He is one of world's top memory experts, Jim Kwik, founder of “Kwik Learning” and host of “The Kwik Brain Podcast,” is a celebrity brain coach to notables that include Elon Musk, Will smith, even the cast of The X-Men. In this interview, Jim shows everyone the “kwik” and simple ways they can boost their brain power and increase their memory. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
One of the challenges people suffer from right now, there's these digital, like, supervillains, if you will, where previous generations, they didn't have this, and it really holds us back.
One of them is digital overload.
Too much information, too little time.
I mean, I think everyone can relate to having books on your shelf you haven't read yet, or getting, you know, how many emails do we get nowadays?
And so we're drowning in information, and one of the reasons why is we weren't really taught how to swim properly.
We weren't taught how to surf.
We weren't taught how to snorkel, if you will.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. podcast. and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
My guest today is one of the world's top memory experts, Jim Quick.
That's his real name, actually.
Founder of Quick Learning.
What a convenient name, by the way.
I thought Oz was a good name.
He's also host of the Quick Brain Podcast.
He's a celebrity brain coach and notables that include Elon Musk, Will Smith, even the cast of The X-Men.
Today, Jim's here to show everyone the quick and simple ways they can boost their brain power and increase their memory by the end of this podcast.
Now, here's the thing that's always amazed me.
Most folks listening probably are like me.
I can't memorize a...
I can memorize a tune, but not the lyrics of a song.
But I'm really good at medical stuff.
I was always good at anatomy, these obscure Latin names.
But if I run this one at a cocktail party, it completely missed.
And then I read your story.
You get me jealous.
Until I find out that at age nine, you were also told you had a memory that was like mine.
Meanwhile, my wife, without even trying, remembers everything I've ever done wrong.
And much more.
So how does this all work?
And how did you...
What happened at age nine that changed your life?
Yeah, when I was...
We've met each other at various conferences.
When I speak at these events, I do these demonstrations where I'll have 100 people stand up and introduce themselves and I'll remember all their names or they'll give me 100 numbers or 100 words.
It's intimidating.
And I always tell people I don't do this to impress you.
I do this more to express to you what's possible.
Because the truth is every single person listening to you right now could do that and a lot more.
We just weren't taught.
If anything, we were taught a lie that somehow...
Our memory, our potential, our intelligence is somehow fixed like our shoe size, but we absolutely know that's not true.
And one of the reasons why is I know this is because at the age of five I had an accident in school, a traumatic brain injury, and I was put in special classes.
I had very poor focus.
I didn't understand things.
Teachers would repeat themselves four or five times.
I would pretend to understand, but I didn't really understand.
I had a very poor memory.
It took me an extra almost four years longer to learn how to read because of my injury.
At the age of nine, a teacher, I remember it was a defining moment, pointed to me in front of the whole class and said, that's the boy with the broken brain.
And it sort of really changed my whole perception on who I was.
But at age 18, I was able to break through.
I learned ways of compensating.
And now my passion really is to build better, brighter brains.
Where did you learn these things?
Because there are a lot of people listening probably who are struggling, especially in school or at work with memorization.
Where did they even turn?
Where did you turn?
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because at first I was thinking about going to school and learning it.
But school, I found out it's a great place to learn what to learn.
They teach you what to learn and what to think and what to remember, but they don't necessarily teach you how to learn and how to think and how to remember those things.
I always thought it should have been the fourth R back in school.
They teach you three R's, right?
Reading, writing, arithmetic.
But what about remembering?
What about recall?
What about retention?
Socrates says there is no learning without remembering.
And so I knew I wasn't going to learn it from school, so I started studying.
I wanted to solve this riddle of how does my brain work so I can work my brain?
Like, how does memory work so I can work my memory better?
And so I started studying brain science, adult learning theory, multiple intelligence theory, mnemonics.
Like what did the ancient Greeks do back before we had smart devices and printing presses?
How would people pass on information?
