’re certainly not alone.
Learning a language is often considered extremely daunting and takes a long time.
After all, you’ll have to cram all this information into your brain. For example, you’ll have to memorize new vocabulary, including regional variations, slang, cultural concepts, grammar rules, and numbers. If you’re not some sort of a memory prodigy, you’re in it for the long term – and who has time and energy for that?
But here’s the thing:
The conventional wisdom that learning a language is a long and arduous path is…
Just Plain Silly
As a native speaker of two languages, Swedish and Finnish, and fluent speaker of three more languages, English, French, and German, I can communicate in two other languages, Norwegian and Danish, and I’m a beginner in an eighth language, Italian.
Am I a language prodigy? No way.
Do I have superhuman memory skills? Not really.
Is it in my genes? Nope. No one in my family speaks as many languages with the same fluency.
The key to every language that I’ve learned is that I have learned how to motivate myself to keep on learning and memorizing.
Being motivated to learn a language might sound intuitive, but still, this is one of the most basic things language learners struggle with.
Motivation also applies to learning in general and learning memorization methods that can be applied to other things.
For example, you know from Anthony’s Magnetic Memory Method that there are structured frameworks that can be applied to language memorization.
And if you’ve used the Magnetic Memory Method, you know it works.
Yet, it’s easy to fall back on the same old excuses – you don’t have time to create those Memory Palaces right now, you don’t have time to learn the techniques, etcetera.
So how do you continue to motivate yourself to keep on learning? How do you master those Memory Palaces and learn a new language?
Read on to learn exactly how you do this – once you’ve mastered motivation, there are no limitations to your learning.
(Note: I’ve put together an eBook at the end of this post that will give you 19 actionable ways get motivated and achieve your goal.)
What Does Motivation Do to Your Memory?
Years ago, back in high school, I wasn’t very diligent. German was one of my least favorite subjects. Yet, I had to undertake a rigorous and important exam at the end of my senior year. Everything that I had ever learned in my German classes throughout school was going to be tested.
I didn’t have very much time to revise. Also, I had to take three other exams at the same time. I pretty much gave up at the starting line.
Instead of trying to frenetically revise grammar books and dictionaries a month before my test, I decided to do something unconventional.
Quite simply, I watched my favorite movies, read my favorite books, and watched the news – all in German. I did this for a month and I enjoyed doing it.
At the end of that month, the result for my exam took me by surprise – I scored nationally in the top 20% and was one of the best in my class.
This success happened despite the fact that I had been one of the poorest performing students just a few months earlier. How come?
Don’t Overlook This Little Known Secret:
It Supports All Successful Language Learning
The fact that I enjoyed the way in which I was revising for my test meant that I was motivated to do the tasks I did.
And as it turns out, motivation can affect cognition. In fact, many of those who achieve success in learning a language are highly motivated.
Of course other things play in as well.
When learning a language, your success is – beside motivation – determined by your aptitude skills:
Working memory. Your working memory is what enables you to both temporarily store and process information. Working memory is crucial for our language learning because it enables us to understand and communicate in our target language.
Associative memory. Your associative memory helps you remember associations between unrelated items, such as the name of someone you just met and it helps you connect old and new information. For example, when learning a language, your associative memory can help you build links between words in your native language and your target language.
How strong your mechanisms are for implicit learning. Implicit learning is what you learn without realizing that you’re learning. For language learning, implicit learning means that you unintentionally learn complex and subtle regularities in a language. Implicit learning is common for children, but for adults it can be more challenging.
However, you’d think that my classmates were also motivated. Some of them had been much more successful language learners throughout school – why, then, did I perform better?
What was it that set me apart from other students – those who were diligently reading the textbooks set out in our curriculum?
To answer this, we need first to understand how motivation works.
Here’s Exactly What Motivation Is And How It Works
There are different forms of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is our internal motivation. For example, hobbies are often driven by intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation builds on:
The natural motivation to direct our lives.
Being able to continuously improve something.
Being part of something that is bigger than us.
Beside these motivational factors, intrinsic motivation can build on different factors, such as having a clear goal.
Clear goals should be defined goals that:
Have personal meaning to you. Intrinsic motivation builds on our internal motivation. Subsequently, your goal should build on something that’s important to you and not caused by external motivators.
Are attainable. Self-esteem is tightly linked with motivation. If you don’t believe that you have the capacity to do something, it’s hard to muster the motivation for it. Subsequently, if you don’t gain momentum, you lose self-esteem for that particular task or goal and as a result, you lose interest in your goal. You need to find the sweet-spot between attainable goals and too easy or unachievable goals.
Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is external. It refers to incentives that come from outside of the individual. Such incentives could be a good grade or monetary compensation.
What Motivates You To Learn A Language?
Intrinsic motivation is key both to mnemonic processes and specifically, language learning. Consequently, intrinsic motivation has a huge impact on how you use the Magnetic Memory Method or any set of memory techniques. Extrinsic motivation, again, has shown not to be as effective as intrinsic motivation when it comes to learning a language.
Some people are naturally intrinsically motivated to learn a language. For example, intrinsic motivators for learning a language are:
Learning a language for a trip to a country.
Learning a language to communicate with friends and family.
Learning a language to be able to read a certain book in its original language, watch a certain movie, and so forth.
Learning a language when moving to a country.
Learning a language as a hobby.
Learning a language to better understand a culture.
Learning a language because it appeals to you, e.g., because it sounds beautiful.
Now that we know what motivation is, we can return to why I performed better than my classmates in my exam despite not having performed as well in the past.
I was intrinsically motivated to watch movies and read books as these things are things that I would have done even if I hadn’t had to prepare for my exam. I was preparing for the exam because of an extrinsic reason, but I was able to turn it into something that I liked doing. This gave me intrinsic motivation.
My classmates, on the other hand, were – at least for the most part – extrinsically motivated. They took the tests to get good grades. This, again, isn’t as effective as intrinsic motivation.
What Can You Do When Your Motivation Fizzles?
It’s worth noticing that motivation is not static.
It changes according to circumstances, like your mood and your goals.
For example, if you have a particular task – like I had in my example – you might experience a sudden burst of motivation. The risk is that you lose that motivation once you’ve completed your task.
This, again, can lead to a serious problem – procrastination.
What Is Procrastination Anyway And …
What Makes It So Bad?
Motivation fluctuates. As we’ve discussed, intrinsic motivation has a big impact on your mnemonic processes. The risk is that once you become unmotivated, you don’t take the actions you should.
However, while there are times when you’re not motivated to do something, there are ways in which you can ensure that you continue to work towards your goal. In this case, it’s learning a language and therefore, continuing to create Memory Palaces.
So how do you keep up working on memorizing your target language even when you don’t feel like doing so?
First, it’s key to understand why you procrastinate when you lose your motivation.
You procrastinate because your decisions are processed in two different parts of your brain.
Take the limbic system. It’s a primitive part of the brain. It assesses the instant rewards of any decision. It’s also the part of your brain that makes you procrastinate.
For example, you might decide not to build a Memory Palace, which has long-term rewards, and instead log in on Facebook, which has instant, but useless rewards. By swapping Facebook for memory methods, you immediately do what you want to and not what you should for long-term gain, which is learning a language.
The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, evaluates long-term gain and processes decisions accordingly. To keep from procrastinating, you should always consider what consequences your action holds for you in the long run.
Of course, isolating these consequences is much easier said than done. However, there are ways in which you can optimize that you’ll make a decision based on these consequences.
Never Settle For Multitasking
For example, you should focus on few goals at the same time, and never settle for multitasking. This way, it’s easier to keep your goal on the top of your mind at all times and consequently, make decisions based on it.
You should also make a plan for how you will achieve your goal. This way, you always keep up with what your next step is. Also, when you’re tired or hungry, your decisions are processed in your limbic system. Sleeping enough hours and eating regularly helps you identify what consequences your actions have in the long run.
Now that you know why you lose motivation and procrastinate, we’ll look at what remedies there are for this in relation to language learning and memorization.
How Habits Help You Achieve Your Goals …
Even When You Lack Motivation
#1. Seinfeld’s productivity secret as a habit-building method
First, by establishing habits, you ensure that you continue to build your memory palaces and learn your target language.
Habits are behavior patterns that are constantly repeated and ultimately become almost inevitable.
For example, you brush your teeth and shower almost by automation.
Even if you feel like not brushing your teeth, you do it – it’s more difficult not to do it than to do it. In this case, you don’t even make a decision, and therefore, you don’t need to worry about the limbic part of your brain interfering with your action. Consequently, you don’t have to determine the long-term reward of your action, which means that it’s hard to procrastinate on your task.
Habits can naturally be applied to your memory goals.
By building Memory Palaces and using them as part of your language learning activities every day and making the process a habit, you keep up the practice.
To hold yourself accountable and make the habit-keeping process easier, I suggest that you make use of Seinfeld’s productivity secret.
Seinfeld’s productivity secret is a habit-building system.
It’s quite simple: get a wall calendar and a red marker. Now, decide the habit you want to build – right now, that habit is building and using Memory Palaces. For each day that you complete the task (more like a game, really), mark that day with a big, red X.
Soon, you’ll have a chain that grows longer and longer. Your task is not to break the chain. That’s the only task – keep the chain growing.
After a while, you have a habit that sticks.
#2. Tiny habits as a habit-building method
Another habit-building technique is building tiny habits. According to Mark Channon, tiny habits are easy, digestible habits that take you closer to your goal – small steps you take to approach your goal.
For example, if brushing your teeth isn’t already a habit, the smallest step you could take is to place your toothbrush so that it’s right in front of you when you wake up. The next step would be to brush one tooth, then another, and so forth.
In our case, you want to learn a language.
Take the smallest step you can and program your mind to repeat it at a set time. Let’s say you want learn vocabulary in your target language every day. Your tiny habit might be to put paper and a pen on the table.
By making the habit small and specific, you significantly lower the threshold to getting started and in the end, your habit becomes automatic.
If you memorize just one word a day using just one Memory Palace and make this a habit you can build upon, your language learning will skyrocket. And once you’ve done just one, it will be hard for you not to do another.
To Skyrocket Your Language Learning – Find Your Intrinsic Motivation
As already discussed, I used movies and books to learn a language, because I like doing these activities.
Even if I was learning German for an extrinsic reason (getting a good grade in my exam), I was intrinsically motivated to read books and watch movies. Subsequently, I used methods for my language learning that I was intrinsically motivated to do.
In the same sense, when you feel unmotivated to use memory methods and learn a language, you can do activities that you’re intrinsically motivated to do, and that help you reach your goal.
The action itself is already an immediate reward and therefore, you don’t procrastinate on it.
And how do you decide whether the activity in question is worth acting on?
In her celebrated TEDx talk, relationship and career expert Mel Robbins gives a good rule of thumb for these situations.
If you come to think of something and don’t act on it within five seconds – kill the idea.
To take action on an idea or activity, you could make a note of the first step you should take, Google if you can find a certain book, check if the movie you’re looking for is available on Netflix, or check if you can find a language partner online.
As to specific activities you can undertake to learn a language, you could watch a relevant travel program in your target language, read a book on fishing if you’re interested in fishing, keep a journal in your target language if you like writing or play a memory game in that language.
However, to properly use this method, there are a few things to note.
First, you don’t want to overwhelm yourself with a difficult movie that’s impossible to follow in the language you try to learn. This kind of choice will only lead to procrastination.
Instead, you should choose movies and books that:
Are easy to understand.
A movie or book you’ve already seen or read in your native language (or any other language you fully comprehend).
