Your Transformation Station - 36. Assigning Meaning to Information and I Don't Handle Complements Well

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

"How can you create a transformation in others if there's no transformation in yourself?" (Greg Favazza, podcast) host and creator interviews (International Man of Memory, Chester Santos). Chester teaches us how to assign meaning to information using landmarks and mental markers. Greg is invited to play a memory game, tune in to find out how he fares at remembering the silly story.   PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com⁠⁠ Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/apple⁠⁠ Spotify: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/spotify⁠⁠ RSS: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/rss⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/youtube⁠⁠ SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Facebook: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/facebook⁠⁠ - Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/instagram⁠⁠ - TikTok: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/tiktok⁠⁠ - Twitter: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/x⁠⁠ - Pinterest: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/pinterest⁠⁠ - Linkedin: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/linkedin⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Coming up on your transformation station. Without you even trying to commit that to memory, right? You wouldn't even need to try to commit that to memory. So there is this psychological aspect to human memory, realizing that we can harness that, we can take advantage of it, and we can apply it to things that would be very useful to remember, names, presentations, facts figures for business, exam material. Welcome to your transformation station. This is your transformation station.

We're tapping in to surpassing expectations from the most successful people in the modern day and honing in a new foresight, methodologies, and clairvoyance you never knew. This is your transformation station with your host, Greg Favaza. The definition of success. If I could go back, there's not many things that. I would go back for it. What do you do when you lose your purpose? It's okay to struggle.

It's okay that you're not okay. I am your host, Greg Favaza. Together, we will go on a journey. This show is all about surpassing our internal dialogue, rediscovering your true identity, honing new foresight. We have a chance to make the world a better place for our children. start living in the example today and become your future self tomorrow.

If you can leave our viewers with some good advice to follow, what would you let them know? These things that you're afraid to do? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to your transformation station. It's Greg Favaza. This week we have Chester Santos. He's known as the International Man of Memory. What an experience that was for him and I to sit back have a great conversation, take in some new understanding on how our own memory works.

If you're not excited, get excited because this is information that we already know, but we don't really take into the account on how important it is for us to be consciously aware of the habits that we currently do. When it comes to being a better spokesman, a better speaker, a better presenter. This is an episode you really want to listen to. We're tapping in to surpassing expectations from the most successful people in the modern day and honing in a new foresight, methodologies, and clairvoyance you never knew. This is your transformation station with your host, Greg Favaza.

Chester, I appreciate you coming on the show. Welcome to your transformation station. Thank you for having me, Greg. I'm excited to talk with you today. Awesome. Me too. I've seen your work. I've seen what you can do. And I'm really excited to have you. Like, I'm a big fan. How did you gain your title, The International Man of Memory? The International Man of Memory. Well, first off, I started out in my career from winning. I won the United States National Memory. championship. And after that, I wanted to go into training other people in the techniques that I needed to master in order to win that competition. I wanted to go into training people around the world in how they can learn the same techniques and apply those techniques to become more successful

in their career, personal life, and also in school for those people that need to take various types of exams. And when turning the United States memory championship title, trying to leverage that into a business, there are a lot of things involved. And part of that is a branding marketing strategy. So I came up with this idea of branding myself as the international man of memory. I just thought that it sounded like a cool kind of. cool and interesting thing to go by that might get people's attention. And I then hired a branding

team, which involved a lot of different things. They created a website for me around this theme International Man of Memory, hired a stylist to come up with a look. That's why I'm always wearing different hats like this. The stylist recommended that as part of the international man of memory look. They created a theme song for me. And I've just since then, built up that brand over the last 10 plus years. You've been on CNN, ABC, PBS, NBC, CBS, BBC, and I think the Science Channel. Did you know this is what you wanted to do? Well, you know, how I got into memory training, you know, was really random.

I just happened to be flipping channels one night. I caught a segment on ABC's 2020. There was a segment on the United States National Memory Championship. When I saw it, it just sparked my interest because growing up, I would often get the comment from people. People would say, wow, you have a really good memory. So when I saw that US Memory Championship on TV, I thought, okay, maybe I can do well at this.