And after I started studying this, about 60 days into it, a light switch flipped on.
And all of a sudden, I started to understand things.
I started to have better focus.
I started to remember things.
And my grades shot up in school.
And along with it, so did my self-esteem.
And because of that, I couldn't help but help other people.
You know, when I was kind of upset because I was thinking how...
How much easier life would have been, you know, through all the struggles I had for about a decade and a half had I learned this back earlier.
And so I started helping people.
And one of my very first students I was tutoring, she was a freshman.
She read 30 books in 30 days.
Can you imagine that?
Not skim or scan, but actually read 30 books in 30 days.
I wanted to find out not how.
I know how she did it.
I wanted to know why she did it.
And I found out that her mother was dying of terminal cancer, was only given two months, 60 days to live.
And the books she was reading were books to save her mom's life.
And I wished her luck, you know, to prayers.
Six months goes by, I don't hear from her until this phone call comes in and she's crying and crying and crying.
And I find out when she stops, there are tears of joy that her mother not only survived, but is really getting better.
Doctors don't know how or why.
They called it a miracle, but her mother attributed 100% to the great advice she got from her daughter who learned it from all these books.
And at that moment, I realized that if knowledge is power, then learning is our superpower.
And it's a superpower we all have inside of us.
So let's unwrap this a little bit because that's an unbelievable story.
And I think it's emblematic of how you...
You share your wisdom.
We shared a stage at the Milking Conference.
And I remember bringing it to you in the hallway afterwards.
And you were just, again, mostly to inform me, demonstrating a few things that I was stupefying.
So I want to, for example, you mentioned you wanted to know why that young woman was reading those 30 books.
But I do want to understand how she was able to read the 30 books.
And breeding is a good example because I've read some of your work and you've shared with me in the past that it's not that you're It's more than anybody else.
But if you're distracted while you're reading or you're literally saying the words to yourself to force yourself to hear them, that's a pretty slow process.
It is.
And if you can...
I think the metaphor used was if you're driving your car through a neighborhood and sipping a coffee and glancing around, you may not remember everything.
This is true.
I think one of the challenges people suffer from right now, there's these digital supervillains, if you will, that...
Where previous generations, they didn't have this, and it really holds us back.
One of them is digital overload.
Too much information, too little time.
I mean, I think everyone can relate to having books on your shelf you haven't read yet or getting, you know, how many emails do we get nowadays?
And so we're drowning in information, and one of the reasons why is we weren't really taught how to swim properly.
We weren't taught how to surf.
We weren't taught how to snorkel, if you will.
And so to be able to read faster, for example, it's something that everybody could do.
Anyone could double, triple their reading speed with better comprehension.
It's just there are a number of things factors.
There are obstacles to effective reading.
For example, number one is lack of education.
Like reading is a skill.
It's not something we're born with.
We learned it.
But when's the last time we took a class called reading?
How old were we?
Like six or seven years old.
And most of us are still reading to the same degree.
But the other one, as you mentioned, is this lack of focus.
You know, you read a page in a book, you get to the end and you just forget what you just read.
And you go back and you reread it and you still know what you read.
And so your mind wanders.
You start to lose concentration.
You wonder why that is.
I think a lot of it is driven by digital distraction, which is another supervillain besides digital overload.
All the app notifications, social media alerts, it's a real challenge nowadays.
But when it comes to your reading, as you mentioned, when you're driving a car, If you were to read, most people feed this incredible supercomputer of a brain one word at a time.
Metaphorically, we're starving our mind.
And if you don't give your brain the stimulus it needs, it'll seek entertainment elsewhere in the form of distraction.
Much like driving that car, if you're in your neighborhood just going slow and you're observing the speed limit, you're not focused on the act of driving.
You're drinking your coffee, you're texting, even though you know you shouldn't.
You're thinking about the dry cleaning, you're singing...
Along with having a conversation, you could be doing five different things going slow.
But if you're racing cars and you're taking straightaways at 200 miles an hour, do you have more or less focus?