Don’t have subtitles in your native language.
In best case scenario, you’ll read a book in your target language and then watch a movie based on it to fully understand the plot.
Second, optimize your activity for memorization and language learning.
Actively apply the Magnetic Memory Method and the use of mnemonics to get the most out of your language learning.
For example, you can pick one of the locations in the movie (or book) – the location that is most appealing to you – and reconstruct it in your brain. Now, build a Memory Palace using words from the movie. Maybe there are characters and other details that help you construct your Memory Palace?
I’ll give a specific example to help you out.
In the movie The Intouchables (Les Intouchables), one of the main characters (a street kid), gets to live in a fancy room in a mansion. I could reconstruct that room in my Memory Palace (or use it as a Memory Palace itself) and then name its different objects in French.
I could add other associations, both from the movie and outside of it. In the room, there’s a painting of a man – now, I’ll remember that “painting” is masculine in French (“un tableau”). And voilà – I’d have a new Memory Palace full of French words.
How To Pump Up Your Motivation And Learn a Language
Now you know exactly how motivation affects your memory and language learning and what you can do to prevent procrastination.
You also know what to do when you lack motivation. The key is to either be intrinsically motivated to learn a language and if not, then build lasting habits or do activities you’re intrinsically motivated to do.
There’s just one thing left…
Implementation.
This is what I want you to do. Go ahead. Get something to write with. I promise, it will help you.
List the language you are trying to learn and why you’re trying to learn it. Are you already intrinsically motivated to learn that language? Are there parts of the learning process that you’re not so motivated to complete?
If you need to find intrinsic motivation to learn your target language, you should list 5 things you love doing in your spare time. These should be things that you could do anytime and that are effortless to you.
Now, determine how you can use these five things to help you get your memory exercises done and consequently, move towards learning your target language.
Let’s say you love watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians (Don’t worry, I’m not judging you!)
This TV-series is probably dubbed at least in the most commonly spoken languages. You can use that TV-series to your advantage and build memory palaces out of it with your target language (I can also imagine that you could have great fun doing so).
Remember, this method works even if you’re not naturally intrinsically motivated to learn the language, as long as you’re intrinsically motivated to do the specific activity in question.
So that’s it – that’s the secret to how I’ve successfully learned so many languages.
And I know you can do it, too.
Want 19 more tips on how you can achieve any goal through motivation? I’ve put together a free eBook that helps you with just that.
Sound good?
November 5, 2015
Kevin Rogers And The Truth About Comedy, Memory And Marketing
[image error]Have you ever thought about getting into marketing?
Or perhaps you’ve just wondered … what on earth makes the people who write all those ads tick?
If so, then today’s your lucky day, because on this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast, the remarkable comic turned copywriter, Kevin Rogers of Copy Chief, holds the truth about …
How To Be Memorable On The Stage And On The Page
So go ahead click on the play button above, download the transcript for this interview or read Kevin’s many words of wisdom right here below.
Anthony: Kevin, I’m really excited to have you on the podcast today. There are a number of reasons why I wanted to speak with you in particular. Maybe you could tell everybody listening to this a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Kevin: Sure, thanks Anthony for having me. I’m really glad to be here. An interesting, I guess, resume, I am now a freelance direct response copywriter, which means I write the ads that force people to make a decision. Essentially, direct response compared to more sort or traditional advertising means that there’s always a call to action at the end of it. An extreme version would be an infomercial – buy now, buy now and you’ll get an extra set of knives and all that good stuff. We certainly have much more subtle ways to do all that, but that would be the one big distinction between what we do and other types of marketing.
My story is that I was a stand-up comedian. I actually left high school a little early because I was restless and after doing some labor jobs that I didn’t feel were a perfect fit, I was dared by friends to do an open mic night at local comedy club. It turned out that was a better fit for me. I was fortunate to excel pretty quickly at that and actually won a contest to take over as the house MC at this club here in Clearwater, Florida. It was a really great opportunity because it meant that I was doing eight shows a week and stage time is everything to a comic.
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For instance, in New York City, there are so many comics there, and they will club hop. They might be taking cabs from club to club from 5:00 in the afternoon to 2:00 in the morning just trying to get on everywhere. It was a big deal to get that much stage time at a popular club here in town. Then I went on the road at about 19 and stayed on the road for almost 7 years as a comic. That was an incredible adventure.
How To Turn Your Hair Into A Calling Card
I knew at some point that I didn’t have any control over whether I succeeded or not in that business. Show business is one of those things where it takes a little bit of luck and some knowing the right people. For me, I had no business sense whatsoever. I do know a few comics who had marketing backgrounds and certainly used that to their advantage, Carrot Top being one really good example. Carrot Top was having stickers made of his image when he was still just a road comic. He really understood that his shock of orange hair was his calling card. I had none of that. I had no business sense.
I just kind of knew that at some point I would need to make a decision that if I wasn’t getting signs from the business that this was going to pay off for me, somewhere around the age of 30 maybe, I did not want to risk becoming some of the older very bitter comics that I worked with. Because they were amazingly funny and talented, and, they were also really tortured. It was clear to me, and to them, that they had no alternatives. When you spend most of your life as an entertainer and that does not manifest into a big win, then what do you do? It’s a really sad state of affairs for a lot of people I have a lot of respect for.
Anthony: We know the image of the tortured comic, or many of us do anyway because we see it again and again. What do you think it is that tortures them? Is it something that links to memories that they’re trying to deal with? What would it be maybe from your own experience?
Kevin: Yeah, it’s absolutely that. I think there is an incredibly thin line between pleasure and pain when it comes to how we express ourselves. You know funny comes from pain, period. We laugh as a healing device. Comics – I can’t tell you about a stable person I’ve ever met who is like gut-busting funny. It just doesn’t equate. Not everybody grew up in some terrible condition, although that’s often the case.
A very true statement is comedy is therapy for the comic. Very often, these people would be in dire straits mentally without that outlet. It’s funny because hanging out with them or being around them offstage is very often not what you would expect. People just assume a comedian is funny all the time and loving life and it’s nothing but laughter. There are parts of that which are true. For the most part, it’s a bit of – I don’t want to call it miserable – but….
How To Hold The Most Depressing Dinner Party In The World
I’ll never forget a story a screenwriting teacher told about his wife wanting to liven up a dinner party so she invited comedy writers. It turned out to be the most morose dinner party she had ever thrown. It made perfect sense to me.
Anthony: I’m curious, how do you remember sets and when you’re doing eight sets like that back to back, are you doing the same thing? Are you embedding it into memory as you go along? What is the artistry there in terms of your own delivery and the role of how you prepared and how you performed?
Kevin: That’s a great question. I think what I did, and what I saw, is very typical among comics. There wasn’t a lot of strategy to it other than you always wanted to be coming up with new material.
We would start with what we call a premise. A comic would say to another comic, “Do me a favor and watch my set because I’m trying out a new premise.” They wouldn’t really say I’m trying out a joke. Sometimes jokes come to you just done out of the aether. The first thing you do when that happens is you call four other comics, and you go have you heard this before? Because you are afraid that your memory is playing tricks on you and telling you it’s got something new when it’s actually something you heard somewhere else. The worst think you can encounter as a comic is being labeled a thief. We are all very careful that we’re not accidentally repeating someone else’s bit.
You bring up the premise, you have some idea of what the punchline will be and you work it into a place in your set where it feels safe because you’ve got momentum and then you know that you’ve got some great jokes after that. You slide it into sort of a safe place in your set and you just work it out.
I think most comics prefer to have the magic happen live. It’s almost more about how you introduce the premise than how you execute the punchline when you’re developing a joke. Because at its best, the process is letting the audience sort of dictate live which way the joke should go. Very often things happen in the moment that you couldn’t sit with a pad and pencil and create.
Notebooks … The 51st Shade Of Grey?
As far as memory, people would say all the time, “How do you memorize all that?” I guess it just starts with five minutes. You memorize it enough to –
The first time I went on stage that was my biggest challenge. I got on stage. And it felt nothing like I could have imagined. I was very nervous. I couldn’t see. I didn’t expect that. I’ve got these lights in my face. I was just trying to remember the jokes and listen for something that sounded like good news coming back from the crowd. Then you just remember that and then you add on bit after bit, and guys could have hours of material.
George Carlin famously would do a new HBO special every year. He would build up new material for that year, and then he would throw it away after the special was recorded. That was done. That was part of the magic of George Carlin. He was dedicated to the craft and to developing and evolving new material. He would take about the best 10 percent of the previous special, use that as the foundation, sort of the safety net to give audiences their money’s worth.
Other than that, he’d bring up a notebook and basically just be working out new material in front of a crowd of hundreds or thousands sometimes.
Anthony: I was going to ask you about that. Because there are some comics that have trademarks like Carrot Head. There are very few comics that have actually made a bit of a trademark of actually having lines written on a notepad or whatever that they bring up. I wonder if you ever did that too, or had any sort of visible triggers, notes written on your hand or anything like that to prompt yourself?
Kevin: It’s a good question. There was like a phase – a thing in the 1990s all of a sudden called alternative comedy. It was the early days of Patton Oswalt and Marc Maron and these San Francisco comics. Janeane Garofalo was a big alternative comic.
They would all bring their notebooks up. That was their thing. It was like we are so cool we are not pretending to perform. We don’t care. There is no formality here. Honestly, it was a bit like torture a lot of times. It was just very self-indulgent. It’s not that there should be some hard rule that you can’t bring up a notebook and refer to it if you’re working out new stuff. No problem with that, but it almost became a cliche. You know, like this is all so fresh that I have to look at my notebook to even remember it. With some people, it was BS. They knew the bits. They were just using the notebook as a prop.
For me personally, I did later start recording my sets. To be honest, I don’t know how often I actually listened back to them. If I was trying to work out a new joke, I would record and at least listen to that part. Then I might go I forgot the funniest line I had or whatever. It would have benefited me to formalize that a little bit more. For the most part, again like I said, for me and a lot of comics it was about creating a moment.
Believe me, when you do create a moment with a new premise and it hits, you will not forget what made it work. It just becomes a part of you because that’s your lifeblood. It wasn’t too formal.
How To Build An Empire Without Wearing Any Pants
Anthony: As a way of seguing from comedy into copywriting and Copy Chief, there is a real funny and compelling marketing video that you put out at one point recently for the Copy Chief community. You were apparently wearing no pants. Maybe by way of saying a little bit about how you went from comedy into marketing you could also talk about, “What is it about comedy that helps persuade people to buy?” and, “Have you ever really left comedy?”
Kevin: Great question. So I’ll try to really give the condensed version of this. I did leave comedy and that was a painful exit for a couple of reasons. One, I was really done with touring clubs. That part wasn’t hard. My heart I knew would always be in it and there would be potential jealousy to see friends make it when I had kind of thrown in the towel. I had convictions about it, and I knew it was the thing to do.
The other part that was difficult was logistically trying to go get work. That same problem I talked about wanting to avoid. The good news was I was only about 30 so I had plenty of energy and some time.
I knew I liked to write and so I would take classes at the local university, University of South Florida here in St. Pete after moved to Florida from Chicago, my wife and I. I would just take all the writing courses I could before I had to actually choose a major and go to real college.
Writing was always there for me, and I just had no idea there was this thing called copywriting. I always said I wanted to be a writer. I had no idea outside of comedy writing, which I had decided probably wasn’t for me just because of what I had seen of it in Hollywood and how it worked. It really turned me off. I was doing like these no resume jobs. I bellman, I was a bartender and then I just got really lucky and got into a situation where I met a guy who was a direct response marketing junkie and he introduced me to copywriting. He knew I liked to write and he said I think you’d be a good copywriter. You should check it out.
