There Is No Such Thing As A Good Or Bad Memory | Jim Kwik

There's no such thing as a good or bad memory. There is no such thing as a good or bad memory. There's just a trained memory and an untrained memory. Does that make sense? Now here's the thing. I grew up with these learning challenges. I had all these difficulties all through school, all through elementary, middle school, junior high, high school. I had all these challenges. At the age of nine. I remember a teacher looking at me thinking I wasn't either smart enough to understand what she was saying or wasn't paying attention. She was talking to another adult and she said, that's the boy with the broken brain. I was like at 9 years old. Right. And so those kind of identity issues, those beliefs, does that make a difference? Yes. Right. And a lot of people believe that they can't do certain things. They could just never remember names. So I could teach them a strategy, but if the belief has not changed, what happens? It's not because it becomes self fulfilling. I remember running a marathon and preparing for it. I read a chapter of one of the books and it was on the psychology of running a marathon. Right. The mental part. And it said this verbatim, word for word because I'm a memory expert. It said, your brain is like a supercomputer and your self talk is a program it will run. So if you tell yourself you're not good at remembering names, you're. You will not remember the name of the next person you meet because you programmed your supercomputer not to. A lot of people say, oh, I have a bad memory, right? They always say I have memory or I have focus or I don't have focus or I have creativity. I don't have creativity. I want you to scrap that. Creativity is not something you have, it's something you do. Focus is not something you have. Focus is something you do. Energy is not something you have or don't have, it's something you do. Memory is not something you have, it's something you do. And what's the benefit of turning it into a do as opposed to something you have? What's the benefit? You have control over it because you could put it into a process, it becomes a strategy because there's a strategy for reading faster, there's a strategy for remembering names, there's a strategy for having focused and it's a verb, not a noun.