Limitless

learning is inefficient is because it only involves

there’s no such thing as a good memory or a bad memory, only a trained memory or an untrained memory.

In order to learn any new piece of information, it must be associated with something you already know.

Information by itself is forgettable, but information combined with emotion becomes a long-term memory.

Notice that you can also go through the story backward; the associations can give you the list in any order.

This is the power of working smart and not hard. This is the power of your imagination. This is the power of your mind. Let’s try it again.

This is the power of working smart and not hard. This is the power of your imagination. This is the power of your mind.

your first pass had certain qualities about them.

that the words you were able to remember on your first pass had certain qualities about them.

the words you were able to remember on your first pass had certain qualities about them.

the words you were able to remember on your first pass had certain qualities about them. The words you didn’t remember failed to have any quality that resonated with you. So,

the more emotional and exaggerated they are, the better you will recall.

The loci method, then, is a memory tool that aligns the things you want to remember with specific points or places that you know well.

Identify the 10 major talking points from your presentation. These can be keywords or phrases or perhaps quotations that you want to incorporate. They should not, however, be multiple paragraphs long, as that will make this process cumbersome and your presentation feel stiff and overly rehearsed. The assumption here is that you know your topic well and that you have some facility with the material. This method is designed to help bring each of the key points to the forefront of your mind when you need them. Now imagine a place that you know well. This can be a part of your home, a street that you walk often, a nearby park, or anything else with which you have a great deal of familiarity and that you can easily recall vividly. Now consider a path through that location. If it’s a room in your house, for example, imagine walking into that room and traveling through it. Identify 10 spots in this room that you can quickly see in your mind. Maybe one is the lamp in the corner that you see as you enter the room. Perhaps another is the chair just to the left of that lamp. The next might be the side table next to that chair, and so on. Make this path as procedural as possible. Zig-zagging around the space is likely to be less productive. Just see yourself walking through this space clockwise noticing what you always notice as you pass each item. Once you’ve picked out your 10 locations, assign a major talking point to each of these locations. Be sure to make the order of your talking points match the order in which you walk through the room. For example, using the room we just described, if the first thing you want to say is the keynote message to your entire presentation, assign that to the lamp. If the next major talking point is an essential product detail or a key historical fact, assign that to the chair, and so on. Now practice your presentation, using your walk through the location as a tool for remembering each of the primary messages in the presentation. Each component of the presentation should come to you as you need it.

A KWIK MEMORY EXERCISE Ask a friend to give you a list of 10 random words. Or you can make a list yourself: To make this as random as possible, grab the nearest piece of printed media available to you, whether it’s a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or a flyer from your local supermarket. Use the first substantive words in the first 10 paragraphs you see (in other words, don’t use things like I, the, when, etc.), making sure not to use any word more than once. Write these down. Now flip over the paper you wrote these words on and try to write the list again, in order. Check what you wrote against the original list. How did you do? You probably didn’t remember all 10, but you probably didn’t forget all 10, either. That’s instructive, because genius leaves clues, by which I mean that your innate intelligence teaches you about your intelligence. There was a method that allowed you to memorize what you did, and you can access that to move to the next step. Tell yourself out loud which of the words you remembered and why you think you remembered those words. Doing so will help you to understand how you memorize things. For example, there’s a good chance that you remembered the first word and the last word. This is that common phenomenon we discussed back in Chapter 4 known as primacy and recency, where people tend to remember the first thing as well as the most recent thing they heard in any given situation. Which other words did you remember? Do these words have anything in common, such as that they all start with the same letter or they’re all action words? What does this tell you? Were the other words you memorized organ <You have reached the clipping limit for this item>

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