Here’s Why Comedians Might One Day Rule The World
I slowly became indoctrinated and learned and was able to make a career of it. What is interesting is in trying to sort of transition and “go legit” from an entertainer to a guy who you should hire to push people’s luggage around at your hotel, I realized that bringing up comedy was bad news. People don’t want to hire somebody who wants to talk about how great it was to be a comic. They assume that’s still what you want to do.
I was finding other things to put on my resume and really kind of burying that story. When I got into copywriting, I still had that mindset. It just wasn’t on my radar anymore at that point. It was my friend and mentor John Carlton, the legendary copywriter, who, when we began in the early moments of our friendship, said to me – that was sort of what bonded us. He was really fascinated by the idea of standup comedy and that I had actually made a career of this. He had a lot of questions about it.
Then he said to me at one point, “Why aren’t you talking about this?” He said right now you are just another copywriter but if you were the standup comic turned copywriter, that’s a much more interesting conversation. He said, “Do you realize how few people in the world have had the experience you’ve had and how many would love to?” I didn’t. I just knew most of the people I knew were comics. It was normal to me. That was a huge revelation to me. It still took years.
Then what I began doing was teaching copywriting through the lens of comedy. Then I wrote the book The 60 Second Sales Hook where I took a joke formula and I showed people how to just change the last part of it and it becomes a perfect condensed marketing story. That was very popular.
To Be Memorable, You Gotta Make A Commitment
It wasn’t until recently, Anthony, where I realized it was kind of my duty to strive to be funny again with marketing. Part of it was me just getting comfortable enough in the market to feel like it wouldn’t hurt me to do that. Then it became about, “Well how do I do it? What approach do I take?” I started to just post up videos on Facebook and sometimes they would just be tactical giving copy tips and other times it would just be me doing something stupid like lip sinking to Sympathy For The Devil in my car. It’s funny because I never stop. I commit to the entire song, right. I realize that it’s not funny if I show 20 seconds of it, but the fact that I did the entire song and never broke character for a second. That resonated with people.
I slowly started learning what’s funny. How do I merge into now this new technology, this new ability to reach people? That’s when I started having fun with video. It’s interesting that you bring up the no pants video, because that is the result of me spending two days in this very office that I’m talking to you from right now with a camera set up, the lights just right and trying to do a straight pitch for my copywriting course. I was feeling incredibly frustrated and it just not feeling right. I finally got just annoyed enough to go, “You know what dude, just like relax. Go sit at the desk and just look into the camera even if it is babble for a minute.”
You know what it was? It was like just going right back to that idea of just take the premise and go with it and see what happens. I literally sat down, turned on the camera, and for whatever reason, I guess because I was sitting at a desk, that’s the line that came out of my mouth. I said, “Hi, I’m Kevin Rogers, the founder of Copy Chief, and I may or may not be wearing pants right now.” Then I kind of ran through some stuff.
I literally wrote that video which is about four minutes long in a minute. I jotted down. I came up with the premise of I want to teach something. To me that is the most important thing we can do to brand ourselves is to deliver value. Always be teaching is my motto.
I thought, “What can I teach?” Well, I will teach the difference between good copy and bad copy. I just wrote down real quick good copy means this and bad copy means that. I went into these characters. Then I realized at some point well I have to at least tape the part where I don’t have pants. The punch line has to be here that I’m actually not wearing pants.
So I sat there pantless in my office making this video and then of course the joke was that I cut away for a second and then I stand up and I’m not wearing pants. I actually didn’t know which part I would actually show. It just seemed obvious to me that it’s not nearly as funny if I don’t end up pantless.
So that’s kind of how that evolved. It is interested you ask that because I did leave comedy. It wasn’t until smarter people than me made it painfully obvious that I needed to be using that and then putting in action and effort. If that’s my brand, if I’m the former standup comic turned copywriter, I’ve got to deliver some funny once in a while.
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Anthony: I mean it stuck in my mind in such a way that I came back to it and it was an interesting moment for me as someone who is interested in copywriting and in marketing as such because I had first encountered as a voice only on the Gary Halbert All-Stars Audio.
Kevin: Oh, interesting.
Anthony: I had always noted a sense of irony in your voice. I’ve listened to that thing probably four times, the Part 1 and Part 2. There is always this kind of flavor of irony especially because of a particular part that you narrate. Getting to actually then see you and know you through video made it, I guess, exceptionally interesting, but what I really am wondering is, is there something about the comedy that you find that persuades people to ultimately buy?
Kevin: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know about buy, but I do know about that “know, like and trust” are major factors in why we buy from one person over another. I do know that if you can get a laugh from somebody, and, in particular a couple of laughs in one sitting – two or three laughs – that is a real bond. People did share that video quite a bit.
I had one woman tell me she loved it so much and thought so much of it that when she shared it outside of the marketing community on her personal Facebook wall and nobody liked it, she was angry. She felt like you people don’t get it. That was really interesting to me.
I don’t know if that makes somebody a “buyer.” It’s interesting because I’m in direct response. Like I said, our job is to get a reaction whether it is sign up, give us your email and let us give you more value and let’s have a conversation and ultimately of course you would like that to lead to that person being a customer or it is buy right now.
“Look Like You’re Having A Good Time Being Yourself”
It may not be an immediate thing but yeah, if you can show some personality and really look like you’re having a good time being yourself people find value in that. They go I want more of that. I’d love to be that comfortable in my skin. I’d love to wake up happy to be me, and be able to turn on my iPhone and make people laugh or share these bizarre thoughts I have.
I think it does make people buy, but not immediately and certainly not in every market. When you’re talking about healthcare or health supplements or things like that, outside of male enhancement products that have been able to use humor occasionally, there’s not a lot of funny going on in those subjects. If you’re marketing and you’re teaching people how to do what is ultimately at least a 50 percent creative endeavor, which is like write better sales copy, guys like me, Frank Kern and others have a pretty good license to let loose and have some fun.
Anthony: I’m really glad you made this distinction between buying and knowing and liking and trusting and then deepening a relationship towards having a financial transaction because this to me has a lot to do with making yourself memorable with many touches over the long haul and in a way that hopefully to basically quote Frank Kern that’s “always cool,” but still moving towards the sale.
You know, so many people complain about sleazy marketers and all the sales tactics that assault us thousands of times a day. There certainly are those kinds of people in that world. How do we make that many touches that are sometimes necessary to move towards the financial traction of the “know, like and trust?” Knowing that we cannot 100 percent not insult some people or offend some people or annoy some people, but what is the fine line there so that we’re remembered but not rejected so that when that moment comes when the person is readily to buy that they think of you.
Do You Know What You Stand For?
Kevin: Another great question. I think part of it is what you just said in that we can’t please everybody. Some people are going to reject us. I would take that further and say decide up front who you would want to be rejected by. Because if you are, as the great Gary Bencivenga said, (I don’t know if it was his quote but he emphasized the quote), “If you are not against something, what are you for?” I am actually totally screwing that up. I don’t remember how he said it. Basically, you have to have a rally cry.
You have to let people know this is the enemy. This is who this is not for. You look at a copywriting colleague of mine, Colin Theriot, who has a thing called the Cult of Copy, 14,000 members in a closed group. Now not all loyal followers but 14,000 people requesting to join a group about copywriting. Pretty amazing feat, right?
Anthony: Right.
Kevin: Colin is constantly reminding people who that group is not for. It’s not for the timid. There’s going to be a lot of language and there’s going to be things that make people uncomfortable, and if it’s not for you, no problem but never, never tell me not to do these things, because you just don’t get it. So he’s against are the people who don’t get it or feel so righteous and indignant that they need to scold him or recommend to him that he should tone it down or these things. Those are the opportunities he sees to attack. It only strengthens his bond with his followers.
That’s probably an extreme case of a guy who like honestly not only doesn’t care if you are not interested but goes after people who raise their hand that explain why they’re not. That doesn’t work in every market, but if you just allow yourself the freedom to be yourself and not hold back, and that doesn’t mean you have to swear.
Why Are Some Words Offensive?
I don’t swear much. I don’t know why, Anthony, I as I mature, because I’ll be honest with you, around the house I swear a lot. I’m sure I’m looser with language with my children than most other parents would be, but to me, I take sort of the George Carlin approach because we talk about why are some words dirty. Why are some words offensive? We don’t get it. At the same time, something in me, there is a filter like in my podcasts, one of guests on podcasts my default is to not swear for whatever reason. I don’t know why, but I point that out to say that it doesn’t mean that you have to swear or go out of your way to be edgy or annoying.
Take a minute, I would say to anybody with a product, anybody who wants to build a following, take a minute and open up a notebook and say who am I for and who am I for not. Who does not qualify to be in this group, this tribe I’m building and go out of your way to point those people out? Not in a judgmental way, but in a way that the people who do belong will feel strengthened to identify that with you.
Anthony: It’s a good life principal for sure in in many areas. I wonder, you know, speaking about I think what is sometimes called repulsion marketing so that you’re attracting the people that you want, I want to mention your podcast, The Truth About Marketing so people can look it up and it seems like a good example. There is an episode that you recorded with Ben Settle who sort of has that kind of down pat, you know, defining who is with him and who isn’t with him.
Kevin: Yes, a big part of his marketing. Almost every email has some shade of that. It’s very strong to him.
Anthony: So I just mention that to people listening that your podcast is called the Truth About Marketing and that would be a great example of that to listen to and remember some principals from.
Speaking of podcasts, you’re also involved with in Psych Insights with John Carlton who you already mentioned. There is one particular episode on that podcast called How to be a Damned Good Road Dog & Sneak Into “Insider” Status and it connects to something that you’ve talked about on The Truth About Marketing when you were discussing how to impress Michael Jordan.
What I like about all these episodes combined, and that really switches certain things on in my mind, is that you’re teaching through examples about getting it wrong when you’re trying to connect with influencers and that is the opposite of repulsion marketing.
That’s where you’re repulsing people with, you know, not being consciously aware of mistakes that you are making, or just being kind of awkward. I know I’m often an awkward person. I wonder, first, what do you think if you could define them or list them some of the wrong ways that rookies try to get the attention of a influencer and wind up making themselves forgettable by that person or disregarded and maybe not forgotten but put on the “black list.”
How To Be Socially Awkward And An Epic Failure … Guaranteed!
Kevin: Wow, I’m loving these questions man. I have a great example of this. What is interesting is this is sitting on my desk now for months because I’ve been waiting to teach this. One classic way of doing a poor job of getting the attention of an influencer is to kick the door in. I always coach people to be confident and sort of take the reigns of their business and all that and not wait for permission to go forth and be an expert, because there is always somebody who needs to learn what they know.
Being cocky – John Carlton has told this story a few times on our podcast. It is a great example. When Gary Halbert was his mentor and they were very close friends and when they would do live events they would have a lot of fun with each other and they would bust each other’s balls and do a lot of that from the stage.
He said, “Once an event there would be that guy who thought the way to come bond with them would be to walk up to them and the bust Gary’s balls.” It was an epic fail every time. That’s a sure sign of showing that you just don’t get the joke. You don’t recognize and appreciate that that’s a bond that only happens after a certain comfort level between two people has been achieved. That’s a classic.