People say I have a good memory. but I quickly found out when I looked into what the best people in the country were scoring in various events, they were memorizing hundreds of names, hundreds of computer generated random digits, decks, of playing cards, poetry, all this just a huge amount of information in just a matter of minutes with, you know, near 100% accuracy. I quickly found out that although I was above average, I wasn't on that level. So that's when I started doing research. okay, how can I magnify, how can I improve my memory from where it's currently at? I did a bunch of research experimented with a lot of different techniques.

I found what seemed to be working best for me personally, stuck to training myself in that small subset of techniques until eventually I was able to win the United States Memory Championship. And since then, as I mentioned earlier, I've gone on to train other people around the world now in more than 30 different countries I've been booked to give presentations on memory skills. That's really remarkable, Chester. Let's go into how the training went for you during your experience as you were at your younger self. Yeah, so I read a lot, you know, just about every different book on the subject I could find. I did a lot of online research as well. There are some techniques that I found just

were not working for me at all. In terms of names, for instance, in some books they say, write the name. Imagine that you're writing the name on their forehead with a giant marker. Just say the name to yourself over and over again, you know, three to five times. But things like that, if they work at all, they're only effective in the short term. So the point here, I'll get into names later on if there's time and if you're interested. but what I really wanted to address there is that there were techniques that I were finding that I just didn't think were very effective. So I stuck to the ones that I felt worked best for me.

And later on when I decided I wanted to train other people around the world, I started doing even deeper research and found that, found out that all of these techniques, at least a lot of the most effective ones, originated from the ancient Greek. at a certain point in history, you had to develop a powerful memory. And you were not considered well educated at all if you hadn't developed some really extraordinary memory skills. Keep in mind that at one point in history,

that's how information was passed on, right? It was passed on orally. Storytime, yes. Yeah. So you really had to retain information that's when all of these techniques were developed. And what I did was synthesize all of this stuff that I was reading about in more modern books, websites, and then took into consideration what I was learning from the history of the origin of these techniques.

And then I developed my own curriculum, basically, my own system, my own way of teaching other people how to learn the very, very important principles and then apply those to their career and personal life. And what I found out that is when you boil it all down, there's really only three main principles that will apply no matter what information type you might be trying to learn and no matter what specific memory technique you end up using. Are you referring to the common known as the memory Palace. That's one of the techniques that the ancient that originated. So nowadays, some people know that as the memory palace technique. But really, again, that it originated with the ancient Greeks. It was known as the method of loci, L-O-C-I, meaning location. It was also used a little bit

later in history by the Romans. The Roman orders were able to give speeches hours and length from memory without any notes. So this technique has also been known as. the Roman room method, right? But some people refer to it as you just did as the memory palace technique. Those are three different names for the same thing. It involves using locations from your environment to store imagery that reminds you of what you want to remember. So what you do is you later take a mental stroll back through your environment, back through these locations. The images that you stored there will remind you later of what it is.

you're trying to remember. So that's a specific technique. But again, before you start to learn those types of techniques, there are really some main principles that you want to have mastered first. And then you will apply them to the memory palace. And there's a lot of other things you can do. But one of the main principles is visualization. So you can't really, you know, come up with these images and place them at locations

until you've really mastered your ability to turn any type of information into an image or series of images, right? So that's a whole thing of itself, a whole separate, really principle that you need to master. So that's the first thing, whatever you want to remember, whether it's a name. So Mike, I might turn it into a microphone, the name Alice. I might picture a white rabbit because that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, right? So I'm just giving some examples of the names there. But no matter the information type, try to visualize the information, and it becomes so much easier to remember.

I'm trying to relate this almost to character development. I mean, we just can't go out and start living our value proposition or our niche, but we almost got to have our very own principles, our morals, our ethics. And then we can start to understand what we want out of life. is that kind of what you're referring to as far as memory, we have to have this standard that we hold ourselves to memorizing what we choose to memorize? Sure. You can make a connection there like that.

