Have you ever gone through a phase that forced you into starting over from scratch?

Don’t worry. It happens to everyone.

Luckily, we can learn from those who have gone before us. In this guest post from Jeffrey Pickett, you’ll learn how to minimize the suffering that comes from rebooting your life and how to get back on your feet in the best possible manner.

 

Three Reasons Why Starting Over Is So Painful

 

Starting over can be painful. You’d love to blame others, but after close analysis, you realize it all points back to the person looking at you in the mirror.

Our careers, like cars, were meant to go forward most if not all of the time. No one likes to go in reverse. It takes more attention, more focus and more detail. Starting over means you need to back up before you can go forward.

Finally, starting over sucks because self-doubts creep in the back door, playing with your mind. The sky is no longer blue, the chirping birds are dead, and someone pulled the chain, diminishing the once bright sunlight.

Take heart, my friends, because it just so happens I am the self-proclaimed big deal in the world of starting over. Allow me to prove it to you…

 

Why You Should Forgive But Don’t Forget

 

In a previous relationship, well perhaps several, the occasion to try and make things work occurred a few times too many. The bottom eventually fell out and I beat myself up for letting things go on as long as I did.

That guy on the street with the “The End is Near” sign was right all along. I just wouldn’t listen.

When you make mistakes, learn from the event, forgive yourself and move on. Looking in the rearview mirror only serves to cause pain. Learn the lesson and move forward.

Forgive while you’re at it. Holding anger or resentment towards another only sets you up for failure. Let go of the attachment to anger.

 

Wouldn’t It Be Cool If You Could Be Superman?

 

I think I’d ditch the cape myself, but having superpowers and flying around would be awesome, right?

Well, back in reality-world, that doesn’t work. You can only be yourself.

That’s not totally correct.

Humans have this unique ability to recognize who they are and change. We can go back to school, join a gym or even seek therapy if necessary.

With effort, we can become a better version of ourselves.

An important facet to starting over means you have to be willing to change any aspect of your life that no longer works. Ultimately, you can only change yourself; you have no power to change anyone else.

That common definition of insanity (dare I repeat it?) is accurate – to avoid more mistakes, change that which is in you versus what you have no control over.

 

What To Do When The World Turns Upside Down

 

Whenever your world upside down, forcing you to start over, a vital lesson should be at the forefront of your brain.

The way we see things may not be the best perspective.

You can’t mold the world to your point of view, but you can shift your perspective.

Recently I went hiking with my wife. Just when the trail appeared to dead-end, I’d take one more step, and my perspective changed.

The opening was there all along; I just needed a few more steps.

 

How To Get More Done With Less Effort

 

I love running. I used to train five to six days a week, running up to 15 miles on some days. But I could never improve my race times.

One day, a friend of mine introduced me to running sprints instead of running long distances. I did as he suggested and my race times came down even though I ran shorter training distances.

Another example involves my garage that needed some fix-up. A friend offered to help, someone with a lot more experience than I. But my pride got the best of me. I thought I’d do it myself.

You can guess what happened.

I ripped up most of my work, I cut my thumb open, and my kids learned a new curse word from my repeated frustrations. If only I would have invited the help and pushed away my pride…

See the difference? I just needed to change my approach.

 

I Lied – You CAN Be Superman!

 

You just have to do one thing before you begin starting over.

You have to learn a new skill. Maybe you need a better memorization technique…

A potential reason you are in need of starting over is that as hard as it may sound, you may lack the resources to get the job done. Before starting over, research your topic of interest or situation, gain the extra knowledge and get back into the fight.

 

 

The Real Reason It’s Better to Give And Not Deceive

 

The world operates differently these days. You used to be able to ask for favors. But now it’s all about, “What Have You Done For Me Lately?”

That’s not all bad.

Instead of looking out for good ol’ #1, start over with an effort to provide value. Do things for others. Show the world you want to add versus subtract. Don’t provide something with the apparent reason you just want something in return.

Give with the intention of helping. If you’re lucky (and genuine), then the gifts will come back. Give your work away.

Giving is good for the soul. It’s good for your health, too.

Speaking of giving, I have a self-titled website where I give as much of my experiences as I can write down. I’m focusing on health these days, so if you’d like to improve your health and lose some weight in the process, check out my free guide.

Well, now you know of my experiences in starting over. I’d love to hear yours. I’ll bet they are the type of stories Jimmy Fallon/Kimmel would feature! Share what happened and what you did to get over it and I’ll see you in the comments.

Further Reading

How To Live An Interesting Life

The post Insights to Remember Before Starting Over appeared first on Magnetic Memory Method - How to Memorize With A Memory Palace.

Alex Stone Shows You How Magic And Memory Can Heighten Your Sense Of Reality

 

Go on, admit it. The idea of being a magician has haunted you since childhood. Who hasn’t at some point wished they could perform miracles and win the admiration of the masses?

The truth is, anyone can, but not everyone has the time, energy or discipline.

But the good news is that in Fooling Houdini, magician and outstanding author Alex Stone takes you into the world of Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind. And the best part is that you learn about using your memory better too.

So tune in to this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast and enjoy the full transcript below.

Anthony: Alex thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It’s a real honor and exciting because I myself have a relationship to magic and the whole world. So I hope to touch on that a little bit. The book Fooling Houdini is an absolute marvel I think. Not just because of my interest in magic, but it’s about learning as such.

One of the themes, and you can correct me if I’m wrong about this, seems to be self-acceptance as being kind of the best thing we can do for ourselves, and that going through the process of self-acceptance is kind of like “fooling” around with yourself a little bit as if life is kind of a game. Would that be a fair assessment?

Alex: I think that’s a wonderfully nice way of saying it, yes.

Anthony: With all that said, what’s your first memory of being interested in magic?

Alex: It was definitely when I was 5 years old and my father went on a trip to New York for an academic conference of some sort. He was a professor and he bought me a magic kit at that famous store FAO Schwartz. It’s like a famous toy store, which closed, I believe, recently.

It was just like one of these little kids kits, but he brought me back, and I was 5 years old in just remember like being enchanted by it. I couldn’t stop playing with it, and I learned all the tricks and went around just showing them to everyone every time. We had guests over and to my friends.

Honestly from there on, I was interested in it and it became like a thing that my father and I kind of bonded over and did together. But that was very vivid memory. Gosh, come to think of it, it probably is up there with some of my earliest memories actually. Because I was only 5.

 

Can Kids Be Fooled?

 

Anthony: One group of people that tend to be very difficult to fool is young people because they don’t know the cues of Mr. Action so to speak. So it’s kind of a fascinating age. What experience do you have doing magic for kids?

Alex: You are absolutely right. I learned that at my first show when I was 6. It was my own birthday party. I performed for my friends and it was a disaster. They were trying to touch everything and yelling at me and heckling me. I remember crying and going to my room and being really upset.

But you know, it’s a fact that children are very difficult to perform for. I mean not just because, I mean obviously they have a hard time sitting still and they can be rambunctious. It’s hard to do anything with kids because of that, but they’re also, I talk about this a bit in the book, psychologically I think quite good at figuring out magic tricks. You know there could be a lot of reasons behind that, but I think part of it is that they don’t have quite so many assumptions going in.

They have a way of thinking about things where they’re kind of testing out new ideas, and on some level, they’re better at figuring out tricks than adults are. I’ve seen this time and again. If you talk to magicians, they’ll say the same thing that kids can be remarkably difficult to fool. They often figure out tricks that fool some of the smartest adults.

