Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0417: Memorizing the Cisco Packet Tracer commands and steps

Episode Date: October 13, 2015

Frankie asks for help with memorizing the Cisco Packet Tracer commands and steps. I suggest a few actions to take in order to get a good start on this project. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 417. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Frankie asked a question in an email about remembering the Cisco Packet Tracer commands and steps. So this is a computer network simulation program that allows students to experiment with network behavior and ask what-if type questions. That's just kind of what I've come up with as looking up what this is, the Cisco Packet Tracer commands and steps. So I have two

main suggestions for you, Frankie, and as is often the case, this isn't something that I really know about. This is just the approach that I personally would take if I were taking on this project myself. First of all, you're going to be using mnemonics to learn a lot of these commands. Many of them can be learned quite intuitively. For example, src underscore addr specifies the source address for the packet trace.

So you have source address, SRC underscore ADDR. So again, that sounds kind of intuitive, but what I would do is I would still create a memory palace to help you remember certain things, like that this one has SRC underscore at the beginning, as a lot of the commands will. So you could create a memory palace that's organized by the beginning of the command. So you might imagine that the src underscore commands, all of them that start that way, are visually happening all in one room of your house. And you place them in different places in one room in your house. And then all the ones that start with dest underscore all happen in a different room in your house. And that way when you think

of a command you can easily remember which room it happens in your imagination and quickly recall how to start the command based on the room. But in some ways that's the easy answer and I'm going to tell you that a big part of this is simply going to be a matter of being proactive and practicing these commands, practicing what you're trying to memorize in a meaningful way to maximize your time and accelerate your absorption, even regardless of the mnemonics. So what I mean by that is finding a way to quiz on these so that you're actually learning them proactively rather than just learning them on the job or when you're doing whatever assignments you happen to have. And since typing is the way that you're going to be using these commands, I recommend choosing a review method that has you typing the commands because,

you know, you're not just picking out flashcards, you're actually typing them as you will in real life situations. So you might just make a quiz. I recommend Quizlet because you can do it, it's mobile friendly and it's in the cloud. You can just access whatever flashcards you create on the go as well and when I say flashcards I just mean sets of information that you can review and you can review them typing which is one of the main ways to review using Quizlet but really any platform where you'll be typing out the answers it'll give you a prompt and you type out what it's gonna be and whenever you find that you have trouble with a particular command you're gonna review that one more often than others.

And Quizlet makes this easy with the star function. You just star a certain fact or flashcard or whatever it is and it'll give you that one more often. Or you can review all the starred cards together in sort of a subset. So, I mean, you could easily learn a hundred of these commands in one or two hours when you combine these two things together. Many people waste a lot of time simply for not doing something proactive like this, putting together a method for them to learn things independent of what they're studying.

So really, I mean, a small investment like that of just a couple of hours of working on this will pay off big because after just a couple of weeks of review, you can probably remember these indefinitely and never have the trouble with remembering these commands that some people will continue to have for months until they're really integrated into the way that they work. Those are my suggestions, Frankie, and for anyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.