So in other words, learning some guiding principles, right? Internalizing those guiding principles and then let those guide your actions. So once you've mastered the main memory principles, you will then let them guide though. you will then let them guide you to commit certain information to memory. So the second principle is involving additional senses from there. So we first, we're visualizing, right? Second thing you want to do is try to get more and more senses involved in this imagery. So don't just see the white rabbit.

Maybe you smell the white rabbit or you imagine that you're touching the white rabbit, right? involve more senses, you're activating more areas of your brain and you're building more and more connections in your mind to the information. So then that makes it easier to retrieve the information later on. For those that are struggling with those abilities to visualize or see what we're talking about, how can they work on that process? Yeah. So this can be trained. You can develop it with training and practice. So when I started out, the imagery that I was seeing wasn't crystal clear. A lot of times I was really forcing myself to visualize, but the imagery was kind of blurry in my mind, right? What you're going to find is that if you will just be consistent in your practice

over time, that imagery is going to be created in your mind much more quickly, and you're going to start to see that imagery in your mind more clearly. So it's something visualization is something that can be trained. So you'll learn how to visualize. You'll learn how to get more and more senses involved. In other words, add to that imagery, make it more, even more vivid, more realistic by involving those additional senses. And then the third and final principle is going to be while you are seeing and experiencing

all of that in your mind, you want to make it crazy, unusual, extraordinary in some way. all right so you might might want to make that microphone a gigantic microphone or a multi-colored gigantic microphone because when things are strange unusual extraordinary in some way we tend to automatically remember that stuff pretty easily right there is a psychological aspect of human memory Greg right now wherever you're at in the studio if while we're doing this interview, if an elephant suddenly crashed into the studio, if it happened right now and started to spray water all over you, you would probably remember that for the rest of your life and always tell that story. You're never going to believe this. I was interviewing this memory guy for my podcast.

And during the interview, an elephant just crashed into my studio started spraying water on me, right? Without you even trying to commit that to memory, right? You wouldn't even need to try to commit that to memory. So there is this psychological aspect to human memory, realizing that we can harness that, we can take advantage of it, and we can apply it to things that would be very useful to remember, names, presentations, fax figures for business, exam material, right? So you want to apply that principle to the imagery, to the additional senses. You end up with three main things to keep in minds. And when you combine all of that, just, you know, right away you're going to, you're going to notice a huge improvement in your ability to remember just about anything at all.

When you're at a store or just living your daily life, do you remember more average details about your day-to-day life than somebody else? Or is it something you have to do consciously? Yeah. So really, I would say probably just average or maybe above average, what I am really my field is developing skills that, you know, anyone can develop these skills, but you would have to consciously apply it, right? You would need to think about using the technique. However, what is important to point out, though, is it might become a habit, right? So you can, you can get into the habits. So you might automatically be using these techniques, right? to, for instance, remembering names, you just get into the habit of applying what I'm teaching you

when you're meeting people at a conference or wedding, whatever type of function it might be, right? So as it becomes a habit, it's more automatic, but there is a conscious thought to use the technique. So without the techniques, I'm probably only average or above average. Yeah. I see what you're saying. So it's a conscious thought in the beginning as far as. for an example, like working on my posture, I will, I would tell myself I walk through a doorway. Every time I walk through it, I will relax my shoulders.

And each time I go through the doorway, I'm like, all right, relax your shoulders. And now it becomes unconscious if I stay consistent. You got it. Exactly. That's very much what I was talking about. Can you talk about the championship a little bit, just to bring our listeners up to speed? for those that don't know who you are. You won that back in 2008.

Is that right? Yeah, that is correct. I won the United States Memory Championship back in 2008. So it's an annual competition that is held in various places. It used back when I was competing, it was held in New York City, just about every year. Now, at certain points, it was held in Pennsylvania. Now the finals are held at MIT, the University, Massachusetts Institute of, of technology. That's where the finals are held now. So it's been in various locations over the

years. One day annual competition and we memorize one event is memorizing the longest sequence of computer generated random digits that you can memorize in five minutes. I memorized, well, my official, like in competition record was 132 digit sequence memorized in five minutes. we memorize hundreds of names and faces in about 15 minutes. There's a 50-line poem that we have to memorize in 15 minutes. One of the most popular events as far as for people watching in the audience. And as far, it used to be, it's been televised over the years. So one year it was on Science Channel televised actually.