Then I received a letter from somebody in three different ways: it was emailed to me, it was hard mailed to my house, and it was hard mailed to my office. This is somebody who clearly believes that they’ve figured it out, they’ve really nailed it, and all they need to do is get this in front of me. I’ve never responded to this person because of the first line of the letter.
It says, “Dear Kevin, I need our help. Now I know that sounds selfish so I’m going to offer to help you.” Now that’s probably supposed to be what Frank Kern would call a pattern interrupt because maybe he would think most people who would write to me would start by gloating or trying to flatter me or something.
It doesn’t work for a few reasons. Of course, it did get me to read it. If somebody sends you a letter, you know, that is usually enough to get you to read it. He was just so cocksure in how he was offering to help me, and he made so many different assumptions about whether that would actually be valuable to me or not without ever asking, “Hey, would this be valuable to you?” It made me instantly discount him as somebody I would ever want to invest time in or reply to. I think the worst thing you can do is (a) ever make assumptions, or (b) try to open with the joke that can only exist after you’ve been friends for a while.
I’ll tell you another great story based on this. Do you know who Mark Ford is? He’s one of the great copywriters. He doesn’t get credit for it. He’s also known as Michael Masterson and he wrote a course called the Accelerated Guide to Six-Figure Copywriting and when I started it was the only course out there really on copywriting. The guy is amazingly brilliant. He runs a thing now called the Palm Beach Letter and he was a big player in Agora Publishing.
Anyway, the first time I met Mark Ford it was outside of a conference and every time the guy would stop and talk to one person a group would quickly form around him because he’s a very magnetic person. In such a group, a guy came up to him and he said, “Mr. Ford, I have a question if you don’t mind.”
He said, “Sure, what’s up?”
The guy said, “You know, I’ve always heard that the best way to connect with an influencer is to offer to help them, but I’ve been walking up to some of the influencers and saying hi, I’m Larry, how can I help you, and they just look at me funny and it doesn’t go anywhere. It feels awkward.”
Mark said, “Well, what is it you do and how could you help somebody like Clayton Makepeace that you’ve just had this encounter with?”
He goes, “Yeah, that’s the thing. I’m not really sure. I’m just starting out in the business. In fact, that’s what he asked me and I didn’t have a good answer for him.”
Mark said, “Well that’s the problem. You don’t even know what you do yet.”
The point of going up and offering to help somebody is to know that (a) you really can help them and (b) first make sure that it’s something they need or have interest in. I always remember that story and I thought it was really funny that people just take the really core meaning of the device and then go out and try to implement it and are shocked when it doesn’t work.
How To Really Get The Attention Of An Influencer
I will give you just as an alternative what I think is a great way to get in front of an influencer and what I teach the freelancers that I coach. I say, “Look, if you have somebody who is an active marketer, just do a case study on a piece of their advertising and teach other people what you see going on in the piece. Show what you know. Showcase your own expertise through the lens of what you admire about their copy and make sure that gets in front of them.”
When they see that, it’s kind of like hearing your name – you can’t not listen. If somebody says, “Hey, you know, this copywriter did a breakdown of one of your ads.” Of course, they are going to go look at it and if they’re impressed, they’re going to call you. I promise you because they are always looking for copywriters.
That’s a really great way to get results in advance and display only your value and sort of generously give to somebody. Even though they never asked, but you also never asked them for anything. You don’t send it to them and go, “Hey I did this breakdown of one your ads. Hopefully you’ll learn something from it! You idiot. You were missing these four key factors that I call dah, dah, dah.”
Just teach generously to other people using their stuff and they’ll think wow this person is cool man. All they want to do is teach and I happen to agree with what they’re teaching so why I don’t I get on the phone with this person. Suddenly you’re equals instead of some guy hanging out by their doorstep.
Anthony: With this alternative example that you gave, what is an example whether you either have personally or through the mechanisms of the Internet created results in advance for people as part of making yourself memorable and moving forward towards goals that you have for yourself?
Kevin: Probably the best example would be the book, The 60 Second Sales Hook. Because the whole point of the book, like I mentioned earlier, is I took a joke formula which is relevant to my story. Then I show people in a very short (it’s only a 50-page book that sort of gets right to the point and talks about story) and I give them the device to write their story and use this formula to make it really effective.
That was a big turning point in my career because anyone who read that book and did the exercise was instantly compelled to share it with me sort of as a thank you and because it really did create a special moment for them. A lot of times, it was the first time anybody ever wrote anything that actually looked like copy and worked like copy. People who just thought they couldn’t write their own copy. They would of course naturally also want my feed back and see if – or maybe they would be stuck and say here’s what I’ve got but I feel like it’s missing something. I was giving them results in advance but I was also opening the door for them to want more from me.
I found that was a great opportunity because with that opportunity I could kind of do whatever I wanted. I did everything from offer 20-minute what I would call sales hook perfection sessions for like $350.00. I realized that was unscalable and then that evolved into what is now Copy Chief because it was the simple premise of I’m teaching the same things over and over to people one-on-one, what if I could just let a bunch of other people watch that lesson and learn from it and implement it in their own stuff. It would very often solve their problem for a lot less money and deliver similar value. That is how Copy Chief was born and that’s sort of the premise of any effective membership community I think.
Anthony: Would you think it’s fair to say that an effectively memorable marketing campaign essentially creates a kind of ecosystem?
Always Be Teaching
Kevin: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. I guess so, yeah. I’d say that’s a fair thing to say, if the campaign is teaching along the way. This is why I say, “always be teaching.” Teaching is everything. If one of your top priorities for your marketing campaign is to deliver actionable value to anybody who comes into the funnel, the campaign, then you absolutely are creating an ecosystem because especially on Facebook and anywhere if you have a site dedicated to it, people are naturally going to share something cool that they’re value from.
Anthony: Well, one thing that I wanted to talk to you a little about is the actual use of words. We’ve already been touching upon it with comedy and it’s come up a few times the idea of having structures and formulas and sort of setting something up so that it almost falls into place later when you come to the punch line. People listening to this may not be familiar with copywriting but we know that there are some particular structures like AIDA and related acronyms. How could you describe those kind of structures even if it is just one or two of them and how a person absorbs them into their memory so they can sort of use it on autopilot or using a crib sheet or something like that but still have an authentic ability to write according to structure?
Kevin: I sure you can educate me a lot more on this in regards to how memory works, but I think the best way to do it is not to just recognize a formula but to immerse yourself in the formula. Sort of like what I mentioned about the book being so effective for people because it gives them a very simple formula and then they’re inclined to do it, to use it. It’s sort of fun to use and everybody has a story so they are instantly qualified to use this. They don’t need to go do research or anything like that first. Then they immerse in it.
The Insider’s Guide To Sales Hooks
Part of why that took off for me was that people began to take ownership of the formula. It’s the ISDR (identity, struggle, discovery, result). People would call it that ISDR or the KLT formula (know, like, and trust formula). Because they immersed in it, they knew it and they took ownership of it.
What else was cool, what I never would have expected, was people started to recognize it out in the wild. They would be watching a TV commercial and they would go that was The 60 Second Sales Hook. They would send me a clip of the TV commercial or they would take a photo of an ad in a magazine and they go look at this. It’s The 60 Second Sales Hook. It was super cool. I think if it had not been for the fact that it was so easy to immerse yourself in that formula that never would have happened because like most things people would have nodded at it and said that makes sense and then just moved on to the next shiny object.
Anthony: I mean it is such a fascinating world and there is so much depth to it all. You mentioned Gary Halbert before, and speaking of depth, he had this idea of neurological imprinting which is something you could perhaps explain better in terms of actually writing out either headlines again and again or entire sales letters. Is that something that you’ve ever done or what do you think is the logic behind that.
Kevin: Yeah, it is something I did early on. It was one of the exercises in that course I mentioned, the Michael Masterson course. I found it useful but I also personally kind of got bored with it quick. Other people I know it’s actually become a bit of a cottage industry. There’s a service that does only that. I don’t know if there’s a fee for it or not. But essentially they send out a letter, a sales letter every day and then your job is to write it out by hand. They have kind of built a community around it. It’s a very popular thing to do. Occasionally, I question if that becomes for people, you know, they feel like okay I did my copywriting today but all they’re really doing is copying other people’s copy and I think there is value in that but it also could be a trap.
What I recommend to people and it was recommended to me as rote learning. As I understand it, it sort goes back to like a Greek philosophy of how to learn just by doing something over and over and over and does sort of imprint it on your brain and become an instinct. Famously other writers have done this. Hunter S. Thompson handwrote Hemingway he said just because he didn’t want to write like Hemingway. He just wanted to feel viscerally what it was it like to write on that level. I think there’s definitely value in that.
Again, I mention Gary Bencivenga, who is pretty commonly regarded as the best ever direct response copywriter. He gives a great piece of advice about a similar thing. His advice is to read a great ad every day, and not just read it, but as you are reading it, ask yourself, “Okay, what’s one thing I would change about this ad that I think would make it convert even better than it did?” To me that’s the real power. So I recommend to people if you’re going to hand copy great sales letters, headlines, stuff and bullets, add that to it. Every time you write a headline, go, “Is there a word I could change here? Is there a line I could add to this that I think would actually make it better?” You’ll begin to recognize that some things are super perfect the way they are.
The #1 Question You Need To Ask Your DNA
John Carlton famously wrote long headlines but you could not replace a single word in them. That’s something to study.
I think it is very effective. I don’t know the exact science as to why it works. I guess, again, immersing in something that is quality, it forces you to recognize what is good about it. I think the real power is in asking yourself, “How can I, personally, me with my unique DNA, what would I change about this that I think might make it even better.”
Anthony: I think that’s a great way of approaching it. Maybe if I can offer something to you to take back to Copy Chief. There’s a real interesting guy named Kenneth Goldsmith and he runs something called “Uncreativity Courses.” There’s actually a YouTube video, I can send you a link later and maybe you can share it around where he talks about how he gets his students to pick something to rewrite, to retype essentially. He says the surprise assignment behind the assignment is for them to write an essay about why they chose that particular thing to torture themselves to type through. That’s where the insight is. It is in the reflection of the repetitive action. That’s kind of the connection to Greek philosophy that you were mentioning. How do we derive insight from what it is that we chose to repeat? The same thing with Zen archery and so forth, it’s not so much the repetition as such, but the reflection on the repetition.
Kevin: Wow, love that. That’s great. What’s the name?
Anthony: Kenneth Goldsmith. He gave a speech in the White House. It is the most hilarious thing in the world when you hear him saying to Ms. Obama that I think students should be retyping famous pieces of literature and in fact that’s what they do and the look on their faces is completely, like all these old biddies that are in the White House for poetry day. I will send you a link.
Kevin: I’ll definitely share that. I love it. That’s great. Thank you.
Anthony: It’s awesome. This has been really great. I wondered if I could pick your brain with a question for the people listening to this who aren’t going to become copywriters, but they aspire to get great jobs and have amazing careers and they need to write compelling resumes. As someone who relies to a large extent on the written word, what advice would you give to someone sending out applications for jobs that strictly require their details in print. How can they not kick down the door but get remembered and ideally called in for an interview so that door is opened?
Kevin: I’ve got to be one of the least qualified person ever to talk about how to write a resume. I’m like proudly unhireable. I will say, and I’ve heard that it’s basically computers scanning resumes for certain keywords and that’s how you ever make the pile. The only place I could offer advice is on a cover letter perhaps. The advice I would give for that is speak to the reader like the human being they are.
Cover letters that I’ve seen are either desperately boring because they are just trying so hard to sound professional. It’s like mission statements. Companies’ mission statements are typically – you are literally asleep by the fourth word.