You have much more focus.
You're focused on the act of driving and you're focused on what's in front of you.
And similar to reading.
And so actually, there's a myth out there that if you read faster, your comprehension would go down.
Everyone thinks that.
But we have students in well over 150, close to over 180 countries online And we have a lot of data.
We find that the fastest readers actually have better comprehension because they have better focus, like that fast driver.
One of the reasons that, as you mentioned, we read slowly is because we sub-vocalize.
Have you ever noticed when you're reading something, you hear that inner voice inside your head reading along with you?
Hopefully it's your own voice, somebody else's voice.
You're not worthy.
Exactly.
If you're saying the words in order to understand them, then you can only read as fast as you could speak.
That means your reading speed is limited to your talking speed, but not your thinking speed.
That's why you can listen to this podcast at 1.5 or 2x or audiobooks faster, because you can understand that, but you can't speak that fast.
And the key is, a lot of people are pronouncing the words, but you don't have to pronounce a word like New York City to understand what New York City is.
And we find the fastest readers actually reduce their sub-vocalization, and there's also a process for that.
Interesting, because when you start to read, you sound out every letter.
And then when you see a word, you don't do that.
But we haven't done that with reading.
We've only done it at the word level.
We've never taken it to the whole paragraph level.
Exactly.
So it's similar where you look at a page and you don't see the actual letters.
You see individual words.
And trained readers actually see groups of words together.
So they have less what they call fixations.
When you're reading across the page, it's like an eye stop.
And obviously if you're taking less stops, just like driving a car, you're going to get through it faster and less interrupted.
So when you read, you go straight down the page?
You don't go side to side?
So I actually go side to side.
Traditional speed reading courses actually aren't...
It's a misnomer.
They're not actually reading.
They're actually skimming or scanning, skipping words, where you get the gist of things.
And as you mentioned, our students, they run companies, they're doctors, they're attorneys.
You don't want your doctor to get the gist of what she's reading.
So if you go just down the page, you miss everything on the left side and the right side.
And so even if a simple brain hack, if you will, quick tip, pardon the pun, is if you underline the words with a visual pacer, like a pen, a highlighter, a mouse on a computer, your finger, you will actually boost your reading speed and focus 25 to 50%, which is tremendous.
Just underlining how you read.
Just underlining because, and this is why, as human beings, we want to know the reasons why things work the way they do.
First of all, I would say test it.
If you read for 60 seconds, count the number of lines you read normally, and then pick up where you left off for 60 seconds just underlining the words, that second number will be about 25 to 50% increase immediately.
And so people don't have to take my word for it.
They can see from their own personal experience.
First of all, children will always use their finger to help them focus until we train them not to do so.
Second of all, adults do it too.
And someone listening can say, I don't use my finger when I read, but when I ask you to count the number of lines you just read in 60 seconds, 100% of the people will use their finger as a visual pacer or pointer.
Third reason is your eyes are attracted to motion.
I think we're good to go.
Or number two, you could be lunch.
And so your eyes are attracted to motion.
So when your finger is underlining the words, your attention is being pulled through as opposed to apart.
And then finally, last reason just to really put it over the edge, you try it using your finger while you read because it's how your neurology is set up.
Certain senses work very closely together.
Like, it's wonderful because this time of year, don't you love going, having like a fresh piece of fruit?
Like right from the...
Right from the vine, right from the farmer's market, not something that's been sprayed and waxed sitting in a grocery store for six months.
Have you ever tasted a great tasting peach before?
In actuality, we're not tasting the peach.
We're actually smelling the peach.
But our sense of smell and taste are so closely linked, our mind can't perceive the difference.
It perceives the difference when we're sick.
If we're congested, food tastes different, right?
As our sense of smell and taste are so closely linked, so is our sense of sight and our sense of touch.
That literally people using their finger while they read, they'll say they feel more in touch with their reading, right?
And it's kind of interesting.
