You Can Improve Your Memory in Just 3 Months
Change your life by harnessing your memory in under 50 hours
Table of Contents
Change Your Life In 90 Hours
Commit 90 hours to practicing the techniques covered in this newsletter, just one hour a day for 90 days, and once you reach the other side of it, your life will change in ways you never thought possible.
Your approach to reading, writing, note-taking, strategizing, and creativity will all be radically transformed.
Your approach to anything that touches on memory, which is pretty much everything, will change.
It’s a bit like going from a sedentary, junk-food filled life to an active, healthy life. You’ll realize your approach to most “knowledge work” was… clunky, ineffective, and a lot of work. In a way, a bad memory turns a healthy book into junk food, since without a solid memory, you’re not really extracting all that much “nutrition” from it.
In the same way that adopting a healthy diet and an active lifestyle is hard at first, harnessing your memory requires commitment and dedication. However, once you reach a certain tipping point, everything becomes so much easier that you can’t imagine going back to your old habits.
Getting to that tipping point requires time, practice, and experimentation, but it is absolutely worth the investment.
I read less now, but what I read sticks in ways it never did. I no longer spend any time collecting, managing, and sorting through piles of notes. Writing and composing work is also much easier, and I expect that ease to increase as I continue adding more books to my mental library.
I also don’t need to use sophisticated spacial repetition algorithms (the kind that power software like anki) and flashcards — I just need to look at my physical library of books, quickly run through the contents in my mind, and if there’s a gap, I just revisit the book to refresh my memory. Yep, I used a spaced review schedule to organize my bookshelf.
10 Benefits of A Cultivated Memory
The benefits of a good memory practice are overwhelming:
1. You’ll remember what you read, at least the stuff that matters to you.
2. You won’t have to take notes.
3 You’ll spend less time studying
4 You’ll be more likely to put what you read into practice.
5 You’ll have an easier time keeping track of your learning progress
6 You’ll be able to compose and create essays and books on the fly
7 You won’t have to rely on software to remember anything
8 You’ll be able to spend less time in front of a screen
9 You’ll have a significantly easier time connecting ideas together
10 Reading will be much more rewarding
It’s Easier Than You Think
There’s a bunch of other benefits, but I think the ten i’ve just highlighted provide a solid argument for why you should build your memory practice.
Unlike what a lot of educators believe, mnemonics are easy. They barely take any time to do once you get the hang of it. It’s silly not to spend 15 minutes memorizing something you’ve just spent 180 minutes reading. And for most books, that’s all it really takes.
However, it will take practice to learn how to use mnemonics effectively, and that bump can be a struggle. Once you reach the other side though, a world of opportunities will open up to you.
A little bit of effort for a whole lot of change
Give it 30 minutes a day for 90 days. That’s barely one week of full time effort for a lifetime of benefits.
Mnemonics and the memory arts are a foundational tool that can help you unlock every other practice, technique, or art form you want to master. It’s like learning how to write or read. It helps with everything.
There are plenty of beginner books out there to check out: Tony Buzan, Dominic O’Brien, and Harry Lorrayne were the entry point for a lot of mnemonists. I quite like Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft and Nelson Dellis’ Remember It! as more recent beginner’s books.
I will, of course, be offering a lot of basic how-to tutorials in the months ahead, though right now most of my stuff is more theoretical, since I want to explain the why behind my own techniques before I can fully share how I do what I do.
What I do is just a variation of what other’s have done, though. If you learn the basics from a $10 Amazon book, you’ll have an easy time using those techniques to learn my own method.
I’ll wrap this up by saying that the key difference between my use of mnemonics and what other mnemonists do, is that I consider memory techniques a foundational creative tool, one that you can use to replace note-taking on one hand and to aid in composing and creating things on the other.
My inspiration is Thomas Aquinas. I want to use memory the way he did, which is not something that’s really being discussed much at the moment, so there aren’t that many lessons out there yet on how to accomplish what he did.
I’m going to fill that gap, but I really want to stress this: I’m filling that gap using techniques that are already common and well understood, with a few novel innovations here and there. Most of what I’m doing isn’t new, and what is new is just a different take on something old. If you read one of the basic memory books by one of the author’s I’ve suggested, and practice their techniques, you should have an easy enough time learning how to study and write like Aquinas did, once you incorporate the ideas i’ll be discussing in this newsletter.
This newsletter is more of an advanced mnemonics newsletter. I will eventually share more of the basics, but until then, read one of the books that already covers them and practice their techniques for the next few months. Once you get them down, it’ll probably only take you an hour or so to learn the Aquinas method.
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