Anthony: It’s always interesting performing for kids. I wonder, you started at a young age with that interest. How did you manage to combine throughout your life and particularly once you got into university and so forth, physics and magic and journalism. Is there a common thread between all those three things that the more you see a connection or is it just happenstance?

Alex: Well the short answer is yes. I absolutely think there’s a nice connection. I was very fortunate because I had these three interests of writing, journalism, magic, which I’ve been into since I was 5, and physics and science, which I’d also been into for years and was studying. It was this wonderful moment of realization when I sort of saw that, well first of all as a writer, this world, these concepts and ideas hadn’t really been written about.

Secondly, that there were all these beautiful connections between magic and science. Especially psychology and neuroscience, but also mathematics and physics. To see that there was this science to the magic and that a lot of the literature in psychology were essentially applied to magic tricks and to see all these connections, that’s what really kept me fascinated and took me along this kind of quest, if you will, to understand magic.

That’s the basis of the book. It is exploring, not just this great world with amazing characters and amazing stories, which as a writer was you know just a wonderful gift to be able to share this world with other people that I’d already been immersed in. But then to also be able to incorporate my love of science, my interest in in scientific mysteries and to see all the overlap and to see all the magicians who are interested in science and all the scientists who are interested in magic, that to me was just this blessed confluence of all my geeky interests. It was just like a nerd trifecta.

Anthony:  I think one of the things that I also really loved about your book is that it, kind of for me, is the magician version of Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, where he takes you deep into the world of memory competitions and memory techniques. You’re doing that with the magical community. I wonder, for people who aren’t familiar with magic and this world of circles, brotherhoods, personal mentorships and the lineages, how would you describe the magical community?

Alex: Well, first of all thanks for that comparison. A great book Moonwalking with Einstein and a wonderful story. I’ve always loved those kinds of books where it takes you and pulls aside the curtain and takes you behind the scenes.

Magic, I think like a lot of subcultures, is filled with brilliant obsessives. People that really are single-mindedly devoted to this craft. I think magic in particular because it’s so wrapped up in secrecy, by definition you’re not supposed to tell how it’s done, etc. It lends itself to an even more extreme version of this kind of hermetic community of people.

You have these societies with these initiation rituals and these codes of secrecy. You have a very curious form of information exchange. Whereas, like with the memory book Foer wrote, he went into this fascinating subculture, and I think it was probably easier to learn these techniques than it might be if you are a newcomer to the world of magic where not everyone wants to share. You have to become much more imbedded to then benefit from this exchange of ideas and information. So that’s part of it too.

 

Magic Is Weird …

 

Then I think it’s just a very weird place. Magic is weird. A lot of people who do magic are kind of nerdy and bizarre and wonderfully so. But it’s honestly like the kind of thing it is almost hard to believe that it’s real in some cases when you meet some of these people and some of these characters. Then the fact that magic also has all these sort of hubs, or whatever, that connect to the science, but also there are connections to crime and scams. Then you have branches mentalism which ties into psychics. You have all of these overlaps with other kind of allied groups and that is something pretty incredible.

In many ways it’s a fairly narrow thing because it’s just magic, but just in the way that I imagine that the memory community ties into mathematics and public speaking or whatever various other pursuits, so does magic and it’s intersections are fascinating. You are able to kind of go between these different worlds. It grants you access to all these other kind of worlds or communities. It is just incredibly rich and it’s filled with wonderfully interesting and often very brilliant people. Like nothing else I’ve ever encountered.

Anthony: Absolutely. There is a bridge with memory and magic as well on multiple levels I can think of such as memorizing tricks, like the actual routines, memorizing the scripts, memorizing the moves in performance and then remembering to execute certain moves while you’re performing. So I wonder if you have any thoughts on how those things are part of magic as you have had in performance, in studying with a mentor and in actually competing as part of your career as a magician.

Alex:  Yeah, I mean that’s a great question. So you’re absolutely right. There is quite a bit of overlap. In fact, there are magicians in the past who have used the mind power, the memory power as a kind of magic or as a kind of performance technique. More specifically, there are a lot of magic tricks that rely on memory techniques and memory and memorizing decks. I mean some of my favorite tricks, honestly, are tricks that require you to memorize an entire deck of cards.

 

If I can just make a little tangent. If I can just rewind for a second. Probably the most famous or one of the most famous magicians who was also kind of a memory expert was Harry Lorayne. He was a magician but he did these memory shows and these mind power shows. He was the kind of the embodiment of this this connection between magic and memory. He was a memory training specialist, he wrote books on it. He would perform on the Johnny Carson Show and do these remarkable mnemonic demonstrations. You know he’d go to parties and memorize everyone’s names. He was also a magician who pioneered some wonderful tricks and sleight of hand and whatnot. So that’s kind of the embodiment of this connection.

But more broadly, they intersect throughout magic, and just know, you’re not the first memory person I’ve talked to. Actually, through this book I’ve met a lot of people in this community. In terms of my own practice, I would say that some of the most beautiful tricks out there, card tricks especially rely on being able to memorize strings of cards and numbers. Juan Tamariz –

Anthony: Mnemonica, yeah.

The Most Important Book On Card Magic Published In Decades

 

Alex: Mnemonica is, I believe, probably the greatest, most important book on card magic published in in decades. It’s absolutely revolutionary. I mean my favorite tricks are from that book. Honestly, that stuff is incredibly powerful. You know, you combine memory techniques with a few other basic magic techniques like false shuffles, card controls, and double lifts, it’s almost like you can do anything.

I’ve also created another trick that relies on also memorizing a deck that’s organized in a very special sequence that is basically a binary code that allows you to determine what order of the cards, where you are in the deck based on the color configuration of like a group of six cards. It’s a little bit hard to explain. That also required me to memorize the entire deck. In particular for that one, because I had to learn to map a six-card configuration of red and black to a number that corresponded to the first card in that sequence, I had to use the Memory Palace, the method of loci – is it loci or loci?

Anthony:  I’ve just replaced it entirely with “station.” A station in a Memory Palace.

Alex: A station in a Memory Palace, that’s better. So anyway for this trick, which is one of my favorite tricks of all time, it was really first developed, the idea was first developed by Persi Diaconis, a guy at Stanford, for that I use the Memory Palace technique. Like Joshua Foer actually kind of explained to me. I also use that technique where you assign letters to numbers. What is it called again?

Anthony: The Major Method or Major System.

Alex:  The Major Method. That’s right the major system, right. So for this trick what I do is I have six people take cards. I figure out what the red black configuration is, that’s a binary number, which I can turn into a digit, a regular base ten number. I use the major system to turn that into a word, that word corresponds to a station, an image in my Memory Palace, which in turn corresponds to the first card in that sequence. Because I memorized the deck, I then just walk through my Memory Palace, and I see all the cards so I know where I am.

It sounds very complicated but using the memory techniques it was actually fairly easy because I was able to memorize the deck quickly and it’s so robust that it just sticks in your head for a long time. All you to do is revisit it once in a while and it’s there.

I was really shocked when I did this. I’d never done this kind of technique before and I was so impressed by how powerful it is. There’s not, when you’re kind of a grown up, there aren’t too many times when you continue to amaze yourself at what your mind is capable of. You have kind of seen it all at that point. This was one of those rare instances which I was like wow I didn’t know that I could do that. That’s pretty cool I think.