Compare that to something like Dollar Shave Club. That famous video, eight million views on an ad. Why? Because the guy just kept it real and made it funny and told you everything you needed to know in a very transparent and entertaining way.
Humor doesn’t belong everywhere. I wouldn’t try to be funny, but if you could be real. You have got to figure these people are just scanning these cover letters over and over and over, and if you can be the one that makes them slow down their reading and go, “Huh, oh, that’s interesting,” and sound like somebody they can relate to or a niece or a nephew or a friend or someone they care about.
The Human Elements You Should Never Forget
There’s a reason C-level executives go to lunch with the people they go to lunch with by choice on Friday or whatever. It’s not always business. People are drawn to other people. We’re all human. I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes we make saying like B2B copywriting, which essentially this is kind of what this would be. We are so bent on sounding professional, intelligent and qualified that we forget to be human. I would say that would be your one shining example. Take a chance and be human.
If you can make a connection that way, I bet you’ll get an interview and if you do get an interview, it’s going to be the one they look forward to that day because you’ve already raised their eyebrow with how you connected with them.
Anthony: I like that. That’s powerful.
What is coming up next for you and how can people get in touch if they want to learn more about you, learn about Copy Chief and what you teach in terms of enabling people to write better and essentially make a career for themselves as a writer if they wanted to go down that route. How do people find you?
Kevin: Yeah, Copy Chief is pretty much where you’ll find everything. A copy chief in our business is the person who oversees the ad campaign, the copywriting and my premise for the community is that we all need chiefs. We all chief each other and help each other write better and more effectively. There is a membership community with a monthly fee but there’s also tons of great helpful stuff you can get for free at Copy Chief. You’ll see the blog. You’ll see The Truth About Marketing Podcast and lots of fun little formulas.
You can also download The 60 Second Sales Hook book. I would love for anybody – I think anybody no matter what their goal is would find a lot of value in that book if nothing else. I would certainly love to have anybody take advantage of that.
Anthony: Well to end on the note of “the truth about marketing,” if – heaven forbid – some nuclear disaster were to wipe away your entire memory, what would be the one truth about marketing that you would want to hold in your mind and never forget?
Kevin: Wow, that’s a big question. The one thing? That when all else fails, just be honest. When every other framework feels insufficient, try bold honesty. If there’s a flaw, point it out. If there ares people who something is not for, point them out. Help them identify themselves. Again, by doing so you’ll strengthen the bond with people who it is for. I guess that would be the big one. Know who you’re talking to and speak to them like you would a friend.
October 28, 2015
11 Unexpected Answers To Your Questions About Mnemonics
[image error]Have you ever wondered if mnemonics and memory techniques are for everyone?
Or maybe they just didn’t feel right for you?
Here’s the thing:
They might not be.
That’s one of the unexpected answers you’ll hear in this podcast and read below, so let’s get started with a wonderful letter I received from a student in the Netherlands:
Let me introduce myself. I am Timo, a Dutch high school student. Nowadays I am preparing for my finals, but besides that I am also working on a final paper about the human memory. To be honest, last year I failed to pass my exams, so I decided to learn differently this year. During my summer vacation, I came across your website. While listening to your podcasts, I realized that this would be the best way to learn for me. That I eventually picked out this subject for my paper was a coincidence.
Back to the story. The last months I have read many books and scientific articles about the method of loci (or the Magnetic Memory Method). There are not many articles about this matter. These articles suggest that the method of loci is an effective way, but they are written by psychologists. Most of them are sceptic to use this in classrooms. You are, on the other hand, the expert for teaching this method to students. I assume that you use this method almost every week.
My practical part of my paper is an experiment with high school students. (This is required in The Netherlands.) Last week I finished teaching them the basics and how to apply the method to a list of random facts and vocabulary words. Now they are preparing to make a test, which I prepared. A university researcher helps me to process the data from these test results. However, I met some resistance with some of the students. They think that this is too time consuming. The teachers are, however, enthusiastic about my research. They want to know more about this subject.
Therefore I am considering writing a much shorter paper for all the teachers to explain my findings. Assuming that you are the only one, who gives these kind of courses, could I ask you humble opinion. Most of the books and articles do not give a clear answer, whether or not this method is effective on large classes and is better for the knowledge of the student (long-term memory). So here are my questions:
Is the Magnetic Memory Method a skill that everyone can develop?
No. The Magnetic Memory Method, any mnemonics or set of memory techniques are exclusive to a particular kind of person.
First, the person must be open to experimentation and implementation.
These personal characteristics appear not to be present in everyone. They require learning a set of tools that must be used in order to truly understand them.
Think of a computer keyboard, for example. Anyone can look at the keyboard and understand a description of what it is supposed to do. But without putting their fingers on the keys and learning to press the keys to produce words, words will never form.
And the exciting thing about typing is that, once you’ve started learning it, you can learn to write very fast. Not only that, but you’ve become so familiar with the keyboard that you can type entire books without even looking down at the keys or your fingers.
Memory techniques are like that, especially if you’re using Memory Palaces. The Memory Palace is a kind of keyboard you build yourself based on a manual like the Magnetic Memory Method. The information you want to memorize forms the keys and the associative-imagery are the sentences you write on the paper of your imagination.
And of course, no one types an entire book without making mistakes. But editing is a minor feat and quickly accomplished simply by scanning the record and compounding your associative-imagery or making the necessary changes.
The keyboard metaphor is not perfect, but it gives a sense of how mnemonic approaches like the Magnetic Memory Method work. Other metaphors have been given, such as the wax tablet and bird cage metaphors given by Aristotle.
In sum, not everyone can develop memory techniques because not everyone will take action. And a large percentage of those who do get started will, unfortunately, abandon the task at the first sign of mental effort. This premature departure is unfortunate because incredible successes are usually just around the corner.
Again, memory techniques are best learned by doing. The real job of an instructor in the art of memory is, therefore, inspiring people to take action by learning the techniques and then continuing to take action as a kind of scientist.
As a scientist, you create the basis for an experiment based on a clearly defined outcome and track your results. When the results don’t match the desired outcome, you analyze the mnemonic procedures you used and the Memory Palace itself and make the necessary changes, try again and once again track the results.
Like many things in life, they who test win.
Is the Magnetic Memory Method worth learning?
Yes, but ultimately that is not up for me to decide. Learning is just one part of the process. You must implement the memory techniques, not just learn them. Knowing what they are and how they work without using them is like holding your fingers over the keyboard but never typing anything.
The same holds true of any other memory training you might pursue. I personally believe that everyone should read as many books on memory techniques as possible, but only if they’re willing to try things out.
To this day, I continue reading every book on mnemonics I can find. Almost every single one of them has a new angle on an old technique or something entirely new. I always give these new approaches a try and sometimes they become part of what I do in my personal memory practice.
How much time does it take to master the Magnetic Memory Method for tests (and eventually final exams)?
Mastery is not the issue. It’s results that matter and these often arrive fast and hard when people learn the techniques, follow the instructions and implement based around topics they’re passionate about and that will make an immediate difference in their lives.
When I say “instructions,” I’m not talking dogma. The Magnetic Memory Method is called a method precisely because you need to come with a spirit of experimentation. It’s not a system and it breaks my heart every time I hear someone talk about their “memory system.”
There are no universal systems and you cannot truly use the approach of someone else. Rather, people need a method that helps them create their own, highly personalized system , remembering that flexibility is a requirement as they experiment with making the Magnetic Memory Method their own.
You need to understand that the map is not the territory and results only happen when you’re with the rest of us mnemonists down in the trenches and doing the spadework.
All that said, people typically learn and prepare themselves for the Magnetic Memory Method
Are there any requirements to make the Magnetic Memory Method easier to learn?
The only requirements are a willingness to learn and experiment with the techniques. It helps a great deal if you also come with a topic you’re passionate about, but that’s not strictly necessary. Even the most boring information from the driest topic in the world can be made thoroughly exciting using a Memory Palace and the other tools mnemonics offer.
How can someone test, whether or not the student has learned the Magnetic Memory Method?
Testing is simple. The student either correctly produces the memorized information or not.
That said, unless you’re competing, 100% accuracy is not always necessary. You can create a huge advantage for yourself simply by covering 50%, 35%, 25% or even less of the material on a test.
The important point is that you direct the memory techniques where they are needed. Some people pick up lots of information without the need of any technique.
Others, for various reasons, are desperate for something – anything – that will get more information into long-term memory.
Whether one uses memory techniques or not, testing offers the only means of discovering how much and how deep into long term memory information has gone.
The best part is that we know that as memories age, they move into different parts of the brain. (Gary small link). These memories may even be segmented into different pieces that are stored in different places. In this way, the remembered material becomes connected to other pieces of information, leading to what can be considered the formation of knowledge.
So it is not uncommon that a person using mnemonics will seek a single piece of information and wind up uncorking a powerful flow of related information. This effect takes place often when the remembered information involves philosophy, history and material from subject-based textbooks. Here’s a quick training on how to memorize a textbook.
Testing is a tremendously exciting part of the Magnetic Memory Method because it not only demonstrates that the techniques are working. Merely by testing recall, you strengthen your memory. You also discover more about the techniques and create deeper familiarity with them, ingraining them deeper in your being.
In principle, without testing, which amounts to recall, you aren’t really using memory techniques. This is why I talked in this video on card memorization about how memorization really only takes place during recall, and we must take the time spent during memorization and recall together to form a proper assessment of the time investment.
Is your method age restricted? Is it easier for younger students?
I do not believe that memory techniques are any easier or harder for younger students than any other age. The one advantage young people have is a lack of inhibition and a fresh connection to play.
However, adults, when they can get their egos out of the way, have the advantage of discipline and focus. They can, by and large, sit still at will and channel their energies towards the imagination. They can also practice meditation and analyze the kinds of imagination they have at their disposal with greater insight.
Could information that someone learns, interfere with other information? For instance, would Latin vocabulary interfere with biology terminology?
One kind of information can interfere with other kinds. This possibility is called either “ghosting” or “The Ugly Sister Effect.” These tend to arise when people use the same Memory Palace more than once without cleaning it first.
If the information is too similar – such as when memorizing French and Spanish vocabulary – the interference can be severe. However, Spanish and Russian vocabulary are sufficiently different, something that reduces, if not eliminates jarring effects and confusion.
In either case, with a bit of practice, neither need be interruptive. Once you understand the Ugly Sister Effect, you can bend it to your will and make it advantageous.
Do you think that this method is an essential skill in our digitalising world? People are nowadays more depending on their mobile phones than their memory.
Is it really true that people are relegating more and more information to their memory? Or is it possible that they are freeing it up so they have more space and time to learn and memorize more important things?
Long before computer technology, people suffered from unexercised minds. We sometimes have a false vision of the past in which all kinds of people were running around with superior memory abilities. Many scholars, yes. But the average Joe? Hardly. More everyday people use memory techniques around the world than ever before.
No, it is a lame and technologically deterministic view that blames technology for human laziness. It is the same technological determinism that blamed cars for more sex amongst teenagers and now blames cell phones for sexting. Believe me, young people had lots of sex with each other before cars appeared and many lewd notes were passed from student to student in the absence of cell phones.
What is interesting about technology is that it is at the precise moment that it became so central to our lives that a mnemonics Renaissance took on full force. I believe there is no mistake that the World Memory Championships, mind-mapping and a global interest in memory techniques surged as computers grew in popularity.
But I do not believe this occurred because human memory was being replaced and weakened. I believe the mnemonics Renaissance began because technology has freed the human mind to remember much more valuable things.
