Why You Forget Names Immediately 😅

And there's simple things that people could do to remember people's names. You know, I always remind people, remember your mom, M-O-M. It's just kind of a, just a simple mnemonic. I imagine a lot of your listeners forget people's names. You meet somebody, you get their name, seconds later, name just disappears out of your mind. Or you're at an event, somebody taps you on your shoulder, you turn around, you see someone you recognize. Hey, you. Yeah. And then you do that, right? And you start like, you know, you start giving them nicknames or, or you're in a position you have to introduce these people. Right. You know, it's embarrassing. Hey, John, meet. Yeah. And you come up with all these little, little, you know, hacks to be able to do it. And what makes it worse is when that person has the audacity to remember your name. Oh yeah. Right? And especially the two of you, because, you know, people know who you are, right? They follow you on social media and you don't know if you met them. Right. And so I, you know, something simple is like, imagine there was a suitcase of $1 million cash. If you just remember the name of the next stranger you meet. Now I'm talking to all the listeners here or the viewers, or if they're watching this on video, who's gonna remember that name? if they just, if they get all that money, everybody, right? Everybody, literally everybody. You know, and so, so it has nothing to do with their capabilities. It had everything to do with whether they wanted to or not. So the first M in MOM stands for motivation. Really do a motivation check. Ask yourself on a scale of 1, you know, 0 to 10, how much do I wanna remember the person's name? You know, or why do I wanna remember this person's name? Maybe it's show the person some respect. Maybe it's to do a deal, get a referral. And, and if you just come up with one reason, you're more likely to remember it because you don't remember all names, but you sure as heck don't forget all names. I mean, you remember names that you're motivated. Tell me people you're attracted to. You're going to remember them, right? People that could be good for your business. You're going to remember them because they stand out. So again, reasons reap results. Things have to go from your— I realize when it comes to money or any kind of wealth, things have to go from your head to your heart to your hands. Meaning you can visualize, have goals in your head for what you want to achieve in your life financially and otherwise. But if you're not acting consistently with your hands, you're not going to get it right. Usually what we have to check in with is the second H, which is the heart. Right. The— what's the heart? The emotions. Because we are not logical, right? People don't buy logically. They buy what? Emotionally. Emotionally. And they justify logically because we are not logical, but we are biological. You mentioned like, you know, serotonin, you know, dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins. We are this feeling chemical soup. And so how do we tap into more of those feelings? We remember things that make us feel a certain way. You know, even at events, you know, to be able to stand out, it's not just what you know. That's why we teach people accelerated learning and speed reading and memory. And but it's also who you know, but it's not even that. It's also who knows you, right? And who remembers you and how do you stand out, you know? And Maya Angelou, one of the, you know, one of my, one of my favorite people that, you know, I just, I love their, you know, her work and just says people, she's like, people won't remember what you say. They won't remember what you did, but they'll always remember how you made them feel. The key to a long-term memory is information by itself is forgettable, but information tied with emotions become absolutely unforgettable because you have part of your middle brain and what's connected in there is your amygdala. and your hippocampus. Hippocampus stores memory, right? And the amygdala is a switching station for emotions. But it's interesting how your emotions and memory are connected in your brain. And so, you know, we remember things that stand out in our minds, that touch us emotionally. I bet many of you listeners could, you know, there's a song that could take you back to when you were a teenager. You could just hear one or two notes, or maybe a fragrance or food that take you back to when you're a kid. So the first thing to remember names, Tap into your emotions, tap into your motivation, your motive for action. You know, the O in MOM, very simple observation. Most people, they think they forget things. They forget a name because they blame their retention. It's not your retention. Usually it's your attention. So the O is observing the name. One of the stories I share in the book is the second time I met President Bill Clinton, I was at a charity event. It was like 2,000 people and I get to go to my assigned seating. I was the first one there and After I sat down, Forest Whitaker sits right next to me. You know, I'm a big, you know, Forest Whitaker fan. Right next to him, Richard Branson. Hmm. And then Ashton Kutcher, and then Ashton Kutcher's twin brother. And then about 20 minutes into it, President Clinton sits right next to me. And, and we had met years before, very, very briefly. And when he sat down, he remembered, he called me by name. You know, he said hello to me by name. And I was just like, wait. And then I was like, okay, of course he knew who was sitting at his table. And then he picks up a conversation that we had a couple years earlier. And I was like, nobody was privy to that conversation. And I was like, dude, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm the memory guy. I need to know how you're doing this. Right. And he, he tells me this story in Arkansas with his grandfather in the living room would tell stories and to, to all the, the kids. And, but afterwards, he's a very smart man. He would quiz each of the children to see if they were paying attention. Right. And so he learned very early on to really listen and be present. And I realized when he's explaining this to me, I felt this eerie feeling. You ever with somebody and they're just like really focused on you? Like, even though there's many more people in that room that are more important than me, certainly at that table more important than me, but I felt like I was like the only one. And I get goosebumps even just saying that. I call them truth bumps. But I, you know, that's— I think his incredible memory and his powerful