 

Memory Techniques Are Real Magic

 

Anthony: I think it’s one of those things that really borders on, if not entirely, is real magic. If I can put real beside magic, because there’s lots of things that are real magic, but this is almost alchemy in some sense in terms of creating knowledge and reliably so

Alex:  Yeah I agree. I think that’s why people like Harry Lorayne you know he used it in his shows because it really felt like, wow, this guy has superpowers.

Anthony: I’m really glad that you mentioned Lorayne and Juan Tamariz. There’s a Penguin Live lecture where Darwin Ortiz talks about how he worked for Harry Lorayne, teaching in one of Lorayne’s schools or programs that he had. I guess it would have been in New York.

Alex: I didn’t know that.

Anthony: I’m not sure if he’s done more than one Penguin lecture, but if he’s just done the one then that’s it where he talks about it. He talks about the importance of like memorizing the names of your participants that you use in routines. He tells quite an amusing story of working for the Harry Lorayne. Lorayne is not really well known as a magician, but he was a huge contributor in terms of literature. Publishing other magicians apparently giving them work has memory trainers. It is kind of fascinating. About Tamariz, did you ever try his suggestions for memorizing the deck?

Alex: Yeah, I did. In fact, when I memorized Mnemonica the first time around, I used the technique that he recommends in the book, which is to basically draw faces on the cards if I recall. At that time, I didn’t know the Memory Palace technique so I used his technique.

For the other trick since then, whenever I’ve had to memorize a deck, I’ve used the Memory Palace technique. I thought about going back and making the Mnemonica into a Memory Palace, but I have it now and I use it so often that I’ve got it. Also, his technique is nice because it’s really easy, it’s very bidirectional. It’s very easy to remember the card and then say oh that’s number fourteen, or if you hear fourteen oh that’s this card. Whereas the way I had memorized this other deck, I didn’t index it.

But yes, so I used his method up front, which was, again, I mean really based on the same concept right? Which is to turn it into an image to make it visual. Each card you draw some image of something fanciful and it links it to the number in an interesting way, in a visual way. So what you’re basically doing is you’re linking the card and the number in an image. I didn’t install it the Memory Palace at the time because I didn’t know that. But it seems to me like it’s kind of the same idea, right? It’s turning numerical or verbal memory into visual memory which we know is far more powerful.

Anthony: I think too, if you don’t mind me inserting this, for anyone who’s listening to this and they don’t know Tamariz, they should not just think of him necessarily as a guy who can teach you to memorize a deck of cards and do all kinds of routines with them, but he’s also a very good person to read for things you should be remembering about how to be a memorable performer. Five Points in Magic is one of his great books.

Alex: That’s a great book. He’s a wonderful mentor and also he’s talks about so much more than magic. How to become kind of a complete performer and a complete person. He’s got so much insight and wisdom.

Anthony: You have a really interesting discussion of shuffling which you sort of have mentioned just now. It’s one of the, I think, most fascinating parts of the book and you make the math very clear. But could you say a few words about the mysteries of shuffling, and what it means to shuffle a deck of cards from a mathematical sense?

Alex: Yeah sure. I mean shuffling stuff is pretty cool I have to say. There’s two basic ideas that I talk about. The first is the question of how much you have to shuffle a deck for it to become truly mixed. So what does it mean when you shuffle a deck? You basically, and I’m talking here about a riffle shuffle, you basically split the deck roughly in half, then you sort of riffle them together and the cards mix.

So there’s the question of how many times do you have to do that before the decks are truly random. Meaning you can’t really recognize the original order. The more formal definition, actually, would be – well let’s just leave it at that – to where they’re perfectly random.

So anyway this question was posed in a formal way by Dave Bayer and Persi Diaconis. Dave Bayer is a professor of mathematics at Columbia and Persi Diaconis is now at Stanford though at the time I believe he was at Harvard. Persi was also a magician who trained under Dai Vernon, the great master of sleight of hand. The man who fooled Houdini. Persi was interested because he’d read about a trick that would been published in a magazine or journal in an obscure place and suggested that someone could shuffle and then find a card even after it’s been shuffled.

Anyway, a long story short they did an analysis. They found it takes about seven shuffles to completely mix the deck, to fully randomize it. Which is surprising in a way because it’s a lot or it seems like a lot. More interesting was that it’s not a very linear process. It doesn’t really happen incrementally. You don’t really get much randomness out of the first four or five shuffles, and then right around six and seven is what you could call a phase change. So it very rapidly becomes random. Basically it’s an exponential decay, which is pretty cool.

So that’s an interesting result, and it had implications for casinos and whatnot stuff like that. It also means you could do some pretty cool tricks where you have someone pick a card and put it back in, shuffle and still you can find their card because there’s still patterns that are recognizable sequences.

Now that’s a shuffle that randomizes the deck. The reason why shuffling works is because it’s sloppy. When you shuffle you don’t cut the cards precisely in half. You riffle the cards together but it’s not one after another you know you get groups of two and three and four. That’s what introduces the randomness. It turns out that if you shuffle perfectly, and by perfectly I mean you cut the deck precisely in half and then you interleave the cards so they thought they mesh exactly one, one, one, one, one, that isn’t random at all and after eight of those shuffles, they’re called pharaoh shuffles, the deck returns to its original order.

What’s perhaps even cooler is that this is true for any number of cards. Only the number of shuffles required is different depending on how many you have. There’s a simple mathematical formula that tells you given N number of cards how many shuffles you need to do in order to get the deck to reset itself.

This is tied to something in mathematics known as group theory which is essentially is a language for symmetry. Group theory underlies the standard model of physics. Granted those are very different types of groups, but it’s a similar mathematical structure. To me that relationship, that connection is very beautiful. Something very beautiful and rich. Also, when applied, can create some of the coolest magic tricks you’ve ever seen.

Anthony: It’s quite incredible to think about, and, again, I highly recommend reading your book because of that entire passage. Actually, it’s more than a passage. It’s quite an adventure. It’s one of the show pieces of the book I would say, the discussion of shuffling. You mentioned practicing remembering names. Persi Diaconis was it?

Alex: Yeah that’s right.

Anthony: That he was a student of Dai Vernon. I have never know – sometimes it’s Dai and sometimes it Dai Vernon. I know he was a Canadian which, of course, gives me lots of pride being a Canadian myself. For people who don’t know the story, who is Dai Vernon and how did he fool Houdini.

Alex: Dai Vernon is widely considered one of the greatest sleight of hand magicians of all time. His influence is a towering influence on magic. He was a Canadian. That’s exactly right. Although he came to the states and cut his teeth in Chicago. He rose to become this master of close up magic and sleight of hand. He eventually became sort of the dean, sort of the patriarch of the Magic Castle, lived there for a long time and died in his ninety’s. He was this legendary figure who fooled Houdini.

The story behind that, it’s a true story. It’s kind of grown into almost mythology. But the gist of that was that he was – well Houdini had this very famous bet. He said no magician could fool him three times with the same trick. Because in magic you’re famously not supposed to repeat a trick. The saying is once it’s a trick, twice is a lesson. Because magic relies on surprise, right. If we’re watching it again you know you might notice certain things.

Anyway, apparently as the story goes Houdini his bet or his boast was out there for a while and no one had beat him. Finally, one night at a dinner, I believe it was in Chicago, in Houdini’s honor, it was at the Society of American Magicians dinner, which Houdini was president for a while, Dai Vernon does a version of the ambitious card, which is this classic trick where you put a card into the deck it rises to the top over and over again.