But one of the more interesting events is memorizing a deck of cards. I guess because people relate that to maybe poker or card games, Vegas or something. I'm not sure why exactly, but people find it pretty interesting. So it's the fastest time to memorize a deck of playing cards. They shuffle up a deck of cards. You memorize it. When you're done memorizing it, you will stop the clock where the judge in front of you stops the clock. And they will then give you a second deck that's brand new with the wrapper on, new deck order.

right and you will have a maximum of five minutes to arrange that second deck from memory into the same order as the first deck that you memorized and then they will place the two decks side by side and flip to make sure that all of the cards match. The memorization time for me, my official in competition time best score was just around two minutes, a little under two minutes. In practice, I was able to do it in about a minute and 30 seconds. But the scores keep on going up and up every single year as they do in physical sports, right? So a world record and, you know, track and field from 10 years ago is quite different. You know, the scores keep, the limits keep on being pushed, I guess.

So now in terms of memory, the United States Memory Championship, there are guys that can memorize a deck of cards and undoing. even under 30 seconds now. I was looking at that. But yeah. Yeah. So it's just really incredible what the human mind is capable of with the right techniques and just a little bit of training and practice.

That's an overview, I guess, of the U.S. Memory Championship. Really what I would like people to take from that, you know, just the general listeners, I guess, general audience is that this merely demonstrates what's possible. And I think it shows that everyone is capable of doing more with their memory than they probably think that they can currently do. It's just training practice. Agreed. It really comes down to those habits. I would like to tailor just a few minutes towards the military population as far as memorizing a creed.

an entire page, maybe it can consist of about 500 different words to a thousand, what are some steps for those individuals that can really maximize their time to memorizing something like that? Yeah, so this would apply again to memorizing a creed. It could be memorizing Bible verses. It could be memorizing poetry as we do in the United States Memory Championship, right? or famous quotes, what you've got to learn first is take those three main principles, and I'll quickly review them. It was visualization turning things into visuals, involving additional senses from there, and then using your creativity and imagination to make all of that that you're

experiencing crazy, unusual, extraordinary in some way, right? You want to first apply those principles to being able to create a narrative from random information. So I'd like to go through an exercise using you as a guinea pig, Greg, and just do your best. It doesn't really matter how it goes. And really the point will be also for the listeners of the podcast to follow along so that they can start to develop these new skills and be able to apply them in their career, personal life and, you know, school.

So we're going to start out with random words so you understand how to create these narratives and apply the principle. So the random word list I'm going to give you is going to be monkey, iron, rope, kite, house, paper, shoe, worm, envelope, pencil, river, rock, tree, cheese, and dollar, right? That's the pretty long random list of words. Now, how most people would approach that, they would just write it out over and over again, right? They would read the list over and over again or just recite it to themselves over and over until they feel that it drills into their head, right? And that's also how people would approach something like memorizing 500 words of a creed, right? They would just wrote memory, right?

When you do that, you're not making the most efficient use of the brain to encode the information into your memory. What you want to do instead is keep those principles in mind that I talked about and use them to help you to create a story. All right. So I'm going to guide you through a story here. It's just going to take like two or three minutes. People listening can fall along. The first word I had given you was monkey. So what I want for you to do, Greg, is just visualize a monkey. That's it. Okay. This monkey is dancing around. It's making monkey noises. whatever a monkey would sound like I'm working on the monkey impression.

The point here is to see and hear that monkey in your mind, okay? You've got the monkey. The monkey now picks up a gigantic iron, all right? Like you would iron your clothes with because that was the second word that I had given you. So just see that playing around in your head with your eyes opened or closed, whatever you prefer. The monkey is dancing around with this gigantic iron. It starts to fall, but a rope,

attaches itself to the iron. Maybe even feel the rope. Maybe it feels sort of rough, okay? Interact with it. Okay? Maybe it feels rough. Now you look up the rope. You see that the other end of the rope is attached to a kite.

