Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0424: Using memory palaces for past knowledge and skills

Episode Date: October 22, 2015

Vic asks about a method for recalling past experiences, knowledge, and skills, such that they could be recalled in an interview. I give my strategy for organizing a memory palace by subject. 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 424. 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. Today's question is from Vic. Hello Timothy. My name is Vic and I'm from the UK. My question to you is, how can someone use a memory palace to ensure that they remember and can call upon all the skills, knowledge and experiences they've gained over the years as examples when answering interview questions? Thank you very much for answering my question. Thank you, Vic, for the question, and thanks for leaving a recorded question. It seems there's been a shortage of those lately. A lot of people have been sending emails and leaving written questions,

but for everyone listening, I get to the recorded questions first, so if you have a serious question for the podcast, I'll probably address it right away on the podcast if you leave a recorded message like Vic did. Now, Vic, a lot of people ask me questions about remembering more of their life. And I think that as with anything in life, it all comes down to your purpose for remembering it. And so the fact that you've mentioned the thing about interviews gives me some perspective on how to answer this question. Because the purpose for which you're wanting to remember this stuff is very important. Now, keeping in mind your general purposes,

I would start by creating an outline as if you were writing a paper about your own life and your experiences and things like that. Now, don't write the paper, but create an outline on paper or on your, you know, in a computer or something. Just sketch an outline of how it would be if you were to write a paper. For example, the first section would be about your education, the second section about your skills, the third section about your professional experiences, or something like that, just outlined and categorized in that way so that it would be a coherent paper and it would be organized in a thoughtful way. What you're going to do is you're going to organize your memory palace that way. Instead of organizing it chronologically, you're going to

organize it by topic in whatever way you think would make sense if you were writing it down on a resume or something like that. Once you have that outline, you're going to create broad palaces for the broad areas. For example, a different building for each school you've been to, and a different palace for your different categories of skills and different professional experiences at different companies. So those are the large palaces. And those are easy for you to list because you now have them in separate palaces and you can just name the skills or the schools or whatever by naming your different palaces. You can think of it in that way. Then within those palaces, you're going to put specific things that you've learned or experienced.

For example, if you have a building for your physical skills, let's say you have a list of physical skills that you want to remember and experiences within those that you want to be able to recall, one of the rooms within that palace might include some stories about your experiments in Tango or something like that, where you have all of them listed in there and then you can pull out the stories just by going around the palace instead of searching your mind abstractly. That's the advantage of using a memory palace because you're actually thinking in terms of physical space instead of just racking your brain to try to think of examples and stories and things like that. So that's how I would do it generally, Vic, and I'd be willing to work with you

if you just want to shoot me an email and give you some more ideas on specifically how to implement this in your situation. For everyone listening, what do you want to learn or memorize? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.