Vernon did a version of it for Houdini, and as the story goes, he did it seven or eight times and Houdini was totally stumped. As a side note, he was actually using a gimmick that was invented by Hofzinser, an Austrian magician. That sealed his fame as the man who fooled Houdini and the ambitious card, or this version of it, as the trick that fooled Houdini.

But even if it weren’t for that, Dai Vernon deserves his station because he was a great master who invented dozens and dozens and dozens of moves, and not only that, pioneered this philosophy of magic that emphasizes naturalness above showmanship. Dai Vernon grew up on reading Erdnase, and because of that, because of his connection to the gambling rooms and to the card tables, for him it was all about being understated and not revealing a great technique or flourishes, but really just being natural and making it look like nothing is being done. That magic is really just coming out of nowhere. So anyway, that’s the long winded version of the story.

Anthony: Well it’s a very good one. For anyone listening to you have got to check, if you’re interested in magic, check out Dai Vernon on YouTube. There’s some great footage of him performing that is exactly as you describe very natural, and he’s quite a character. Speaking of repeating things seven or eight times, one of the tragic comedies in your book is something that I’ve certainly experienced, which is going to lead into a question, which is why do girlfriends hate our magic so much after the first trick or two?

Alex:  Yeah, right. Well I think, that’s a good question. Man, I wish I had a good answer. That would have saved me a lot of heartache. I think the thing is this. Like anything if you’re obsessed with it, well let me say one thing. First of all the thing with magic is you can have to practice it on people. I mean you can practice a trick on your own a million times and you have to, but eventually the only way to practice magic is on someone else.

Unfortunately, those closest to us are the ones that are hit the hardest by that. So I think often, whether it’s your family or friends, in my case it was definitely my friends and my girlfriend, were at first you know this is great. Some magic tricks and then after a while it was like wow there’s a lot of magic tricks, and then eventually for the love of god no more magic tricks. I think it’s partly that.

I also think, you know let’s face it, magic is kind of geeky. I mean that in the greatest way possible. You know nerd power, but it is a little nerdy. Maybe if you’re not into that that, that could also maybe get old for some people. I think magicians are obsessive people often. Very much so in the way that anyone, whether it’s music or magic or whatever, standup comedy, you know you have to practice it. Doing the same thing over and over again and become very obsessive about it. That might not be the easiest thing to live with all the time.

Also once you figure out how it’s done, it’s not always this fun for ten more times. At this point my girlfriend knows pretty much how everything is done, and she now thinks like a magician. So it’s very hard to fool her. I really have to figure out something, because she knows all about horses and double – like she knows all the techniques. So even if I do a new trick and it’s based in techniques that she understands and she can figure it out, reverse engineer it. So I really have to try hard to fool her. That’s actually fun to do, but you know I think that might also be part of it.

Anthony: In my experience if I could fool a girlfriend that I’ve had for a year and a half, then I think I’m on to something.

Alex:  That’s right. No, it’s absolutely true. It’s kind of, in some ways, the best audience.

Anthony: One thing that I find really interesting is the nature of competition. I was watching an older lecture from Shawn Farquhar. He said that he’s met some of his best friends at magic competitions. I was just wondering what your experience has been like that when it comes to friendship and competition, and also in the context of mentorship because another big part of the book is your relationship with a mentor and how that develops.

Alex: Yeah that’s a good question. I mean I was amazed when I first discovered that there were all these magic competitions, national ones, local ones and then there’s international ones like FISM. The world championships also known as the Magic Olympics every three years, which Shawn Farquhar won. He’s probably one of the great living competitive magicians. He’s won at everything basically.

When you go to these competitions you definitely see the same faces over and over again. In terms of mentorship, a lot of the magicians who compete have mentors. In some cases, not so much in the in the US, but in like Korea, for instance, there are coaches really at magic schools. So the mentorship relationship there is very strong. But it’s true everywhere. In Spain too, there is a kind of a legacy of students and teachers. So that’s very big and competing for your country is very big in these places.

I mean the end of the day, magic is still a fairly small community. It’s not like musicians you know. It’s magicians. I mean it’s maybe bigger than you would expect and that it’s everywhere. It’s in every city, there are these magic societies and they have hundreds and hundreds of local assemblies, but it’s still the kind of place where after a while everybody kind of knows everybody. Which is one of the things that I think makes it so charming.

At these competitions you definitely see, I mean I probably have been to a dozen of them or so, the same people over and over again in the audience and also on the stage. I think it lends itself even to these very friendly rivalries were people know each other. They also worked in the same industry from a more business standpoint. Everybody knows the challenges of that. So I think there is this camaraderie in the business itself. Yeah, you definitely see people who are just lifelong friends in the art. I think that’s pretty cool

Anthony: I’m wondering given your interests in physics and journalism and in magic, I wonder, just as some rapid fire questions, what would you say is the most important thing to remember about each of those fields about journalism, about writing as such, about magic and about physics and math?

Alex: If I were going to try to make a generalized statement, and again, this is only as true as it is general. It’s only as true is that a very general statement can never be. That’s what I really meant to say. To me there’s this underlying mystery to it all.

What attracts me to all of them is this thrilling sense of mystery. What I mean by that is in physics you’re dealing with the most fundamental mysteries in science. Really you’re looking at the irreducible bits of matter. You’re looking at the nature of space and time, the origins of the universe, the end of the universe. These to me are, I’m not a religious person, but they are almost spiritual questions.

They’re so profound that I don’t know what’s deeper than those. It’s so mysterious when you start to study physics, and obviously when you get into quantum physics and relativity, when you realize how far from common sense and from what we’re used to nature behaves in this incredibly magical mysterious way. I think Einstein said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible. So I love the mystery of that. That just blew my mind from the moment I learned about it.

Obviously, magic is the same way. I’m not going to suggest that doing a card trick is this lofty is studying the big bang, but when you see a magic trick and you don’t know how it’s done there’s this wonderful beautiful sense of mystery. The kind of mysteries that you have experienced all the time when you were a kid, and you were seeing the world for the first time.

That is a pleasure to me. It’s something that the never gets old. Even when you know how it’s done, there is this mystery to how the mind works and why we’re able to be fooled by these things. That taps into the mysteries of the brain and these foibles that we succumb to that are really innate. The way our brain works and what makes us human and what makes us so adept. That’s beautiful so it gets into the mysteries of the mind.

Then writing too. Writing is a way to search for meaning and to find meaning and to essentially capture meaning and put it down on the page and to communicate. Writing is such a mysterious process because so much of the time you really don’t know where it’s going. It’s just digging and you’re really just feeling around in the dark. The creative source is just ineffable. You hope it’s going to come.

You work really hard at all of these things. It’s work, work, work, work, work. You sit down and you do the work. Then you hope that the mystery and the inspiration comes to you. But in the end there’s just this unknown. It’s just these very bizarre and mysterious things that underlie them. I guess that to me is what’s the most exciting. Maybe that a little cheesy but that’s sort of how I think of it.

Anthony: The book ends with you finally getting a bit of a smile from the from one of your assessors after you complete your journey and it’s a great ending to the book. But I wonder, outside of competition, is there one magician living today, maybe other than Penn and Teller, who you would be over the moon if you could fool that particular magician. Who would that be?

