How To Remember People’s Names

“I call everyone ‘Darling’ because I can’t remember their names.”

– Zsa Zsa Gabor

I’m pretty good about remembering people’s names. But I wasn’t always. I’ve gotten better over the years by practicing regularly and instilling a few specific habits.

Here’s what I recommend if you want to develop this skill, too.

1. Get It Right The First Time

To remember someone’s name, you first need to know what it is. This means listening closely when they tell you.

“Bob, was it?”

Repeating a name right after hearing it will help ensure you heard correctly. For example, say you meet a guy who introduces himself as Chris. You’d reply back with something like:

— Hi, Chris. Nice to meet you.

Making yourself repeat the name forces you to get it right. If you can’t repeat the name because you didn’t quite catch it initially, that’s your cue to ask them to repeat it.

Let’s say you meet a girl here in Amsterdam and she tells you her name. You’re not sure you heard her correctly so you might say something like this:

— Sorry, what was your name again?

— Mijsje [pronounced ME-sha]

— Ah ok, Mijsje. Nice to meet you.

The bottom line here is to always make an effort to repeat the name of the person you just met. If you didn’t hear them correctly, ask them to repeat it. If you say it wrong, they have the opportunity to correct you.

2. Make It Sticky

“The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it.” – Ed Cooke, Grand Master of Memory

Repeating the name once is a good first step, but it doesn’t mean you’ll remember it. The next step is to make it memorable, or “sticky.”

How do you do that?

In a word: mnemonics. You want to create a strong visual association of the name in your brain.

Our brains are hardwired to remember strong visual images. The more strange and exaggerated the image, the better. For example, if you live in a city, you probably see lots of cars every day and don’t remember much about any single one of them. But if you see one on fire, that’s very unusual and so you’ll remember the image of that car for a long time. You’re even more likely to remember it if it’s bright yellow and expensive-looking.

“Oh my, how unremarkable.”

Especially when you’re just getting started with the practice, it can take some time to come up with a good mnemonic for a person’s name, and it’s often not something you can stop to think about in the middle of an introduction.

Given that, whenever I meet someone with an unusual name, I recruit them to help me come up with a mnemonic and make it part of the conversation. For example, last year I met an Indian girl named Amardeep. I knew I’d have trouble remembering such a name so right away I asked her:

— How do you usually tell people to remember your name?

— Just remember “deep love.”

That stuck.

I met a guy here in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago at a comedy event. We chatted briefly at the start of the night and he told me his name was Bijon. I asked how I could remember that and he replied:

— Don’t worry about it. Nobody ever remembers my name.

— It’s like the mustard, right? Like dijon with a B?

— Yeah, that’s it.

A couple of hours later we ran into each other again and I addressed him by name. He was pleasantly surprised that I remembered. (And I still remember, two weeks later.)

The more vivid and crazy you can make the association, the better.

I once met a white, clean-cut French guy named Yamin and associated his name with Bob Marley singing “Jammin.” The image I visualized was this French dude with dread locks dancing to that song but singing it as, “I’m Yamin, I’m Yamin, I’m Yamin, I’m Yamin, and I hope you like Yamin, too!”

That image is so bizarre that it’s easy to recall whenever I think of that guy, and so his name has become unforgettable.

Mnemonics are useful for remembering common names, too. Sometimes a common name is the hardest to remember due to the fact it is so common. For example, the name Brian can easily slip your mind because there’s nothing very remarkable about it, and so you might have to work a bit harder to make a memorable association.

Here are some ideas:

If the guy is smart, you can associate Brian with brain and imagine him with a massive, bulging cranium.
If the guy is funny, you can associate him with Brian from Family Guy and imagine them hanging out together.
If the guy seems like a bit of a meth head, you can associate him with Bryan Cranston