The kite is flying around in the air. Maybe imagine trying to touch that kite. You're reaching up trying to touch the kite. Okay. The kite now crashes into the side of a house. Really see it. in your mind smash into this house. You notice that the house is completely covered in paper.

For some strange reason, it's completely covered in paper. That was the next random word I had given you. See the paper. A shoe appears out of thin air now, appears at a thin air. Really see that shoe. It's walking on the paper. Maybe it's messing it up as it's walking on it. See that shoe.

The shoe smells pretty badly. So you decide to investigate and see why. You look inside of the shoe and you find a little worm crawling around. See that smelly worm, okay? The worm now jumps out of the shoe and into an envelope. Or envelope, maybe it's going to mail itself or something. I don't know. But envelope was next.

A pencil appears magically out of nowhere and it starts to write all over that envelope. Maybe it's addressing it, that pencil. The pencil now jumps into a room. river and there's a huge splash like you wouldn't expect when it hits the river. Okay. The river you notice is crashing up against a giant rock. It's crashing up against a giant rock. The rock flies out of the river and it crashes into a tree.

Really see it smash into this tree. The tree you notice is growing cheese. You probably haven't seen a tree like that. This one's growing cheese. and out of each piece of cheese shoots a dollar. A dollar shoots out of there. The last word was dollar. Okay.

That was it. Now I'm going to run through this again very quickly, though. And your job is to simply replay through this little story that you've created in your mind. And your listeners can follow along. Play through the story as well. We started off with the monkey. The monkey was dancing around with what? It was an iron, right?

What then attached itself to the iron? It was a rope, right? The other end of the rope was attached to what? It was attached to a kite. Yeah, you got it. The kite crashed into the house. Yeah. What was the house covered in?

It was covered in paper. Yep. What walked on that paper? It was a shoe. It was a shoe walking on it, right? What was crawling in that shoe? It was a worm. You got it.

The worm then jumped into what? It was an envelope. you got it. Something wrote on the envelope. What was it? It was a pencil. You got it. What did the pencil jump into?

It was the river, right? The river was crashing up against what? It was a rock. Yeah, well, that rock flew into the tree. The tree was growing something. What was it? It was growing cheese. Yeah.

And what came out of the cheese? It was a dollar. Right. So now you should be able to recall the, the entire list of words. Did I lose you there? Did I go out there? And you went out for a second, but you're back now.

So I put my phone on airplane mode and also do not disturb, but somehow a call was coming in. I don't know what's going on with that. But anyways, so now we're going to see if you and your listeners can recall the list of words by simply replaying through the story in your mind. Each major object that you see in the story will give you the next word. So do your best. Take your time and people listening can see how many they get right. All right.

So we're looking at monkey, iron, rope, kite, be house, paper, shoe, worm, envelope, and pencil, river, rock, tree, cheese, dollar. Excellent. Great job, Greg. Awesome, man. Under pressure, too. I appreciate that. Really well done, man.

It's not easy like when I just bring that on you as the interviewer. But you did so well that I'd like to see if you can do it backwards. Just try your best. And, you know, people can also attempt this. listening. So we're looking at dollar, cheese, tree, rock, river, pencil, envelope. Then we're, oh yeah, then it'll be worm, boot, or shoe, yes. Yep. Paper, house, kite, rope, then iron monkey. You got it, man. Great job backwards as well. Really nice. Well, well, well done. Well done.

I appreciate it. So very well done. I think that your listeners following along, attempting the exercise, will also get most, if not all of them, correct. That technique there is called the story method. Okay. It's just one of many techniques that memory champions like myself use to pull off what at first might seem like, you know,

crazy feats of memory, but it's really just using the right technique and training and practice. So as you mentioned earlier, I've been on all these different TV shows over the years. They asked me to come on, perform some memory feet, and then give tips for viewers at home as to how they can improve their own memory. There's nothing different about my brain at all compared to anyone else's. I've just learned these techniques that you can see right away are very effective. So once you master things like the story method, you're going to notice an improvement in your memory over time, even in general,