Alex: This is probably the cheesiest answer I could probably give. But I would love to fool David Blaine. I’m sorry. I know that’s terrible.

Anthony: I don’t think that’s cheesy at all. Say more.

Alex: I think we maybe could. I don’t know. I mean he knows a lot about magic. He does. Sometimes he gets a bad rap, but he’s actually an expert. He knows a ton. So I think fooling him would be tough but fun. His street magic, his earlier stuff was inspiring to a whole generation of magicians. I really appreciate that about him. So I think that’s cool. I guess if I had to pick another person it would probably be Tamariz just because I think of all the magicians in the world he’s the one I find to be the most inspiring. If I could fool him that would be like epic.

Anthony: That would be amazing. I’ve never understood the, whatever you want to call it, the Blaine bashing because I think he’s really quite a character and very good at what he does.

Alex: Yeah is he really is.

Anthony: Well so Fooling Houdini is an excellent book and thank you again for being on the show and for writing such a such a great exposé of your experience in that world and tying it together with math and all these other elements of the of the human psyche and your own personal journey.

Alex: Thanks, Anthony. I appreciate it. It was a pleasure.

Further Resources

The Amazing Doctor Who Wanted to Cure His Patients By Memorizing A Deck of Cards

How to Memorize Zodiac and Horoscope Info (For Entertainment Purposes Only)

The post Fooling Houdini And Memory Secrets With Magician Alex Stone appeared first on Magnetic Memory Method - How to Memorize With A Memory Palace.

You’ve dreamed about it for years. Opening your mouth and fluently speaking a foreign language. You know just how deeply that ability would fill the wide open gap in your soul.

You may not be fully aware of why your monolingualism hurts so bad, but in this post you’ll discover 15 reasons to find out what you’re missing.

Let’s explore each of these and see how each can inspire you to get started learning a language today. There’ll be some powerful tips and action steps for you at the end so you can get started today.

 

Learning A Language Exercises Your Brain

 

Do you ever feel like your mind has gone a bit soft?

Chances are it does feel a little doughy. The good news is that learning a language is one of the best long-term workouts you can get. Working with new words and grammar rules gets multiple areas of the brain working together.

And because you get to think familiar thoughts from a completely new angle, your perspective stretches more profoundly than looking at an M.C Escher painting ever will.

 

Language Learning Develops Discipline

 

Languages are fun, but also require consistency of exposure and effort. Luckily, access to languages has never been easier thanks to the Internet.

However, you do have to click over to the right websites and invest your time optimally. Sites like Duolingo and Memrise offer some help, but you’ll also want to find resources that capture all of the “Big Five Musts” of language learning:

• Memorizing
• Reading
• Listening
• Speaking
• Writing

The good news is that you can get each of these done in the first half hour of your day with an additional one hour or less in speaking practice with a tutor per week.

Covering The Big Five Of Language Learning is especially easy if you develop the discipline of consistently getting your language learning in before you even switch on the computer. There’s more information about making sure you get all of these done within the first 15-30 minutes of your day in my case study Mandarin Chinese Mnemonics And Morning Memory Secrets.

After you’ve covered your daily language learning activities first thing in the morning, you’ll never never suffer the dreaded Zeigarnik Effect which creates intrusive thoughts when we’re not focusing on things we need to get done.

For the rest of your day, you can check in on your language periodically by stocking up on podcasts, watching some Youtube videos in your target language and by using the technique taught at the end of this article.

Finally, work on understanding motivation in the context of language learning. Master your motivation and you’ll make steady strides toward fluency in no time.

 

Language Study Deepens Your Appreciation
And Understanding Of Your Mother Tongue

 

You rarely ponder it and yet it’s in front of your eyes and on your mind all day long. It even dominates your dreams. Yes, your mother tongue is that prevalent.

But just imagine understanding the ins and outs of your mother tongue at a higher level. The benefits are wide reaching and knowledge of how and why we speak as we do will enrich many aspects of your life.

Your mother tongue is also downright amusing when you realize how many weird things we say. And as I suggest in this video…

You won’t get this level of silent education and amusement while walking down the street in any other way, so pay attention to the odd nature and quality of the phrases we speak. Ezra Pound called this element the logopoeia of language and it is profound.

 

New Languages Exercise The
Muscles Of Your Mouth And Ears

 

There are spots on your tongue that you didn’t know you have. Lots of them.

And that’s not to mention the backs of your teeth and the terrain of your palette. When learning  a new languages, these places suddenly become a vast world ready for exploration.

Your ears develop exciting new abilities too. You’ll automatically start picking up on variations in sound and your attentiveness to detail will improve. All languages are musical and syncing your ears with your mouth makes you both the player and the instrument. Prepare to bloom.

 

Your Cultural Knowledge And Understanding Expands

 

Want to know why some people tick as they do? Learn about their culture from the inside looking out instead of trying to peer in.

Whether it’s history, politics, cinema, literature, theater or music, the ability to study and experience these aspects of a culture from within its language is inspiring. Even sculpture and painting take on new dimensions when you can read the plaques in your target language.

The best part is that your interest in the culture will expand. When you start learning the language of a new culture you’re interested in, prepare for your curiosity to increase twelve-fold (or more).

 

Numbers And Math Concepts Will Grow Your
Logical And Conceptual Abilities

 

Learning to count and perform basic math operations in another language can feel a bit like learning to tie your shoelaces all over again.

Different languages express numbers and the time of day in unique ways that can be puzzling to the point of frustration. But push through and you’ll be delighted by your ability to think backward, sideways, upside down and in some cases completely opposite to your norms. Win in this department and you’ll enjoy one of the highest forms of mental triumph you can experience.

 

Learning Languages Boosts Self-Esteem And Confidence

 

The great thing about the long game of learning languages is that there are countless victories along the way.Click To Tweet

Small achievements build up you can feel proud of yourself again and again with greater intensity as your accomplishments grow.

And it’s not just about your self-esteem. Here’s how to teach your kids memory techniques.

 

New Languages Retrain Your Eyes

 

You’ve seen the word “baker” thousands of times. But how about “Bäcker”? You recognize it in principle, but it looks weird with that extra letter and the umlaut, right?

It sure does, though no more or less than “baker” looks to a German-speaker who can also probably figure out what the word means in English thanks to the similarity in spelling.

It’s a beautiful thing when you’re able to see connections between languages, but it takes training. And you’ll often do a Homer Simpson-forehead smack when you figure out similarities that should have been more obvious. That’s just part of growing.

Then there’s the matter of completely new character sets. Few languages will challenge your ability to recognize patterns and associate sounds with symbols than Japanese or Chinese.

Yet, once you’ve got your foot in the door, you’ll grow by leaps and bounds and get to explore yet another dimension of logical arrangements you previously could not understand.

 

One Or More Extra Languages Widens Your Job Prospects

 

Even if that job you’re dreaming of doesn’t require proficiency in another language, what boss or hiring committee won’t recognize your discipline and enhanced thinking abilities as an advantage?

You can position yourself better and even open a company up to new opportunities that were previously closed to them when they hire you.

If you’re a freelancer, your pool of possibilities is also broader, as is your potential for networking.

 

New Languages = New Friends
Lots Of Them

 

It’s not that people who speak only your mother tongue bore you. But you are a curious person with multiple interests and you don’t want to get tapped out or caught in the hamster wheel of friendships that cannot grow.