For this reason, I often berate those who teach the memorization of shopping lists. What a waste of human imagination and mental energy!
No, if you want to truly learn mnemonics and feel their awesome power from the first moment, memorize something that will immediately improve your life, or at least please you. Memorize something in line with your passions, something you cannot relegate to pen and paper or a computer. It’s for remembering these daily concerns that technology exists. Save your memory for the information that matters.
Do you think that the Magnetic Memory Method is a necessity for all students around the world?
No. Some students do perfectly well without mnemonics. I believe they would do even better with them, but what matters is the results they want and the results they get.
Should education institutes implement the Magnetic Memory Method in the classroom? How could teachers successfully teach this skill?
Yes.
However, I do not think the MMM or any form of mnemonics should be crammed into the classroom with other subjects.
Mnemonics is a subject on its own. It has history, and like math, has different forms. If math has addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, mnemonics has linking, association, rhyming, keywords, abbreviations and the mothership that bears them all, the location-based Memory Palace.
If schools were to create a semester-long, or even a year-long course in mnemonics, our world would be a much different – and better place – almost overnight. We would be faced with an information revolution far more powerful and interesting than the computer revolution because more people than ever before would be using the software in the hardware of their heads at the highest level ever in the history of humanity.
How often do you use the Magnetic Memory Method, and what for?
I use memory techniques nearly every day of my life. When I meet people, I memorize their names. When I study a language, I memorize vocabulary and phrases. When I read books, I remember dates and facts. When I study music, I memorize scales and lyrics. When I sit in lectures, I memorize the messages in real time. When I warm up for memory projects, I memorize short runs of playing cards.
Above all, I spend the first minutes of nearly every day practicing dream recall. Even if I can’t remember a single dream, I make a note of it to help stimulate recall the next night.
And nearly every day, I spend a small amount of time writing in my gratitude journal. It is a powerful means of never forgetting just what a wonderful life I’ve got.
No matter where we live or who we may be, our existences are tied deeply to memory. And where memory is absent, the mindless void of forgetfulness and repetitive fantasy and negative messages persists. Only by focusing on strengthening our memory can we remember to be present with higher and higher levels of clarity. In this way, using memory techniques are a powerful form of meditation and perhaps the ultimate path to enlightenment.
Further Resources
October 20, 2015
How To Win The USA Memory Championship
[image error] In this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast, USA Memory Champ Nelson Dellis teaches you how to win the USA Memory Championship.
Take it away, Nelson!
So you’ve read a bunch of books on memory skills. You may have even listened to all the podcasts on this site.
But although many of them have helped your memory tremendously, there might be some of you out there who want to use your techniques to compete in (and possibly win) the USA Memory Championship.
As a 4x USA memory champ (and before you think I’m cocky, also a 3x USA Memory Championship loser), I know the ins and out to winning this competition.
Surprisingly, becoming a memory champion is not necessarily all about memory. There are a lot of other subtle things that go into making it to the end and winning the USA Memory Championship.
And I’m going to explain to you exactly how.
Here we go.
Step 1 – Sign Up
This first point is dumb and obvious, but I’ve met a lot of people who talk about the competition as if it’s this Holy Grail that awaits them …
… once they are truly prepared.
To them I say, f*ck it.
Just sign up and compete. There is nothing better than getting the experience of a full competition under your belt than actually competing.
I hate to say this but, no one (well except for the very first winner, Tatiana Cooley) has won this thing on the first try. You could argue that Joshua Foer won on his first go, but technically he was there the year before as a journalist.
Sure, he didn’t compete that first time, but he dug himself deep into the competition for his article. Scott Hagwood, Ram Kolli, Ron White, Chester Santos and myself, we all lost before we won.
Even this year when I took first place, I honestly believe I won based on competition experience. There were some competitors with better-trained memories than me, but less competition knowledge and experience.
So, bottom line, it’s about getting competitive experience. If you want that edge, just sign up and compete. It’s worth gold. Go for it!
Step 2 – Make It To The Second Round
The USAMC is split into two parts. The morning events:
* Names & Faces
* Speed Numbers
* Speed Cards
* Poetry
The afternoon playoff events:
* Spoken Words
* Tea Party
* Double Deck O’ Cards.
Making it to this afternoon second round has a lot of parts, because you need to score well in each event to make it into the advancing top 8. Not as well as you might think, but decent enough.
The scoring works like this: With each discipline you get a score based on how much you memorize correctly according to the rules.
Then, that score is turned into a championship score, which is a weighted score based on a curve. The best score is 100 pts and then everyone scores comparatively.
Statistically over the years, you need about 200-250 out of 400 pts to make the cut. But standards change over time and it is harder to get a score that high than ever before.
But the nice thing is that even if there are a couple people hitting some awesome scores, there are a lot of people with mediocre scores. Until everyone in the USA is amazing at memorizing (which they’re not … yet), this fact will be your savior.
The mediocre scores are there because it often ends up that there are one or two, at most three front runners who are in another league compared to everyone else in the top 8. The rest are good, and still better than the remainder, but not that impressive comparatively to the top.
So the bottom line is that you need to score consistently mediocre (or better) across the board to make the top 8. You used to be able to pass to the second round by being amazing at just 2 of the events. But agian, that’s getting harder to do. And if you are great at only one event but none of the others, you’re chances are nearly zilch.
In other words, sorry to say, but there is no real shortcut here. You gotta be “good” at all four disciplines: names, numbers, cards, and poetry. But the good news is, you don’t have to be that good.
Step 3 – Play Strategically Through The Playoff Rounds
Okay, you’ve made into the top-8. Maybe not top ranked, but you’re in there. The nice thing about the afternoon playoffs is that it is all strategy. The chances for anyone to win at this point are all pretty much even. You could be the worst of the 8 (i.e. Ram Kolli in 2013) and still end up beating 1st place (me) and become the champ.
SPOKEN WORDS
They take you backstage to memorize 200 words (or as many as you can of those 200) in 15 minutes. Then, recall takes place back on stage, in order of the list, alternating between competitors.
One slip-up and …
… you’re out.
The round ends when three people have made a mistake. To me, this is the most difficult and nerve-wracking event. What you want to be able to do is memorize just enough not to run out of words before those three competitors get eliminated.
This means that the real trick is in figuring out how many words to memorize. It makes for a delicate balance between what you are capable of and what you think others can achieve.
Mind Explosion!
There have been years that the word count went up to 88, and others where it only went up to 35.
Everything depends on circumstance. People trip up on the most unpredictable things.
For example, favorite Johnny Briones recited “architecture” instead of “architect” in 2014. Top 5 finalist, Brad Zupp swapped the very two first words “aorta” and “office” in 2012. And many others have just blanked when they new up to 100 or so words. You just don’t know who’s going to trip up, so make sure you know YOUR words.
Typically I go for what I think is a safe minimum, around 100 words. Make sure you can do those 100 words, and do them perfectly. What’s tricky in recall is that you aren’t by yourself reciting. You have to be mentally prepared to say every 7th word or even less if someone gets knocked out before you. This can be a bit tricky and throw you off if you haven’t practiced.
TEA PARTY
Next up, six audience members come on stage and state eight factoids about themselves.
My advice:
Don’t bother listening to the people. Just listen for the name, memorize it, then put your head down, ignore them, and just study the sheet (the same information they speak is given to you in print). They talk way too fast to memorize it on the fly, so just read it instead.
Plus, you get an extra 7-9 minutes to review the packet info after the audience members are done speaking. On top of that, you get three strikes (not single elimination like SPOKEN WORDS).
I find this event the easiest because it’s so lenient. Typically it goes until two people are eliminated, but in recent years, no one has made three mistakes, so all five competitors qualify for the next round. Look for them to add a few more bits of info next year to make it harder.
DOUBLE DECK
So now you’ve made it to the finals! All you have to do is memorize two decks of cards in five minutes.
At this point, it’s most likely there are three competitors left (but it could be up to five). The goal is to memorize more than your opponents.
There was a time when memorizing around a deck and a half was championship winning, but not anymore. Last year four out of the five finalists memorized (or claimed to) both decks in their entirety. So then it comes down to accuracy.
How reliably can you recite those two decks perfectly? You won’t have to say all the cards, since you’ll be alternating between competitors, but as with the words, you need to be flexible and say any card when it comes to you. A few competitors have failed to do this over the years (me included) despite being clear favorites to win the title. It’s tricky, but can be overcome with practice.
Step 4 – Fly Under The Radar
Here’s an “inner game” tip to take with you for the whole competition:
Don’t talk hype. Just show up to the competition and kick some quiet ass.
For one, you’ll be no one’s focus. You can freely chill out in the back of the room hitting the scores that you practiced with zero attention coming your way.
But if people know about you or you’ve been around a few competitions and done well, you’ll get more attention. More attention means more stress and possibly more cameras in your face.
What I wouldn’t give to do my 2010 competition again. No one knew me, and I came out of the gates shocking everyone, quietly and confidently. The top guys didn’t know anything about me, and it made them nervous while I was in there just cruising.
Obviously there is still a lot of work you’ll have to do if you want to do well in all the events. But there is an endless amount of literature on just how to train your memory for competition. You can start at Art of Memory where you’ll find loads of resources created by other memory competitors.
Put all those things together and with enough luck and skill, you might just find yourself standing up on stage as the 2016 USA Memory Champ.
BOOM!
Further Resources and links mentioned in the intro and outro.
Extreme Memory Improvement interview with Nelson Dellis
Nelson’s Kickstarter campaign for a children’s picture book called I Forgot Something (But I Can’t Remember What It Was)
Help a good cause by taking the Extreme Memory Challenge and support Alzheimer’s research
Canada’s Best Memory Tournament
October 12, 2015
3 Ridiculously Boring Ways To Add Focus And Excitement To Your Life
[image error]Absentmindedness sucks.
You forget where you put your keys. Your car disappears from the parking lot. You left the stove on again.
Well, guess what?
There’s a cure for absentmindedness.
It’s called focus, and you’re about to learn three ridiculously boring ways to develop it.
The following techniques work best in combination, but obviously life changes work best when you add them one by one, so pick your favorite and dive in.
But if you have to begin anywhere, I recommend that you start with establishing a basic framework by understanding …
The Stunning Magic Of Being Boring
Boring?
Oh yes, and here’s why:
Just about every successful person in history has lived a life of constraint. Check out the following video and beneath that, I’ll break out some of the key points.
As you’ve just learned, highly boring people live exciting lives. They reduce everything they do to the essentials, including:
Wearing similar clothes and eating repetitive meals every day to eliminate decision fatigue.
Isolating tasks and remove distractions. You can do this by working in cafes without WiFi. Leave your smartphone at home and bring only a pad of paper and a pen and your laptop if you must.
Wear earplugs if noise bothers you, or if you like music, try an app that features focusfriendly compositions, like focusatwill.com.
Hammering away at carefully defined tasks without adding new things to do willy nilly.
Keeping a journal to record their activities and track their time. [link to gold coin post to do: make that a podcast]
The reason developing a life based on constraints helps develop focus and eliminates absentmindedness is because you give yourself far less about which to be absentminded.
Not only that, but should you fall prey to absentmindedness, you’ll find your way back to focus.
Why?
Because the mountains you climb in your daily life won’t be hidden behind the fog of multitasking.
Frankly, when you limit your activities and focus on the essentials, you’ll not only find and climb your mountains, you’ll move them entirely out of your life and move on to finer things.