even independent of using the technique, but that's if you force your brain to go through this process of commit things to memory, recall them. Commit things to memory, recall them, all right? If you do that, that ability is going to strengthen over time, okay? Because the brain is very trainable. The more you force your brain to perform a particular function over and over again, the more you're saying to your brain, hey, I need to be able. to remember things. So your brain makes itself better at doing it. Okay. The brain's incredibly trainable. Now, we started along this whole path because you had asked about memorizing the creeds, right? And this could be, you know, applied to again, famous quotes. You want to,

first, I would master the story method with things like random words, right? Then when you have lines of a creed, you're going to memorize it line by line. and take each line and turn it into a little mini story like we did there. But then that becomes, that story becomes one line of the creed. You're going to put that story then along locations of a journey or memory palace, which we kind of talked about earlier briefly hit on, locations from your environment. So what happens is, for instance, like if you're using your residence,

You open the front door, that monkey's at the front door, and that entire story is stored there. That would be an entire line of the creed. Then you're going maybe to your refrigerator. Let's say that's the second location of your memory, palace, or journey. There's going to be a mini story there that gives you the entire second line of the creed. Okay. So that's it. If you go through just 10 lines, 15, 20 locations of your house,

you've got 20 lines of the entire creed memorized, right? You can't just jump right into memorizing a whole creed, right? You've got to master each thing very systematically. So you start with playing around with those three principles. Apply it to a very simple technique like the story method. Then you can start to learn things maybe like the method of LOSI memory palace technique. Like I've noticed for myself as far as I'm able to connect new information with old information that I've already learned.

Is that kind of what you're speaking in terms of understanding our residents? Because I can look at the floor layout of my place and I can just see everything inside my head. Is that what you're referring to? You got it. So that's what memory always comes down to. So you have something familiar that you already know like your residence and you're connecting new imagery, right? New information there. So you're using something that you already know to learn something new.

That is what memory and learning will always come down to. No matter if you're using my techniques or, you know, no matter your approach, when you're learning something new, you will always be trying to create a connection in your mind between what you're trying to learn and something that you already know. So what this means is, the more that you already know, the easier it becomes, comes to learn new things. So you should fill, you should actually fill your brain up with as much information as possible. So it's the opposite of what a lot of people think and a lot of people use this excuse. I hear this a lot in my presentations, you know, I don't want to fill my brain

with all of this stuff. I, you know, I just want to selectively learn all of this other stuff. I don't really need to know it. Why would I fill my brain with fill my brain up with this stuff, this information. They feel like they're overcrowding their mind, uh, with things. But that is, uh, that doesn't actually, there's no reality to that. That way. People just use that as an excuse basically to be lazy. Oh, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to learn that stuff. I don't want to over, over clutter my head. That's not the brain and memory works. And in fact, it becomes easier to learn. things if you're filling your brain with information, it doesn't become more difficult. So it's,

it's definitely the opposite of what most people are thinking. No, I agree with that completely. I have to definitely work on myself. I've always thought, like, the more I know, the more I hate about life. So it's like, let's not think that way. Let's be more optimistic. You can use it. You can use it in a positive way. You can use information in a positive way. You can make that choice. Yeah. Can we use this? information and can we apply it to learning a new language? Is that possible? So yeah, I'll give you a taste for a taste for basically how it's going to work. That would be awesome. Let's say I will give you an example in, let's use Russian,

because that's what I've been learning recently is Russian actually. If you're learning new words in a foreign language, you want to apply all that stuff. Again, those three main principles are very important that we covered earlier. You want to apply that to creating imagery, involving other senses and things, but connect this imagery that you're building to the new foreign language word that you're learning. So in Russian, the word for fork that you would eat with, a fork is Vilka. So you might commit that to memory by imagining that you take a fork, okay, and with this fork, you poke some veal.