That’s why meeting new people you can speak to from within their culture can be so profound. You get the benefit of learning about their world and expressing details about yours. You can then bring new things back to your old friendship circles. This sharing breathes new life into everything and creates a perfect circle between the old and new.

Just make sure you don’t tell your friends any of these 5 Lies About Language Learning. They not true and only drag everyone down, especially you.

 

Location. Location. Location.

 

What better way to enjoy what you’ll learn from your new friends than to visit their homeland?

Not only that, but you’ll be able to hold conversations with the locals, order in restaurants with confidence and even complain in hotels about the water temperature if you wish.

 

Language Learning Slows You Down

 

This feature of learning language might sound like a minus, but in our sped-up world, nothing could be healthier than taking the time to learn deeply at a slower pace.

Just like you don’t want to abandon the training wheels on a bike too soon, learning a language requires you to master a number of fundamentals. Gain traction with these and you can tackle the next level (and the level after that) with consistency, clarity and the certainty that you’re getting it right.

 

Learning A Language Teaches You A Ton About How To Learn

 

Learning languages requires strategies that apply to learning anything. You can bring outside tactics to help you as you explore a new language, but more importantly, you’ll take a lot of new approaches away for other kinds of learning.

For example, you’ll learn how to assess what you don’t yet know how to say and find resources to fill in the gaps. You can transfer this ability to any communication-based activity. You’ll spot missing words and note the need for clarity when writing or editing, for example.

 

Learning Vocabulary And Phrases Exercises Your Memory

 

When learning a language, you are playing an extended game of memory.Click To Tweet

Retention and recall advance you through the levels, and even in your mother tongue, it’s impossible to plateau. There are always more words to learn and memorize.

 

How To Learn And Memorize Any Word
Or Phrase In Any Language Fast

 

The great thing about consciously using your memory while learning vocabulary and phrases is that you don’t have to rely on painful rote learning. Although index cards and spaced-repetition software certainly have their place, the ancient art of memory, or mnemonics, offers powerful techniques for boosting your vocabulary in record time.

The Memory Palace is one of the most effective memory techniques for language learning because you can group related words together.

For example, a Memory Palace is an imaginary replica of a place you know, ideally a building like your home, school or workplace.

If you can imagine the journey from your bedroom to the kitchen, then you’re already well on your way to creating your first Memory Palace. If you need more help, you can use the Magnetic Memory Method Masterplan.

To do it right, draw out a floor plan of your chosen building. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just recognizable enough for you to recognize a distinct route. Try to move from the inside out and avoid crossing your path.

 

How To Use The Magnetic Journey Method For
Learning Your Foreign Language

 

Then choose a number of “Magnetic Stations” along the route you’ve created. Attempt to have at least ten in your first Memory Palace, using spots like the corner of each room, tables, chairs and doorways.

Next, get together the vocabulary you want to memorize. It can be random words or a list based on themes like travel. You can also memorize lists of verbs, nouns, adjectives or all of the preposition.

Finally, you create a “Magnetic Bridging Figure.” Base your Magnetic Bridging Figure on a real person or an actor for best results.

Cartoon characters also work well. The easier it is for you to see this character interacting with different objects the better. And if you can associate the figure with the sounds of the words, you will be memorizing at the highest possible level.

For example, let’s say you’ve got a short list of German adjectives:

• Bockig
• Dunkel
• Weich

To get started with memorizing German vocabulary, you could imagine James Bond in your bedroom. “Bockig” means “stubborn,” so you could see Bond stubbornly whipping a block of ice with licorice. If you take a few seconds to exaggerate this weird image, you’ll find that it’s hard to shake from your mind.

Plus, when you revisit the image in your bedroom later, it will remind you that the word you’re looking for starts with “bo” thanks to James Bond.

The “ck” sound in “block” will help you recall the “ck” sound in the target word and the liquorice in the image will help you recall the final “ish” sound. The more “stubborn” Bond looks in your image and the more exaggerated you make the action and colors, the better you’ll be able you recall the sound and meaning of the word.

The description you’ve just read may sound complicated, but that’s because you’re reading a mnemonic create by someone else. Once you start using this technique on your own, it will soon become second nature to you.

Here’s another example:

Let’s say that James Bond is now in your kitchen. You’ve got a basketball net in there and you see Bond slam “dunk” the letter “l” through the hoop. If you see the hoop as a dark black hole, then it will be simple to recall that dunk + l = dunkel, which means dark.

To give a final example, “weich” means soft in German. By the door leading out of your home, you could see James Bond squeezing a viper between the jaws a soft and furry vice. Make it exaggerated and funny so that the imagery leaps out at you and the details make it easy to decode both the sound and meaning of the word.

Again, these examples only demonstrate the guidelines of how mnemonics work. You’ll need to experiment and create your own images based on the words you want to learn and memorize.

In whatever language you’re using, avoid getting stalled by looking for one-to-one correspondences between the images and words. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how easily your mind brings it all together based on near-associations.

All that remains is to rehearse the Magnetic Journey Method in your mind a sufficient number of times until the words enter long-term memory.

You can speed up the memorization process further by writing sentences using the words and speaking those sentences in a conversation. Casually mentioning to people what you’ve memorized and how you did it using mnemonics is also a great way to solidify new vocabulary and phrases.

Finally, you can follow these steps for every letter of the alphabet. For example, here are some Hindi Alphabet Memory Palace secrets from a Magnetic Memory Method student.

 

There Are No Magic Bullets In Language Learning
(And That Is A Beautiful Thing)

 

It’s normal and natural to look for shortcuts. But when it comes to language learning, there aren’t any. In fact, shortcuts, like SMART goals, aren’t necessarily desirable.

Why? Because you benefit so much from the learning process. You develop patience, stamina and the ability to juggle many moving parts. In today’s age when computers are bearing so much cognitive load on our behalf, more than ever we need to have this kind of mental activity to keep our brains fit and our mental lives stimulating.

Above all, by not seeking shortcuts and just getting down to learning, you learn to deal with imperfect communication. This process teaches you to come at problems from different angles until you’ve made things clear.

And not seeking shortcuts is easy… So long as you’re in the G.A.P.:

In a world with over 7000 languages, getting in the language learning G.A.P. and staying there is a skill worth having. In every tongue.

The post 15 Reasons Why Learning A Foreign Language Is Good For Your Brain appeared first on Magnetic Memory Method - How to Memorize With A Memory Palace.

You want your children to remember what they learn, right? You’ve probably even hoped that they’d learn enough to succeed in life.

Maybe even change the world.

It’s a great aspiration. And an important one.

And yet …

 

Here’s Why So Few Children Fail To Make A Mark As Grownups

 

Memory.

Think about it. Every test your child will ever take relies on memory. And every gatekeeper your child will ever pass on the way to fulfilling their dreams hinges on the ability to recall details. Thoroughly and accurately.

And since we know that the ability to succeed has everything to do with what you know (and who you remember that you know), the question is …

How do you get your children started towards a superior memory so that they can succeed?

I’m glad you asked because you’re about to find out.

The Simple Way To Use Rhymes And Your Family Home To Learn, Memorize And Recall Anything

 

The best memory techniques all use buildings and other fixed locations. Why? Because the human mind has the unusual ability to remember the layout out buildings. For this reason, location-based mnemonics has lasted thousands of years.

Go ahead and try it. Have everyone in your family draw a map of your home. You’ll be amazed by the accuracy each of you brings to the game.