When you lose your sense of sight, like if you go to a child, actually, like a toddler, with your keys, and you shake your keys and say, look at my keys, look at my keys, what's that toddler going to do?
He's going to reach out and touch them because senses to look at means to touch.
And so when you're using your finger while you read, even if someone's lost their sense of sight, how do they read?
They read with Braille, right?
With their sense of touch.
So I would challenge people to use their finger.
And not only will it help with your speed, but it'll help with your focus.
And if your focus is better, so is your understanding.
Well, when I see people reading on a digital device versus a book, some will complain if they're book readers.
My son is one.
He'd much rather read a book.
And he's a smart student as well.
So I pay attention to that insight.
He's 19 years old.
You wouldn't be able to cry.
I couldn't on a digital device if I moved my hand across.
Yeah, we're not actually touching the screen.
Just like even if you're using, whether you're using a physical, like a print book or a digital device, we're not touching the object because, you know, as you're increasing speed, obviously there's something called, you know, friction.
And I've burned up a lot of books that way.
But, yeah, right above the words.
So you're not actually making contact.
And even in online reading, some people will actually use a mouse.
The visual pacer, it's a wonderful, easy, simple-to-use technique that just makes your reading easier.
There's lots more when we come back.
Can I just shift gears into names, which are?
Reading books is vitally important.
Getting people's names right, that's a career crisis if you can't do it correctly.
I've seen you memorize dozens and hundreds of names.
I mentioned a little bit on how you do it, but you're very humble about the fact that we can all do at least better than we're doing and maybe something more approachable to you.
Walk me through that.
I know you have this MOM acronym, but the specifics of it are what kept me.
Yeah, really quickly.
I think one of the most important business etiquette, networking, just people skills is just to remember someone's name.
I mean, we all know the message we send to somebody when you meet somebody and the handshake breaks and all of a sudden the name just disappears.
Or if it's not a short-term issue, it's a long-term issue where somebody taps you on your shoulder, you turn around, maybe you're at the gym or you're at the grocery store, you see someone you recognize, but for the life of you, you don't know.
And the two of you...
Hey, how are you?
Yeah!
My family well?
Good!
Right.
And the two of you meet so many people, and so it can be overwhelming.
So a couple of tricks for everybody listening to be able to remember names better, because as they say, a name is the sweetest sound to a person's ears.
As you mentioned, MOM, MOM, very quickly.
Most people will say they are horrible remembering names.
95% of the population will admit that.
But let's say there was a suitcase here of a million dollars cash for you, your favorite charity, tax-free, if you just remember the name of the next stranger you meet.
Who's going to remember that person's name?
Me.
Everybody, right?
And so everybody has a great memory all of a sudden.
And so notice that as your brain coach, you know, a coach also challenges you To get through what's not true.
So when we say we're horrible at remembering names, that's actually not true.
We're good at remembering the names we want to remember.
And so tapping in your motivation, a quick brain hack, is just when you meet somebody for the first time, ask yourself, "Why do I want to remember this person's name?" Maybe it's to show respect.
Maybe it's to make a new friend.
Maybe it's to practice these things I learned from this show.
Because if you can't come up with one reason, you're not going to remember.
I always tell people, reasons reap results.
So tap into the reason.
The O in MOM stands for observation.
And a lot of people, they blame their retention.
And it's not your retention, it's your attention.
Most people are not paying attention.
And the truth is, when people are meeting people at a business event or at a wedding, A lot of times they're distracted.
They're looking over your shoulder and seeing who else is here?
Who's more important here?
Or if they're not visually distracted, they're internally distracted.
They're not even listening.
They're waiting for their turn to speak or they're thinking about how they're going to respond.
And you can't listen to that conversation with yourself and somebody else.
And that's why people are forgetting the name.
And I would say that I remember the second time I got to meet President Bill Clinton...
And it was at a charity event.
And the first time was very, very brief.
But the second time, a couple years later, we're sitting at the same table, and he remembered my name.