Even if you have a boss, it should be possible for you to isolate your most high margin tasks. Write a proposal, make a meeting and ask to redefine your activities.
If your boss rejects your suggestion, either track your time on your own time to prove what you can do on your own, or …
Find Another Boss!
Speaking of which, if you want to bypass working for the man altogether, becoming an entrepreneur or self-employed is a great way to develop focus.
Placing yourself in a situation that forces you to get results or starve will rip absentmindedness from your life and leave it wriggling on the floor like a helpless insect.
As you can see, developing a boring life really can add tremendous excitement to your days on planet earth. So get started. Time is ticking.
The Extraordinary Power Of Sitting Still For No Reason Whatsoever
One of the most regular activities you can add to your life involves one of the most boring and yet tremendously exciting activities ever invented by humanity …
Yes, we’re talking about meditation.
Would you like to know why so many people struggle to incorporate this simple activity into their daily routines?
The answer is simple:
It’s Because They’re Trying To Meditate
Sorry, dear Memorizers, but that’s the wrong road to enlightenment and a quick path to suffering.
But before we talk about how to meditate the Magnetic way, here’s what meditation can do for you. All of these features of the world’s oldest brain training technique are scientifically proven and should persuade you to add meditation to your daily routine.
Meditation …
Increases focus
Creates emotional control
Improves your working memory (luca link)
Reduces “wandering mind” syndrome
Lowers pain
Each of these benefits of meditation reduces absentmindedness because when you’re not in pain, and you eliminate mind wandering, focus glides in to replace these distractions.
To maintained your renewed focus, all you need to do is keep meditating.
Boring, right?
Not necessarily.
Not when you know …
How To Meditate In A Buddha-shaped Nutshell
Surprisingly, proper meditation is super easy to do. You need only chuck the idea that meditation is about experiencing socalled “nomind” and sit just to sit.
That’s it.
Sit down and let your mind wander. When first starting out, don’t bother with breathing exercises or mantras.
Sit just to sit.
After a few moments, you’ll become aware of the fact that you’re sitting on the floor, completely lost in thought.
When this happens, you’ll become present. You’ll be in the room, totally focused on the present moment instead of fantasizing about the future, playing some alternative version of things you’ve done in the past, or talking to yourself.
In reality, all that inner-dialogue is far more boring than meditating.
Why?
Because You’ve Repeated All That Junk To Yourself Before!
When that moment of clarity comes, even if it takes a few sessions to get into it, you’ll feel pleasure, elation, and yes, enlightenment. That’s all enlightenment is: the elucidation that the present moment is all we have and you can be in it.
Here’s a practical, step-by-step meditation guide you can use every day for the rest of your life.
1. Pick a time. Morning, noon, evening, it doesn’t matter. Regularity matters.
If you can’t commit to an actual time of day, create an After X meditation practice.
For example, meditate after eating a major meal. Meditating after eating can feel especially profound because, so long as you’ve eaten nonirritating foods, you’ll be physically content. And who knows? You might also digest your food better.
2. Pick a place to meditate. It could be your bedroom floor, basement rumpus room or backyard garden.
Face East, West, North, South … Take your pick. Which direction doesn’t matter, so long as you have one.
Remember, the way to eliminate absentmindedness and increase focus is to eliminate decision fatigue. If you give yourself too much to think about, you eliminate the chances that you’ll get down to business.
3. (Optional) Set a timer.
Tim Ferris suggests that you do less than you think you can. In other words, if you think you can sit still for ten minutes, set the timer for eight minutes, maybe even five.
If you do this, I would add that once the timer rings, you turn it off and then sit a little longer. You can move a little or even stand up,but do squeeze a few more moments into the session. It’s often in this second, untimed session where the magic happens.
4. Sit and do nothing else but sit.
A lot of people teach that you should progressively focus on each muscle of your body from head to foot. This practice is often called a “body scan.”
By all means, experiment with this. But understand that it is not waiting for your awareness of the present moment to arrive. It is not allowing yourself to be lost in thought so you can catch yourself everywhere but here.
5. When you finally arrive, enjoy and observe.
The more you practice this simple form of meditation, the longer these moments of arrival will last.
Clarity will also bubble up in different ways throughout your days. Although it’s unlikely and undesirable that absentminded fantasizing can be eliminated from your life, you can limit the amount of time your mind spends wandering out of control.
There are also dietary reasons why you can’t focus. If that’s the case …
Cut The Booze With A Vengeance
Drinking’s awesome, right? You get a buzz, inhibitions loosen and that ugly stranger across the room starts looking a lot more attractive.
By the same token, your vision blurs. Your speech slurs. You develop difficulty walking as your reactions slow. Worst of all, you impair your memory, including your working memory for two days or more.
Worse, alcohol interrupts neurogenesis. Scientists once thought that the brain doesn’t generate new cells, and once they’re gone, they’re gone.
However, we now know that new brain cells generate from stem cells and alcohol interferes with this process. The lack of new growth in super important parts of your brain (like the hippocampus) leads to foggy thinking, reduced concentration and poor decision-making.
Of course, not all people react the same to alcohol, but even so, why take the risk?
Dump The Sugar
Did you know that sugar changes the structure of your brain?
Not only that, but it messes with neurotransmitters like acetylcholine. That, dear Memorizers, is one supercritical substance when it comes to your ability to learn.
Sugar also leads to brain atrophy, which itself leads to dementia and Alzheimer’s. (Gary Small link)
Those conditions involve more than absentmindedness. They are a complete and permanent journey into the void.
Eat brain healthy substances instead. These include:
Leafy greens
Berries
Whole grains
Nuts and seeds
Fatty fish
Avocado
Bananas
Green tea
Beets
Bone broth (link)
Broccoli
Celery
Coconut oil
Egg yolks
Extra virgin olive oil
Rosemary
Tumeric
Walnuts
Warning: Dark chocolate (but beware of this because prepared chocolate bars usually dissipate the helpful ingredients. You’d need to eat 70 or more to experience any benefits)
And of course, drink water. Like there’s no tomorrow. Without regular hydration, your brain will shrink in mass and it can’t detoxify.
And it’s 85% water, after all, so it’ll feel in good company when you keep it swimming.
This Is Just The Beginning
There is a lot more you can do to increase focus in your life. Reducing clutter, regular walks, playing games and being social all
contribute to greater focus.
Simple stuff, right?
Put these simple practices into your life and you’ll reduce absentmindedness to the bare minimum. You’ll focus like a hawk on your goals and become the Magnetic King or Queen of your realm, just like you’ve always wanted to be.
October 8, 2015
Why Goal-Setting For Memory Improvement Should Be Your Number One Priority
[image error]This is Andrew Barr and today I’m sitting in for Anthony in this guest post.
I’m from realfastspanish.com and over there I help Spanish students get a conversational level of Spanish using specific tactics and strategies to improve their effectiveness as language students.
And in this post I’m going to teach you how you can apply some of these strategies to significantly improve your effectiveness when it comes to your memorisation challenges using the principles of the Magnetic Memory Method.
Whether you are just starting out with memory palaces or you are a seasoned professional, today you will learn three ways you can improve your effectiveness with memory palaces in order to achieve your goals with less effort and in less time.
If you are already using Memory Palaces and mnemonics you are well ahead of the curve. You already know that using memory techniques improves the efficiency of learning. But, it is still possible to get even more out of your approach to memorisation.
It doesn’t matter whether you are using the Magnetic Memory Method for language learning, acing exams in school, vying for a memory championship title or trying to impress friends at a party. There are three steps you need to consider if you want to have even more success with your memory challenges.
Memory Palaces Are a Means, But …
What is the Goal?
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question; I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” — Albert Einstein.
“Begin with the end in mind” — Stephen Covey.
Before you can start to maximise the potential of your memory palace training you need a clear vision of what you are a trying to achieve. A memory palace is a tool that you can use to achieve any number of outcomes with incredible efficiency. But the real power comes when your outcome is sharply defined.
The problem is that, often, we don’t clearly define where we want to end up, which makes the path to get there a lot harder than it needs to be.
Recently, I met a guy who works for an oil company and was telling me about his vision to become rich. He said he had his whole plan mapped out. His plan was to buy property after property and then subdivide and develop. He told me he wanted to have a few million in property, a few million in stocks and a few million in cash for those “just in case” moments.
After mapping the whole plan out, I looked at him and said “Why? What is all this money for? If money is a means to an end, what is your end goal?”
He said “I want to work with children”.
I Couldn’t Believe It
I said “why don’t you become a teacher?” He said “I want to work with disadvantaged children”. He then told me that he didn’t need the money to pay for programs for the children, he needed it so he could live without needing to work to free up his time. I told him he didn’t need millions of dollars to do that.
I told him about a good friend of mine—a high school teacher who quit her job to work with disadvantaged children. She left her job here in Australia and moved to the Solomon Islands where she is working and living on a small allowance to cover her board and her food. She is working with the local teachers to develop a new curriculum in the school. As well as helping and teaching the children that live in the local area.
She didn’t need millions of dollars, she was clear about what she wanted to do and she went and did it.
After telling him the story, he just stared at me blankly.
He offered a few excuses but it was obvious there was a disconnect between the goal and the means for getting there.
Without a clear vision in mind, it is possible he will spend years trying to achieve a poorly defined goal. What if it takes him 30 years to meet his goal? Will it be worth it if he gets there in his 60s? Or worse, if he doesn’t get there at all?
Don’t Get Caught With A Poorly Defined Goal
He is not the only one, though, who got caught with a poorly defined goal. I too have found myself without a clear vision at times.
Seven years ago I decided I wanted to be fluent in Spanish. I did some online research and found some resources for beginners. I printed everything off and got to work. I practiced for quite some time learning whatever I could about the Spanish language.
Within two years, I organised my first trip to Spain. Before I got there I was so excited for the fun and adventure I was going to have with my new language skills. I was going to make local friends, I was going to go to interesting places only the locals knew about and I was going to experience Spain the way a typical tourist couldn’t.
Does Language Learning Overwhelm, Confuse And Frustrate You?
When I got there, the reality was a completely different thing. I was overwhelmed, confused and frustrated.
My Spanish was hopeless. It was miles from what I thought it was. I couldn’t understand what the locals were saying. I couldn’t remember what I had learnt. And when I did remember how to say something, I translated literally from English and got a lot of strange looks.
When I returned to Australia I was deflated. I thought my abilities in language learning were worthless and I should move on to other pursuits.
Shortly after my return, I met up with a few friends in bar. They brought along a friend from France. Her English was good but not amazing—it was good enough to communicate, better than my Spanish at least. I told her about my experience in Spain and for the next few hours we shared language learning war stories. She told me about her struggles with English. I asked her “despite what you are saying, I understand you perfectly, you can communicate. How did you get to this level?”
She then told me something about language learning that changed everything for me. She said “you can just keep learning forever, and that’s it!” I asked her what she meant.
She told me that, if I wanted to, I could spend every day for the rest of my life learning something about the Spanish language. But, if I wasn’t clear about what I actually wanted to do with the language I would be lost learning for learning’s sake.
What do I mean?
In the English language there are over 250,000 words yet only 20,000 are used in regular day-to-day communication.
Sure, You Can Memorize A Gazillion Spanish Words … But Why?
For Spanish, these numbers are even better—there are a total of 100,000 words in the language yet the top 1000 most frequent words make up 87% of spoken communication. It is really quite amazing, you only 1% of the total number of Spanish words in existence for almost 90% of the conversation language.
