Let's Build the Memory Muscle

Why you can't remember it all and What to do about it ?

Photo by That's Her Business on Unsplash

“The information in the world doubles every day. What they don’t tell us is that our wisdom is cut in half at the same time.” - John Seely Brown, co-author of The Social Life of Information

One of the most embarrassing moments of my college years was from the Inter-B School Competition held at IIM Lucknow in 2002-2003. I was to go up on stage, deliver the radio ad for our Consumer Product Launch in front of a packed audience. I mustered the courage to present in public, got all the pep talk from my pack of college mates, prayed sincerely for all the presence of mind, and off I went.

I did a decent job on the stage EXCEPT… I forgot to mention the name of the brand we were launching🤦🏼 It was a gross error, unpardonable, embarrassing, and even haunting for me personally. That memory intermittently visits me even today but brings me a smile instead of the guilt, like 20 years back.

If only I would have remembered the whole script that I had prepared for. If only I could have aced my Product Launch. If only my memory was sharp and served me well. If only…

These if only’s did not stop at the competition. It found ways to show up in many ways and in all areas of my life e.g. I wouldn’t remember what I read just a few days back, or the core message in a book, or the formulae for Investment Ratios, or the principles/value systems from an interview. Yes, I did try using the diary, writing journal, post-it notes, and even highlighting with all colors possible, but it wasn’t helping as I would have liked.

And the main reason behind this struggle was the overabundance of information around me and my inability to make sense of it all, remember it all, absorb it all, use it, and derive personal or economic benefits out of it. A lot of content would hit me anew, while I had loads of previously consumed content to digest. It’s like being served dinner immediately after lunch, which was served immediately after breakfast.

It’s only during my CFA preparations 2 years back that I bumped into a lot of material that was instrumental in me cracking the exams and managing my affairs in a very effective manner. This has allowed me to make room for an elaborate reading routine, daily fitness regiment, blogging, podcasting, and quality family life.

Today’s post is about hacks and routines one can resort to for the job at hand. It covers topics that will aid the memory muscle to gain strength and to deliver the goods, every time when needed.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Learning is an essential component for any ambitious knowledge worker. It keeps us abreast of current market realities, helps us in upskilling and preparing for the future, aids in capitalizing on opportunities around us, and is very crucial to stand out from the rest in terms of our performance and personality. But would it be of any use if you couldn’t remember a thing of what you learned? Absolutely Not !!! It would actually amount to you having learned nothing, bringing all the efforts you put into naught.

Breaking this habit begins with understanding the problem from its first principles i.e. your memory muscle is struggling to hold onto so much information. And if you cannot restrict or cut down the information being showered upon you, then the only option left is to work on the memory muscle.

Hermann Ebbinghaus (24 January 1850 – 26 February 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. From 1880 to 1885, he ran a limited, incomplete study on himself and published his hypothesis in 1885 as Über das Gedächtnis (later translated into English as Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology). He plotted these results on a graph creating what is now known as the "forgetting curve" and shown below.

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The curse of the overabundance of information is that you may not be giving enough time to go through a piece of content slowly and almost no time to going through the content again. But the research mentioned above states the necessity of going through content repetitively (at least 3-4 times)so that it leaves an imprint on your memory and stays there for the long haul.

That’s exactly how we learned a new language in school or a new topic during graduation days or a new skill at our place of work. We got exposed to the content repeatedly and whether we liked it or not, we did get better at it. I still remember how bad I used to be in Marathi and even repeated my 4th Standard due to my low Marathi scores in all unit and term exams. Against all my wishes, I attended the 4th standard again and scraped through somehow.

Earlier days, we would subconsciously learn as our tutors hammered the subject down our throats and forced the memory muscle to take it up. Today we will have to do the same thing, just consciously. I will share some examples of how I do it -

Re-Reading #

I am currently reading the book “Alchemy” by Rory Sutherland. He is the Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy (one of the biggest advertising firms in the world). He also is the Founder of Ogilvy Change, he has variously been President of the IPA, Chair of the Judges for the Direct Jury at Cannes, and has spoken at TED Global. 

He is a remarkable human being with very profound insights into human behavior. You could listen to his talk at TED to get a perspective into his mind. In his journey of 20+ years of tapping into human behavior, he has learned a lot of lessons and distills them very eloquently in his book. But just the book won’t suffice for his wisdom to get stuck onto my long-term memory. And hence I have a 3 pronged approach to tackle this problem -

1. I am listening to his book on Audible while I am driving around in Dubai for work, errands, or gym.

2. I also have the same book on Kindle and I will reread the same in text form and make highlights of all-important nuggets of wisdom that I could find a use for in time to come.

3. I also listen to podcasts where he is being interviewed e.g. he was recently interviewed by Jim O’Shaughnessy on his podcast ‘Infinite Loops’ and that episode was such a good one. But more importantly, I can resonate with Rory Sutherland even better since I have read his book and his interviews bring up the lessons he speaks about in his book.

If you remember the forgetting curve image on the top, you will realize that this 3 pronged approach ensures repetition of Rory Sutherland’s thought process and his wisdom, increasing the probability of me retaining this for a longer time and in some cases even forever.

2 years back when I was introduced to Warren Buffet’s writings and was recommended on Fintwit to go through all he has written, I took this message to heart and went about the process with the kind of consistency that I myself was surprised with. I was committed to learning the art of Stock Picking and compounding my wealth handsomely over my Investing Career. And hence, I was willing to dig as deep as required.