And I was just like, okay, he was told who was sitting at this table.
I know.
And then he remembered the last conversation we had.
And okay, so nobody told him that.
And I was noticing when he was talking to me that I was like, you know...
I'm the memory guy.
I need to know how you're doing this.
And he tells me a story about his grandfather in Arkansas, getting the kids together, telling them stories.
But after that, he would quiz each one separately to find out if they were really paying attention.
And all these great ideas.
But anyway, when he was telling me this, there was a lot more important people in that room.
And I felt like I was the only one.
And I think his, you know, people say, you know, he's got great charisma, great connector, great communicator.
He's got a powerful presence, but I think his incredible memory and his powerful presence comes from being powerfully present.
And that's something we all could do.
And that's really what people want.
That's the greatest gift.
It's the presence that we have, you know, which is another word, happens to be another word for the word gift.
But being present with somebody.
And just notice, when we're talking about motivation and observation, we're just talking about motivation as just caring.
Because people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
And it's hard to show somebody you're going to care for their health, their family, their future, their finances, if you don't care enough just to remember their name.
And then the O is just observing or being present with them.
So just caring and being present.
But finally, the M stands for the mechanics.
And these are the tips, the tricks, the techniques that we teach on our podcast.
But one really fast one that anyone can do is just, if you want to remember names and faces, like walk into a room and meet 20 strangers and leave saying goodbye to every single one of them by name, remember this, be suave.
Just always be suave.
And again, I use acronyms because they're a simple mnemonic device like we learned back in school about the, you know, homes being the Great Lakes and so on.
When you're looking in the mirror before you...
The homes are the great...
Homes, yeah.
Oh yeah, Hudson.
Oh my goodness, that's right.
Michigan, Erie, and Superior.
Exactly.
Or ROYGBIV or all these little...
So these acronyms are very useful.
So remember be suave.
So next time you're at an event and look in the mirror...
You can check your makeup, your clothing, but say, I'm going to be suave.
The B stands for believe.
Because if you believe you can and believe you can't, either way you're right.
Henry Ford said that.
And the reason why I say that is just get rid of the negative self-talk.
A lot of people say, I'm horrible at remembering names.
But here's what you want to remember.
Your brain is like a supercomputer, and your self-talk is a program that will run.
So if you tell yourself you're not good at remembering names, you will not remember the name of the next person you meet because you programmed your supercomputer not to.
And I would say, I have a broken brain.
I have a horrible memory.
People say these all the time.
And I say, if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them.
If you argue for your limits, they're yours.
And here's the thing, even if you're not saying them out loud, internally, your self-talk, your mind is always eavesdropping on your self-talk.
So you want to keep it positive.
Or if you say to yourself, I don't have a great memory, just add a little word like yet at the end.
If people truly knew how powerful their mind was, they wouldn't say or think anything they didn't want to be true.
And it's not to say you have one negative thought and it ruins your life forever, just like eating that one donut's going to, but it's the consistency, it's the habit.
So the B is believe.
The E in B swab stands for exercise.
And I don't mean physical exercise, although we know people who are more physically active will do better on mental acuity, have better focus, memory.
But I mean practice because practice makes progress, right?
And so the bad news is it takes effort.
The good news, not as long as you think.
Like, I'm very good at remembering names, but after 30 or 60 days, once you know how to drive a car and learn how to type, it's something that you just do, right?
Because it becomes a habit.
So you want to practice this.
And finally, the suave, the S's, you say the name.
And it's very, very simple.
You meet somebody, and then you just repeat their name, right?
Ted, it's nice to meet you.
And the reason why you also say it is to make sure you observed it correctly.
A lot of times you're in an event and there's distractions, there's noise.
You don't want to have a 20-minute conversation with Ted and say goodbye, Ed.
So you say the name.
The U in suave stands for use it.
And use it three or four times in the context of the conversation.
But you don't want to abuse it.
