Learn from the Memory Champions?

I had a week of travel and caught up on my audible books for the month. The one I enjoyed the most was Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. A couple of the Q & A’s from Amazon:

Q: Can you explain the “OK Plateau?”

A: The OK Plateau is that place we all get to where we just stop getting better at something. Take typing, for example. You might type and type and type all day long, but once you reach a certain level, you just never get appreciably faster at it. That’s because it’s become automatic. You’ve moved it to the back of your mind’s filing cabinet. If you want to become a faster typer, it’s possible, of course. But you’ve got to bring the task back under your conscious control. You’ve got to push yourself past where you’re comfortable. You have to watch yourself fail and learn from your mistakes. That’s the way to get better at anything. And it’s how I improved my memory.

How do you get past the “ok” plateau in sales and marketing? This is where I think a continuous improvement methodology such as PDCA comes into play. It takes deliberate practice to make perfect and to get better. Breaking the sales and marketing process down into bite size iterations allows you to do that. You could think of it as a pilot testing in a direct mail campaign for example. The author points out 3 things that allows an average person to be able to achieve championship status: Deliberate Practice, Bite Size Chunks and Analyze the results. He definitely believes a coach in analyzing the results is important.

I found it so coincidental that it was much like the learning cycles that Jeff Liker and Jim Franz discuss in their book, The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement: Linking Strategy and Operational Excellence to Achieve Superior Performance.

Q: What do you mean by saying there an “art” to memory?

A: The “art of memory” refers to a set of techniques that were invented in ancient Greece. These are the same techniques that Cicero used to memorize his speeches, and that medieval scholars used to memorize entire books. The “art” is in creating imagery in your mind that is so unusual, so colorful, so unlike anything you’ve ever seen before that it’s unlikely to be forgotten. That’s why mnemonists like to say that their skills are as much about creativity as memory.

The basic principles needed for improvement such as the scientific problem solving, hypothesis testing and memorization have been with us forever. It takes work and dedication to put them into practice. We are always looking for the next and greatest piece of software or even a book that will make it easier for us. Is technology serving our needs?

Q: How do you think technology has affected how and what we remember?

A: Once upon a time people invested in their memories, they cultivated them. They studiously furnished their minds. They remembered. Today, of course, we’ve got books, and computers and smart phones to hold our memories for us. We’ve outsourced our memories to external devices. The result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they’re failing us altogether. We’ve forgotten how to remember.

Listen to author, Joshua describe his experience.

P.S. The book was fun.