So you're poking some veal, all right, with the fork. And right when you poke the veal with the fork, a crow pops out and kind of scares you and is going, ca, ca, ca, the crow is calling, right? So what you've got right there is veal caw. So when you have that crazy imagery locked in, now you're learning language and you want to say, okay, what was that, what was the word,

I was studying. I know one of my new vocabulary words was fork. Ah, fork, vealca, it comes right back to you. It sounds a little bit crazy maybe, but trust me and how powerful and effective it really is. Using that and combining it with, say, like a memory palace, you can learn 100 words a day, definitely in a foreign language. I think, I really believe that that's very manageable. But, you know, whatever you're comfortable with. Maybe you want to do just 20 a day or 10 a day. But just following that strategy, you can learn a lot of new words. And if you were to go to memory school.net and sign up for the online school,

you're going to learn a lot of Korean. But then that's just to help you develop the skills. Then once you wanted to apply those later, you could to Spanish, you know, French, whatever language you wanted to. That's really interesting on how you just played that out perfectly. From previous students, had they mentioned anything about more optimism in their daily life? Because it's just the way you describe this memory process,

I just feel more enlightened inside myself. Listen, you described that. Oh, well, thank you for letting me know that. I love to hear that it's helping people. I'm glad that you've gotten a lot out of just, the little bit that we've covered today. It's the most rewarding part of my career. It's really the coolest thing about what I do.

I love getting emails from people saying, hey, I took your workshop, your online course, and now I thought I couldn't remember names. Now I'm remembering everybody at a meeting and things like this. And, you know, oh, my kid, I forced my kid to go through your program. He didn't want to, but now he's so much more enthusiastic about learning and his grades are so much better now. I love getting those type, you know, hearing those types of comments.

It's really, it's really rewarding. Memory is a fundamental part of learning. So when you improve your ability to remember things, it's going to have a positive impact on so many different areas of your life. It's going to play a huge role in your personal and professional development. I just have a couple more questions before I let you go. Yep. Suppose you were to contact.

your younger self and share the information that you learned today, what would you let your younger self know? And how do you think he will react to that? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the the lessons that I've learned over time, get started. So if there's something that you're interested in, just get started right away, like today. As soon as you feel that interest, get started because, you know, there's a quote that I've put on, I've put up sometimes in various places, my social media accounts. And that is you don't have to, you don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to become great, right, or to be great. And it's absolutely true. So I wish I would have, I would tell my younger self, I wish I would have gotten started

earlier, basically, in not only developing memory skills, but a lot of other things that I appreciate now in terms of my skills, in terms of my professional, personal development. I'm amazed and grateful for what I've been able to do, but I wish I would have started on my journey earlier. And I think it was just, well, I'm not sure why, but again, just get started and you'll start, you know, you'll start along that path. Esther, how can our listeners get in touch with you? Yeah, so really, if you want to learn more about memory skills development, the best thing is to go to memory school.net.

Use the coupon code TS for your listeners. So first 50 people won't have to even pay any enrollment fee. you'll just pay for monthly access as long as you want to. You can cancel at any time, just like any other membership program. And if you want to follow me on social media, the one that I keep it up with the most is Instagram. So I'm Chester J. Santos on Instagram. And for any sort of professional connections, if you're interested in booking me for your company or some sort of corporate event or conference, get in touch with me or even just connect now on LinkedIn

in case something might come up in the future, LinkedIn as well. Awesome. I will link all that in the show notes. One last question. Is there anything you would like to say before I let you go? Really, I just want to, I guess that last question, drill in that last question that you had asked me and that I really just encourage people, if something interests you get started right away and just take small steps.

you don't have to invest a lot of time in developing new skills. What's more important is consistency. So you choose, even if it's just 10 minutes a week, that's it, 10 minutes total for the week. If you do that every week, over time, you're going to notice a dramatic improvement in whatever area it is that you're trying to develop yourself in. So get started and be consistent over time. Excellent, Chester. I really do appreciate your time. And I thank you for coming on your transformation station.

Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. You've been listening to your transformation station. Rediscovering your true identity and purpose on this planet. We hope you enjoyed the show, and we hope you've gotten some useful and practical information. Join us weekly on Monday for the YTS Challenge and bi-weekly on Wednesday for the exclusive interviews at 8 p.m. Central Time. In the meantime, connect with us on Facebook and Instagram, At YTS, the podcast.

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