presence with people is being— is the secret is he's powerfully present with people. He has this powerful presence, but his powerful presence and his memory comes from being powerfully— Present. Present. And who could do that? We can all do that, right? But most of the times when we're at events, right, you know, at elevator night or whatever you mean, but sometimes we have the habit of looking over people's shoulders. Or maybe you've been at the, you know, at the receiving end of this where people, you know, they're not listening. They're looking around seeing who's more important and they're not listening. They're thinking about how they're going to respond or they're waiting for their turn to speak. Right. So I would say the O is observation. Just really observe, pay attention. Finally, the final M in MOM Those are the methods. Because I think if there was a, if there was a genie who could grant you any one wish, but only one wish, what would you wish for? Limitless wishes, right? You ask for more wishes. But if I was your learning genie and I could help you become an expert, and I think we are in this expert economy where everyone who's listening to this, none of you are paid mostly for your muscle power like it was 100 years ago. It's your, it's your mind power. It's no longer your brute strength today. It's your brain strength, right? But how are we investing in our own, our own mind? when we're talking about, about, you know, earning a living and building a legacy. And so we really focus on these aspects. The methods are out there. We built this academy, have students in every country in the world teaching the art of accelerated learning. Because if I was your learning genie and I could help you become an expert in any one subject or skill, what would the equivalent be of asking for limitless wishes? What would you want to learn? You'd be an expert in money, be an expert in martial arts, or if you're an expert, I think, in learning how to learn, What can you apply that to? Money, martial arts, marketing, management, Mandarin. You know, everything gets so much easier when you can focus and concentrate and understand and read faster and remember and mostly apply, which is the big thing. So many people, you know, listen to podcasts or they go to your events or they read a book and nothing changes. You know, like people buy books and they sit on their shelf and it becomes shelf help, not real self-help because people don't actually take the action. Which is the other power thing. Knowledge alone is not power. Knowledge times action equals a lot of power. Another thing to think about is your positive peer group. You know, we are not just— it's not just our neurological network that taps our potential. It's our social networks. Who you spend time with is who you become. You hear this all the time, right? You're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. You spend time with 9 broke people, you're gonna be number 10 because we have something in our nervous system called mirror neurons. And so we're constantly imitating people around us unconsciously. And what are we imitating? Watch, W-A-T-C-H. We're imitating their words. We tend to use the same words as the people we spend time with, right? And those words affect our nervous system. A, actions. We start modeling, unconsciously imitating the behaviors. If your friends smoke, you're more likely to smoke because we're imitating what we see around us, like children. The T in WATCH, thoughts. We tend to have the same thinking patterns and thoughts as the people around us also as well. And we know those thoughts are things, you know, they affect our beliefs and our actions. And then finally, the C and the H. The C is our character. Who we spend time with, we tend to model their integrity, their level of honesty, their level of impeccability, right? And then they— I read this quote, I don't know who to attribute to. They say integrity is measured by the distance between someone's lips and their life, you know? And you talk about this in terms of showing up on time because it's a matter of integrity, not only to yourself, but to, to others, right? And then finally, H, habits. We tend to model the habits of the people around us, have similar routines. And first we create our habits, then our habits create you. You create your habits of meditation or sleep prioritization or eating well or exercising, and those habits become us again. You know, I, so I think it's so very important. Duke University says 40% of our daily activity upwards of is habitual. We're not even thinking about it. You know, one of the videos we have has millions and millions of views. It's just like morning routines. Like, well, like, you know, what do you guys do in your morning to kick off your day and jumpstart your mind? Our lives are a reflection of all the decisions we've made up to this point, where to invest, you know, what to do for a career, how to work, what to eat, all those things. But you could only make good decisions based on the information, you know, at any given time. Right. And so there's not this— there's this gap certainly of those who have and those who have not, certainly. But there's also this gap of those who know and those who just don't know. At any given time, you can only make a decision based on information you know. And if you don't remember that information, you can't make a quality decision. With Peter Thiel, you know, Zero to One, if he has a question like, how do I hit my 10-year goal in 6 months? You're going to get different quality answers than somebody who just says, why am I broke? Or why can I never make money? Or why, why, why can't I do this? You're going to get different answers. So I would say we have a dominant question. Like, my dominant question growing up was, you know, it's like, why am I broken? But that wasn't very useful, right? Then I was like, how do I fix this? And then my question became, how do I make this better? Mm-hmm. Right? I know somebody else who has a question that we did this exercise in this book, and they're like, their dominant question is, how do I get people to like me? And that's, that's what all she thinks about all the time. And you don't know anything about her, but you probably know a lot about her. You know, how's her personality? You know, she's, she's a martyr. Her personality changes depending on who she spends time with. She's a people pleaser, right? And she's a sycophant. And you know a lot about her and you know one question. My question for all of you listening, what's your dominant question and how can you use it to create more wealth?