Lisa, it's great to see you again.
Lisa, do you want to grab lunch?
Lisa, what do you want to talk?
That would be an abuse, right?
But use it one or two, three, four times in the context of the conversation.
So that's the U. The A is ask.
And this is a great technique for people...
You meet them and their name is a name you haven't heard before.
Right, exactly.
And what can you ask about someone's name?
How do you spell it?
Where is it from?
Who are you named after?
What does it mean?
I remember I was doing a training at the country's largest life insurance company.
About 100 people in the room.
Training director's name was Nankita.
And I was like, that's a beautiful name.
Where is it from?
How do you spell it?
What does it mean?
And she paused.
I was like, what does it mean?
And she looked at her co-workers and says, it means graceful falling waters.
And I was like, wow.
And based on the audience reaction, I was like, how long have you worked here?
Just like over four years.
Many good friends here yesterday at my wedding.
And I was like, raise your hand if you knew that's what Nikita's name meant.
And out of a hundred people, how many people raised their hand?
Not one person.
And remember, a name is the sweetest sound to a person's ears.
And so you could ask about a person's name.
And then finally, the V and the E. The V stands for visualize the person's name.
Meaning, I bet most people are better with faces than they are with names.
You go to somebody and you say, I remember your face, but I forgot your name.
You never go to somebody and say the opposite.
You never go to someone and say, I remember your name, but I forgot your face.
Who are you, though?
I remember hearts.
I know what your heart looked like.
Oh, that's true.
So if you're not...
That's kind of interesting.
We don't want to have that conversation maybe on my podcast as a cardiac surgeon to be able to recognize things.
But visually, we remember what we see because our visual cortex...
There's a Chinese proverb that goes, what I hear I forget, what I see I remember, what I do I understand.
What I hear I forget, I heard the name, I forgot it.
What I see I remember.
I saw the face, I remember the face, and what I do, going back to exercise, I understand.
So if you tend to remember what you see, try seeing what you remember.
So you meet somebody named David, and I just imagine a slingshot, just like hitting them on the nose for David and Goliath.
If a person's name is Bob, I imagine them bobbing for Apple.
If a person's name is Mary, imagine they're getting married, right?
If a person's name is Carol, Singing Christmas carols.
First name is John.
You fill in the blanks, right?
When you meet 30 people, though, you're going to have some repetition of names.
And you don't have enough time to ask them what their name means.
And you're doing this all in half an hour with 30 people.
So you can't do all that.
So the best thing about this is when we're talking about these seven things, it doesn't have to be all seven, even if it's just two or three things.
And the goal is not to be perfect.
I'm not perfect.
I don't have a photographic memory.
The goal is definitely progress.
And so, taking a split second, and you're right, if somebody has the same name, two people have the name Bob, I'll use apples for both.
And it's a mnemonic device, and you know what it is?
It's to overcome what I call the six-second syndrome.
When somebody tells you anything, a conversation, a phone number, a PIN number, a name, you have six seconds to do something with that information.
Otherwise, it's just gone in the ether.
And what this allows you to do is put your awareness both on the name and on the person.
So even when it doesn't work, it kind of still works because it puts your attention on the information you need to remember.
And once you know the person's name, then the picture disappears.
It's like a bridge, a temporary hold, if you will, until the true information gets encoded from your short-term to your long-term memory.
And then finally, the E in suave stands for end.
And what does that mean?
It means exactly what I talked about, to be able to end the conversation saying their name.
Because if you walk into a room of strangers and leave saying goodbye using their name, they're all going to remember you.
And that's a standout skill.
More questions after the break.
You mentioned photographic memory.
I've always been fascinated by the phenomenon.
I don't know how real it is, but I've read stories of Russian experiments where they visualize themselves walking down these long book stacks, basically, of their memory, taking the second left, and then on the right there's a car, and there's a license plate of the car, and it's like looking at the phone book and looking at the answer.
I'm sure you have looked into it.