Here’s an image of a simple drawing from a young person who did precisely this activity to give you ideas and inspire you. She took the layout of her home from the drawing stage to rebuilding this floor plan in her mind so she could memorize a poem.

 

The Special Structure Anyone Can Use To Learn, Memorize
And Recall Anything

 

Anyone of any age can build one and use it to memorize anything.

But please don’t use Memory Palaces to memorize any old thing. The trick is to use these wonderful mental structures for memorizing important information.

Not just any information. I’m talking about the kind of information that makes a direct impact on the quality of your child’s life. In the present and the future.

So location is the first power of memory. The second power of memory is association.

To use this power, you associate information with a location. And to make the information really magnetic, you create crazy images that makes it easier to recall. Usually these images will come from visual sources you already know, such as movies, paintings, famous figures and the like. You can also turbocharge the images you create by using stock images placed in the Memory Palace.

 

Here’s An Easy Way To See
The Second Power Of Memory In Action

 

Imagine that your house has five rooms. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom and playroom. You’ve already drawn them out and can walk in your imagination from room to room. And your child can do this too.

Next, use the following rhymes to place an imaginary object in each room.

1 is a bun
2 is a shoe
3 is a bee
4 is a door
5 is a hive

You don’t have to use these rhymes. It’s great fun to come up with your own as a family activity. But these are standard and you can find a full list of these mnemonic examples and a full explanation of this mnemonic peg system here.

But keep in mind that we’re going to take things one step further than rhyming. We’re going to combine this technique with a familiar building like your home.

Now pretend that your son or daughter needs to learn the names of the first five vertical entries on the Periodic Table of Elements. The following suggestions are examples only. The method will work best when young people come up with the images on their own.

Hydrogen goes in the first room. They see a bun saying “Hi” to a drone reading Genesis.

In the second room, they see a shoe with a huge L on it. It’s drinking tea and saying “um.” Lithium,

The third room has a bee. He’s also saying “um” while drinking soda. Sodium.

The fourth room has an enormous potato with a door from which donkeys are entering the room with small potatoes in their mouths. Potassium.

In the fifth room, we have rubidium. Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz is knocking on the hive.

You can help everyone in your family use this location and rhyme-based memory technique to learn and memorize anything. From facts and mathematical figures to foreign language vocabulary and artifacts from Ancient Egypt. Being able to recall these in a snap make a huge difference for kids in school. And bilingualism is very health for young brains.

 

The Minimalist Guide To Making
Memory Improvement A Family Event

 

If your young person is struggling to learn, retain and reproduce information, here’s how you can help. If you’ve already used your home as a Memory Palace, visit a relative or friend. Make a Memory Palace based on their home. You can literally walk the journey between the actual rooms with them, encouraging them to come up with the memorable images on their own.

You can also use a walk through a simple park, a movie theater, a church or a library. But please do start with simple structures before introducing anything more complex. Mastering simple buildings makes mastering multi-detailed environments much easier.

Teach Your Kids How To Paint Like
Picasso In Their Minds

 

If your child struggles with creating images to associate information with, help them to become more visual by looking at art together. If you can visit art galleries, all the better. These buildings can become Memory Palaces too.

You can also help your children become more visual by encouraging drawing more than just Memory Palaces. Characters from movies they’ve enjoyed and especially representations of people from books they’ve read about but never seen work well. They will get the visual imagination flowing.

It’s also useful to look at an image and then have your child “remake” the image in their imagination. Seeing in the mind is a skill you can develop over time and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Mentally “copying” the great masters is perfectly fine. Great and original artists do it all the time.

 

Use World Class Examples To Inspire Your Child To Memorize

 

One way to make these memory skills more interesting to young people is to tell them the story of their origin in Ancient Greece. Simonides of Ceos was giving a speech at a banquet when the building collapsed. Because he had memorized where everyone was using the location principle, he could help families identify their loved ones.

The Simonides story also perfectly demonstrates the principles of exaggerated imagery along with location. The vibrant image of a building collapsing is just of the reasons the story has lasted the centuries. The image is as hard to forget as is the promise of near-miraculous memory ability.

Your kids will also find Matteo Ricci‘s life as an international mnemonist inspiring. He sailed from Italy to China and could memorize books forwards and backward. His life included a great deal of drama and even tragedy.

You can also share with them the stories of how ordinary people have learned memory techniques and used them to accomplish extraordinary feats. Read Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein for a particularly compelling story to pass on.

You can also listen to the Magnetic Memory Method interviews with Dave Farrow, Mark Channon and Alex Mullen for many inspiring stories of ordinary people learning memory techniques and accomplishing great things for themselves and others. Nelson Dellis, for example, has done a lot for Alzheimer’s research and you can contribute to it by taking his Extreme Memory Challenge.

 

Show All Children The True Path To Memory Mastery
With One Simple Tool

We double what we’ve learned every time we teach. Teaching is the simplest tool for learning something better ever invented. All you need to do is learn something and then share what you’ve learned. Merely by doing this you will have learned it better yourself. It’s also great memory exercise.

Encourage your child to share what they’ve learned with others so that they absorb the skills with greater depth. Teaching others also follows the principle of contribution. Your child feels like she or he has given something great and also made the world a better place. Reciprocity will be a natural result.

You can also ask your child to teach you what they’ve learned directly from their memory. Ask them to “decode” the images they’ve created without revealing them. Focus on the core information first and then share the weird images if you wish.

At the end of the day, these images are nothing more than training wheels on a bike. They prompt or trigger the target information. But it’s the memorized information they should reproduce first.

Having your child repeat what they’ve memorized at home also gives them practice in a low-stress environment. (Your home is low-stress, isn’t it?) That way, when the time to take a test arrives, they can access those comfortable feelings about memory created at home. This certainty will help them cope with the pressure of performance at school. Imagination and memory abilities soar much higher when we’re relaxed.

 

Are Memory Techniques The Ultimate Learning Solution?

 

Yes and no. Memory techniques are a supplement to how schools teach, not a replacement. Some kids take to it more than others and for some, taking pleasure in the technique is necessary. But if the images are sufficiently funny and fascinating, it’s hard to imagine the Magnetic Memory Method as boring.

As a final tip, avoid perfection. Just have fun with the art of memory and let go of the outcome. At its core, all we’re doing is looking at information that needs to be learned and retained in a new and likely more interesting way.

But it’s important not to associate this technique with the same pain and frustration given to rote learning. Your child will always be learning the information, but if something truly won’t stick, move on and come back to it. You increase the pleasure and chances of success by not forcing it.

And if you as a parent would like more information about using Memory Palaces to learn and memorize information that can make a positive difference in your life, I’ve got a Free Memory Improvement kit for you. It comes with four free videos and will teach you everything you need to know about improving the memory of everyone in your family.

So what do you say? Are you ready to start changing the world? All it takes is teaching memory skills to one young mind at a time.

Further Resources

Tap The Mind Of A Ten Year Old Memory Palace Master

Memory Improvement Techniques For Kids

The post How To Teach Your Kids Memory Techniques appeared first on Magnetic Memory Method - How to Memorize With A Memory Palace.

Could This Man Be The GODFATHER Of Memory Techniques Of The 20th & 21st Century? 

(Seriously. The dude has memory courses on vinyl.)

Although memory training has been around for millennia, it has seen a huge resurgence in modern times. There are now countless books and materials about memory improvement, not to mention video courses, audio programs and, yes, resources like the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast.