What I discovered after talking to the French girl in the bar was that I could spend the rest of my life learning about 99,000 words in Spanish, but if I couldn’t use the most common 1000 words properly I would never have a chance to meet the locals and experience parts of the culture I had always wanted to experience.
So the question is — how well have you defined your goals? How well do you know and understand the outcome you truly want from the use of your memory palaces? And is there actually a disconnect between the information you are placing into your memory palace and what you actually need to know?
Anthony has mentioned that one of his most popular podcasts was How To Memorize A Textbook. It is possible to memorise a whole textbook using memory palaces. But as Anthony mentioned, and I reiterate here, before you start filling your memory palaces, you should start by eliminating components of the textbook that you aren’t actually going to need.
If you are preparing for an upcoming exam, are there components of the course that you won’t be tested for?
For example, imagine you have an upcoming chemistry test. The teacher tells you that the test will be on the periodic table. The question is—do you have to memorise all 118 elements? Maybe some quick research uncovers from the previous exam tests or maybe the teacher tells you that they will only test your memory for the first 50 elements. Now you only need 50 memory stations instead 118. Through defining a clearer goal you have made the path easier.
If you are studying a language, are there low frequency words that you are unlikely to ever use? Or are there words that you can eliminate because you can easily say them in another way?
The 3 Person Test
If we use language learning as an example, one word that I don’t particularly like is the word fluency. I encourage all of my students at Real Fast Spanish to stop using this particular word when trying to set goals in language learning.
For example, I mentioned that there are 100,000 words in the Spanish language. If you wanted to be “fluent” in Spanish, how many of those 100,000 words should you put in a memory palace?
It is unclear, right? But …
What Does Fluency Mean?
Instead see if you can define a better goal for yourself. How? By using the 3 person test.
Start by coming up with an appropriate goal to help you move you from where you are now to where you want to be. Then ask 3 people if they clearly understand your goal. If they do, it is a good goal, if they don’t, you need to go back to the drawing board.
What you ultimately want from the 3 person test is a consensus from your panel of 3 when you have achieved your goal.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Imagine your goal is to count to 10 in Chinese. If you could do it, then the panel would all agree. Yes you have achieved your goal.
Now imagine your goal is to be fluent in German. When you ask three people if they think you are fluent then it is very possible you could get three different answers, when you think you are. One person might say ”yes”, one might say “maybe” and one might answer the question with another question. In this case your goal would fail the 3 person test.
Knowing and having a sharply defined outcome is the first step to maximising your effectiveness with your memory challenges. A clear end game allows you to carefully select the right information to place into your memory palace which will save you time and effort later.
Let’s look at the second step.
How to Overcome Resistance
“Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work” — Steven Pressfield.
Once you are clear about what you actually need to put into your network of memory palaces and you have eliminated all unnecessary memorisation, you simply need to create the associated images and locate them where you know you can to find them later.
But, this is easier said than done right?
In order to fill your memory palace, you need to actually do the work. You need to overcome resistance.
Resistance, unfortunately, is a part of nature. It’s everywhere.
In the physical world, resistance is called inertia. Have you ever tried to move a large boulder? Or have you ever tried to push a car when the engine isn’t running? If you want to move large objects in the physical world you need to apply a lot of energy. You need to find a few friends or get the help of a large machine to apply enough force to start moving the object.
In the biological world, resistance is called homeostasis. In the human body there are hundreds of processes all working to maintain the status quo. There are buffers in the blood to maintain pH. Insulin is used to maintain sugar levels. Our bodies also use metabolic and perspiration processes to maintain a constant internal body temperature.
If you want to change your internal body temperature—which is not recommended—you need to go into a freezing cold place or an extremely hot place and stay there for enough time to break down the body’s internal regulation systems. In other words, a lot of thermal energy is required to overcome biological resistance.
In the psychological world resistance is called procrastination. Let me ask you this question—have you ever procrastinated?
Why Do We Procrastinate?
It’s because procrastination is similar to inertia and homeostasis. And here’s the thing—it’s not your fault! If you have ever procrastinated it’s because resistance is everywhere in nature. Nature loves to resist change.
So if you want to overcome procrastination, like the large boulder or the internal body temperature, you need to apply enough energy to overcome the resistance. If you want to successfully populate your memory palace with all of the carefully selected data you have chosen in step 1, you need to overcome your psychological resistance to change. How? If you want to overcome resistance you need to apply enough energy. For psychological resistance …
You Need To Apply Emotional Energy
What does that mean?
Have you ever had a big exam, assignment or report due for work that you left to the very last minute? Maybe you left it until the night before or the morning of. Let me ask you this question—in the end, were you able to pull an all nighter or some other feat of poor health in order to get the assignment done? If so, what changed?
In the lead up to the assignment, you were resisting it—naturally. Then when the deadline came close, you started to worry about failing or getting in trouble at work. At a certain point the resistance to doing the work was overcome by the emotional energy that came out of the fear of failure or getting into trouble.
Knowing this, if you want to successfully fill your memory palace, you need to develop enough emotional energy to overcome the naturally occurring psychological resistance.
The Test of the Five Whys
One idea that you can use to build emotional energy is the test of the “the five whys”. This idea originally came from industrial manufacturing as a strategy to pinpoint the cause of potential breakdowns in the production chain. They needed the test because human beings aren’t particularly good at getting to the heart of an issue.
If you want to truly understand why you should do something you need to ask “why?” five times. The true answer is rarely obvious from the first why.
If you want to unearth a limitless source of emotional energy for overcoming resistance, you need to get to the heart of your motivation.
Let’s see an example. I will give an example for learning Spanish because it’s what I’m used to. But you can apply the test to whatever memory outcome you are striving for.
Imagine you have a well defined small task to place 10 new Spanish words into a memory palace.
The five “whys” test would go as follows:
Why do I have to learn these Spanish words? Because they are important for Spanish.
Why is knowing Spanish important? Because I want to be able to speak another language.
Why do I want to speak another language? Because I want to experience a new culture.
Why do I want to experience a new culture? Because it will enrich my life.
Why do I want to enrich my life? Because it is the best way to live!
As you can see, by using the five ”whys” test I have connected the trivial task of placing 10 words in a memory palace with a higher life purpose. By asking the question “why” five times you can access a deep well of emotional energy and use that energy to overcome procrastination and resistance.
Once you have a sharply defined goal and you have overcome resistance at a task level, the final step is to create a routine that will allow maximum effectiveness with the Magnetic Memory Method.
Creating a Routine Allows You to Create
“Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her.” ― Lili St. Crow.
“You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.” ― Anne Lamott.
One important aspect of memory palaces is the creation of associated imagery. If you want to fill a memory palace you need to create and be creative. You need to take an abstract word, sentence or formula and create an associated image that you can use to recall the idea later.
Said in another way, if you want to be more effective with memory palaces you need to improve your creative muscle.
How To Be More Creative
How then can you be more creative?
If I said the key to creativity is routine there would be artists all over that would cringe at the suggestion. Creativity is about spontaneity. It’s about moments of inspiration that can’t be bottled. And these types of moments come when we least expect them, right? At least that what I used to think.
What do Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Albert Einstein and Mark Zuckerberg all have in common? They all wore the same clothes every day. Steve Jobs is famous for his black turtle neck and blue jeans. Barack Obama has said that he simply either wears a grey suit or a blue suit. Zuckerberg rocks a black hoodie. And Einstein was known for wearing a similar grey suit every single day.
Why do they limit their wardrobes? They all choose to wear the same clothes everyday because of a concept called decision fatigue.
The idea behind decision fatigue is simple—every time you make a decision a future decision will be slightly compromised. In other words, every time you make a decision you are more likely to make a worse decision later.
For President Obama, decision making is a crucial part of his job. He can’t afford to make bad decisions. Therefore he limits simple decisions like what to wear or what to eat to someone else. What this does is leave him more decision making power for the important decisions—the types of decisions that could affect the future of the country.
Have you ever had the feeling at the end of a long day at work or college and when it came time to do something as simple as choosing what to have for dinner, the decision of what to cook was overwhelming? This is due to decision fatigue.
So what does decision fatigue have to do with creativity?
There Is A Trade-Off Between Every Decision You Make And Your Highest Order Thinking
Creative types like Steve Jobs and Anne Lamott know that they need to reserve their best thinking for creation. In order to do this they cut down decision making in their lives to an absolute minimum. They did this through routine. Either by wearing the same clothes or sitting down at a desk to write at the same time every day.
The evidence of other artists that used routine for creation is overwhelming. In Mason Currey’s book “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work”, Currey lays out the daily routines and habits of 161 of the world’s greatest artists such as Woody Allen, Agatha Christie, Leo Tolstoy, Pablo Picasso, Benjamin Franklin and Jane Austen.
Why does routine work so well for creation?
Charles Duhigg, the author of the power of habit, says that the brain starts working less and less as we start to form regular habits. The brain can almost completely shut down and this is a huge advantage because it means you now have free mental space that you can dedicate to something else.
This is how the world’s greatest artists work and you can test it for yourself.
How To Easily Assign “Pre-Commitments”
If you want to harness the power of routine and minimise decision fatigue, start by creating pre-commitments.
A pre-commitment is a decision that you make a head of time. And ideally a decision you make only once.
There are so many decisions you may be making on a daily basis—decisions that may seem inconsequential but add up quickly to fatigue of your highest order thinking.
What you want to avoid is having to make hundred of decisions in any typical day:
– What should I eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner?
– What should I wear?
– What should I buy from the supermarket on the way home?
– Do we need extra supplies for the coming week?
– Should I buy that new jacket or those shoes?
Then after all those decisions:
– When should I sit down to work on my memory palace?
– Should I work on the memory palace in the morning, evening, on my lunch break, or after dinner?
– Should I work on my memory palace for 20 minutes or an hour?
– What parts of my memory palace should I be focusing on today?
But There Are So Many Decisions … It’s Overwhelming!
Start by taking stock of all of these daily decisions and start making pre-commitments. Try to make decisions ahead of time. For example, you could decide on a Sunday evening everything you are going to wear for the week and eat for every meal.
Here is a powerful strategy: can you work on your memory palace at the same time for the same amount of time every single day? Can you remove the decision of when or whether to work on your memory palace completely?
If you don’t have to make a decision of whether to work on your memory palace, you can save your best thinking for the first, second or third location based image you have to place in your memory palace.
Can you avoid decision fatigue? Can you use pre-commitments and routine to minimise as many decisions in your life as possible?
If you can, you will leave your mind maximum freedom to create and be creative. A freedom that will allow you to create amazing things, crazy and vivid imagery that will infinitely improve the power of your associated images and the effectiveness of the Magnetic Memory Method.
What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You About The Real Path To Overcoming Procrastination And Learning At The Deepest Possible Level
Memory devices and mnemonics improve learning efficiency. The Magnetic Memory Method is a wonderful framework for putting the use of memory devices in a usable process. Put simply—it works!
If you want to take the Magnetic Memory Method to the next level and be a more effective memoriser you should start with a clear vision of the outcome you want to achieve from the use of your memory palaces.
A clear vision allows you to save time by first removing information you don’t actually need to memorise. This in turn means you can focus more intensely on the information that truly matters.
Once you are clear about your destination, you then need to overcome psychological resistance to change. You can do this by connecting deeply with your underlying motivation in order to build the emotional energy you need to overcome procrastination.
And finally you can maximise the effectiveness of the Magnetic Memory Method by minimising decision fatigue and incorporating routines into your daily life. If you can reduce the daily mental load of simple inconsequential decisions, you can release your creative potential for a vivid world of associated imagery.