Can you explain to us what makes them special?
What allows their brains to do that?
And what allows you to approximate that from the external world?
But it's not quite the same.
That's a great question.
So an eidetic memory, there's a phenomenon...
What's it called?
Eidetic memory.
Eidetic.
And so when people say that people have a photographic memory, I don't think it's possible.
This is me, my experience of 25 years of teaching this.
I haven't been able to duplicate that with anybody.
I feel like...
That, sure, genetics and biology plays a role.
And the good news is, you know, the science is saying it's about one-third of our memories predetermined by genetics and biology, but two-thirds is in our control, the things you talk about on your show.
A good brain diet, getting rid of negative thoughts, you know, movement and exercise, nutrients, brain nutrients, a positive peer group is good for your brain, a clean environment is great for your brain, sleep, very important for your brain, brain protection.
A lot of people, concussions, traumatic brain, wear a helmet, new learnings.
In order to foster neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, new brain cell curations in your hippocampus, new connections.
It requires two things, novelty and nutrition.
Stress management.
We know chronic stress shrinks the brain, right?
If you're always...
Cortisol, adrenaline.
It's great fight or flight, but not great if you need to take a test or remember someone's name.
So, you know, there's hardware and then there's software.
And so all those 10 things are like the hardware of your brain, the anatomy.
The software are the things that we teach.
And the big takeaway from this conversation, I hope everyone walks away from, is this.
You want to take nouns and turn them into verbs, meaning that a lot of people say, I don't have a great memory.
Have implies it's a noun.
It's something you have, right?
I don't have focus today.
I don't have motivation.
I don't have creativity to write on my blog.
Those aren't things you have.
Those are things you do.
Because when you make it a have, you're at the effect.
You're reacting.
You just hope that today I have some magical power.
As opposed to a recipe, because when you turn something into a verb, it gives you agency again, where you have the power.
It's the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat.
If you look at a thermometer on the wall, its only function is to react to the environment.
And as human beings, we're a thermometer occasionally.
We react to the economy.
We react to how someone treats us.
But when we really want to take our life to the next level, spending more time identifying with the thermostat, because the thermostat doesn't react to the environment, It sets the environment, right?
That's what leaders do.
It sets a goal.
It sets a vision.
The environment rises to be able to meet that.
When it comes to photographic memory, there's something called HSAM, Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory.
And about a dozen people have been shown to have this where they could, you say, on May 21st at 8 p.m.
I've done shows with them.
Right.
I get them a little bit because, and you mentioned this in your mom's Technique for people's names.
You put some emotional hook to it.
You do.
Because the key to long-term memory is information by itself is forgettable.
We're drowning information right now.
The only thing that we remember are things that touch us emotionally.
Because information times emotion becomes a long-term memory.
And we forget, like think about what was the primary emotion we felt back in school.
The primary emotion, like most people feel...
Fear, probably.
Right.
Most people are either scared and confused or they're bored.
Bored, yeah.
Most students would say bored.
And boredom, on a scale of zero to ten, emotionally, boredom is a zero.
But if we talk about information times emotion as a long-term memory, if boredom is a zero, anything times zero is zero.
So you wonder why you forgot the periodic table.
You know, or all the things that we learned back in school.
And I would say that there's no such thing as a good or bad memory.
There's just a trained memory and an untrained memory.
It's never going to be perfect, nor would we want it to be perfect.
It's useful sometimes to forget.
But we have this greatness inside of us.
I always tell people that your life is like an egg.
That if an egg is broken by an outside force...
Life ends.
But if it's broken by an inside force, life begins.
And all great things begin on the inside.
And everyone listening has greatness and genius inside.
We just weren't taught how to unlock it.
See, I could have said goodbye to Jim Quick saying he's a wonderful memory expert, but instead he's really a philosopher.
Deep wisdom makes you incredibly popular for folks who know what popular should be.
So congratulations on all your success.
You've got a fantastic podcast which is doing superbly well.