But if there is one name who stands behind the explosion of mnemonics in the 20th and 21st century, that name is Harry Lorayne. Through his voluminous work as an author and presenter, Lorayne spawned and popularized the modern industry of memory training. Correct me if I’m wrong, but in terms of sheer visibility and quality, I think it’s safe to say that Harry Lorayne is the Mnemonic Godfather of modern memory training.

 

How To Survive A Terrible Childhood And Create A Memorable Career

 

But the future didn’t always look so promising for Lorayne. Judging from his childhood conditions during the depression-era, it seemed that the odds were firmly stacked against him.

“I had an awful childhood. I’m a depression kid.” Lorayne shares in his 2012 interview with Michael Senoff. “I remember having a potato for dinner.”

He was also affected with dyslexia, which he only identified as such years later. This learning disability caused him to struggle and fail while in grade school.

But Harry Lorayne’s life took a different course when he discovered books on memory improvement. As he told me in the exclusive interview he gave for Masterclass members, he discovered memory techniques in a dramatic way and after learning these methods and drastically improving his grades, he started teaching his classmates on how they too could become memory masters.

From there, Harry Lorayne progressively became more and more successful. Lorayne has managed to emerge as one of the most famous and published magicians and memory experts of the century. Now in his late 80s, Lorayne is still at work teaching the world about memory, success and perseverance.

 

The Secret Ingredient That Made Harry Lorayne And His Memory Techniques Go Viral

 

Harry Lorayne was born of Jewish parents in 1926 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, right near the East River. Having come to the world only 3 short years before the Great Depression, Lorayne’s childhood was spent in impoverished and difficult circumstances. Most everyone was poor, and Lorayne was amongst the poorest of the poor.

Poverty colored all aspects of Harry Lorayne’s childhood, including his play. He recalls how with his childhood friends he would play in a garbage dump near where he lived. Lorayne recounts: “The garbage became a petrified hill. They were long, petrified mountains of garbage, and that was our playgrounds. That’s what my friends and I played on when I was a little boy.”

School also proved to be difficult Lorayne. Due to his undiagnosed dyslexia, Lorayne received failing grades as a young boy. To make matters worse, his father had a heavy-handed way of dealing with his son’s school performance.

“I got the paper [test] home to my father to sign, and he would look at the failing grade, and he would punch me,” remembers Lorayne “I was scared. Not of getting failing grades, but of getting hit by my father.”

 

How Fear Created A Memory Solution That Would Help Millions Of People Improve Their Memory

Pushed to find a solution, a stroke of insight struck Lorayne one day on his walk to school. “I just realized that at that point in my life, all you had to do was remember the darn answers to the questions, and then you’ll get a passing grade. And then, more importantly, your father won’t punch you.”

In other words, Lorayne understood that school was more about a test of how well you could memorize than a test of ‘intelligence’. As he says repeatedly in many of his interviews “There is no learning without memory.”

Lorayne soon headed to the library where he asked the librarian to show him where the books on “how to memorize” were kept. There, he immersed himself for hours in how-to books on memorization. These included books from the 17th and 18th century, and works from modern memory trainers, such as David Roth.

Much of the material was not comprehensible for him at his young age. However, he understood enough to teach himself how to memorize things quickly and effectively using mnemonics techniques.

From that point on, he aced his tests at school, surprising his teachers and sparing him from his aggressive father. His classmates took notice, and started to ask Lorayne how he managed to have improved his memorization so drastically. That marked the start of his career teaching others on how to memorize effectively.

Later, Lorayne would even have other people teaching his techniques for him. For example, the magician Darwin Ortiz talks about teaching for Lorayne in his Penguin Magic Live Lecture.

But long before being a teacher and helping others become teachers of memory techniques, Lorayne became a dropout during his first year of high school. To make an income, Lorayne started performing memory tricks for small to medium sized audiences. He would impress crowds by memorizing magazine pages, decks of cards or large lists of names. His original intention in doing these shows was to attract students to hire him for memory training. He found little success in doing so, but his shows led him to be noticed by an agent.

The agent started Lorayne on a path of presenting to larger and larger audiences. By 1958, Lorayne was presenting on national television, including shows such as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Merv Griffin Show and Good Morning America. Lorayne performed on the The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson no less than 24 times.

One of his most famous memory feats include memorizing each of the names of crowds of up to 1500 people. As much as 20 minutes later, he would be able to name each of the audience’s names when prompted. He is also known for having memorized an entire phone book.

But Lorayne didn’t make his name off of entertaining others with memory tricks alone. Instead, he became famous by teaching others how to use these techniques and improve their own memories.

This Memory Improvement Solution Could End
Your Memory Troubles Forever

 

Harry Lorayne has sold millions of copies of his many books teach people around the world on how to replicate his memorization ability. Many actors and other public figures have publicly acknowledged using Lorayne’s methods. These include New York city mayor Michael Bloomberg, Secretary of State Colin Powell and actor Alan Alda.

Harry Lorayne’s method is based on image associations. This is where the memorizer associates an image with the piece of information that they’d like to remember.

Lorayne’s methods are based on the idea that all memory can be broken down into associations of two entities. As Lorayne puts it “That’s what I teach, how to make one thing remind you of another.” Lorayne’s method also extends the technique to non-physical and non-visual concepts, such as numbers. His teachings guide students on how to visualize numbers physically so as to remember them.

He does this by teaching students to associate numbers 1 through 9 with specific letters (a technique known widely as either the Major Method or Major System). With this technique, any number can be connected with at least one word. By associating numbers with a physical word, numbers are given a physical quality. As compared to the abstract concepts that are numbers, physical qualities can more easily be used as mnemonics.

Lorayne also underlines the importance of paying attention. His method includes teachings on how to concentrate and focus on the information students are trying to memorize. “We are all born with the same capacity for memory,” he says. “It’s a question of having a trained memory, or an untrained memory”

One thing that many note about Lorayne’s work, however, is that his teaching seems not to cover the Memory Palace Method technique. No one is quite sure why, but my feeling is that in some integral manner, memorizing the names of each person in a large crowd must use location in one way or another. Unless the individuals change location, a mnemonist performing a feat like this most certainly taps into the power of a repeated location, if only unconsciously. There is a link between the where the information was memorized and where the mnemonist goes to recall it.

What Will Harry Lorayne’s Contribution To Helping You Create Instant Memories Will Bring To Your Future?

 

The answer is: Success.

In addition to his immense contribution to memorization training, Harry Lorayne has made significant contributions to the field of magic. For example, he’s written over 30 books on card tricks. As a world recognized magician, Lorayne has invented and refined techniques which are now widely used by current-day amateur and professional magicians.

Lorayne’s life and career shows us how even barriers which many would consider insurmountable can be overcome. His landmark contributions to memory training is an essential tomb in the library of memorization techniques. At 89, Harry Lorayne continues to work and give seminars to large corporate audiences. He has even recently completed an autobiography.

Harry Lorayne, living legend of memory mastery, proving what Winston Churchill said: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”

Further Resources

The Memory Book

Ageless Memory

Super Memory – Super Student: How To Raise Your Grades In 30 Days

Jonathan Levi On ADD, Education & His TEDTalk Memory Palace

The post Harry Lorayne Memory Improvement And The Magic Of Mnemonics appeared first on Magnetic Memory Method - How to Memorize With A Memory Palace.