In the last 2 years, I have gone through all 56 Annual letters from him to his shareholders, read his autobiography ‘Snowball’ by Alice Schroeder, watched 100s of his interviews on Youtube/HBO, and also read many books written by various authors about him e.g. Essays of Warren Buffet by Lawrence Cunningham, Warren Buffet Way by Robert Hagstrom, Tao of Warren Buffet by Mary Buffet and Value Investing by Bruce Greenwald.

It was the only way for me to build my knowledge base around Investing and to create a tool kit to gauge opportunities and make the right decisions. These efforts have served me well and helped me to build a portfolio of solid entities across Asia, Europe & the USA while I avoided all the SPACS, New Age Technology stocks in the news, esoteric investments, or leverage of any kind.

Today, I can sleep well knowing that my portfolio continues to grow steadily, while the chaos consumes market participants and confuses the living daylights out of them.

Deeper Learning #

In the 1980s, three researchers and authors working with the Center for Creative Leadership, a nonprofit educational institution in the USA created a new model of learning i.e. 70-20-10 Rule. It holds that individuals obtain 70 percent of their knowledge from job-related experiences, 20 percent from interactions with others, and 10 percent from formal educational events.

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As per this rule, the next step for enhancing your learning requires you to participate in practice tests, debates, discussions, quizzes, and assessments. These play an instrumental role in the “active recall” of the knowledge stored within our grey matter.

Our schools, colleges, and professional bodies like C.F.A Institute of US or  The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India do a good job of preparing students with enough test material. But the same needs to continue even after you have found a satisfying career or started a business and thriving in it.

Today, every single subject of interest to you has been gamified by EdTech companies that provide educational material online and test you for it. The one I have been using is Brilliant and it provides many courses that interest me -

I am currently going through the ‘Probability, Statistics and Finance’ course wherein I get tested with puzzles on these topics. Just in case the word “puzzle” sounds easy to you, let me warn you that these courses will test you at varying levels of difficulty. If you keep scoring well, the AI embedded in these courses will elevate the difficulty in Questions being asked and that’s when you start realizing how good or bad you actually are at the subject.

Maybe no one around you is developing themselves to master a particular skill, craft, or trade. Maybe you are the best in the business now. But the question is - Are you the best globally? Can you improve? Can these skills serve you well for crafting a new career down the line or upgrading your performance in the current profession? Are you testing your own limits? Are you good enough for the best firm in the business?

Maybe these questions will make you take tests and expand your competency in every endeavor of yours.

The additional benefit is the release of Dopamine i.e. a neurotransmitter that controls the reward and pleasure centers of the brain. Hence playing Quizzes or doing Practice Tests can allow us to enjoy the game and create a long-lasting affinity for the subject matter being tested. You just got to watch out for the level of difficulty you are testing yourself on. If it is too easy, you will get bored. if it is too tough, you will lose interest. Hence I like the ones based on AI Algorithms which do this job really well.

Brilliant is an example of a paid service. But you could create these kinds of quizzes on your own. You could use Anki App to create flashcards for testing yourself. I used this a lot during my CFA Prep and it helped me in testing the topics I had prepared for.

I also have a deck of cards at home to test me on various Mental Models, Behavioral Finance or Economics. Every time I pick a card from the deck, the topic on top quizzes me on what it means and provides a description below followed by a funny example (the humor used in these cards is very effective in getting the message through).

‘Mental Models’ Deck of Cards by Wise Charlie

Or you could use the Quiz function in Readwise wherein it could provide you your highlighted passages from kindle but hide the word selected by you to be quizzed upon from time time.

One of the sentences I came across in Gautam Baids's book ‘Joys of Compounding’ hit me like a brick. It resonated with me really well and I could realize the many mistakes in my life stemmed from my ignorance of this one sentence. Hence I saved it in Readwise and it keeps coming up as a Quiz on my Readwise app at regular intervals.

The answer is ‘Expenses’.

This app serves as a reminder to me of many insightful passages or statements that have been highlighted in kindle across 100s of books. Every day 8 reminders show up on my app and after years of these highlights and quizzes, many of these messages have got ingrained in me and shaped me in many ways.

I can’t exactly pinpoint one particular tool or a hack that works in strengthening your muscle memory. All of these in different doses need to be utilized to generate a significant impact on your grey cells firing on all cylinders.

Set Up for Learning #

Having the tools isn’t enough. You also need to operate in an environment that supports your commitment to learning. Without the right setup, you will struggle with information overload which eventually will lead to cognitive burden i.e. your mind getting taxed heavily and hence producing way less output.

Let’s look at an example of 2 similar illustrations and find out which one was easier on you and which one was taxing to understand.

Figure 1 #

The above illustration shows information flow all the way to it getting stored in your long-term memory or being lost in transition.

Figure # 2

Figure 2 is actually the same as Fig # 1, except that the words are shown separately and not at the relevant place as in Fig # 1. Just the cognitive requirement of placing words mentally in the right place and then understanding it is a taxing endeavor. And most will not indulge in this task and let the learning get lost in transition.

This is what happens with so much of what you may read/study. Websites have distracting ad banners that are an absolute nuisance, and hence make it difficult for you to focus on the content. You might be trying to learn while your energy levels are low or distraction around you is high. You might be feeding on low-quality content of content on low-quality paper.

These are very subtle factors that make learning a burdensome task. But there are solutions to these -

1. You could read on Instapaper instead of websites. Instapaper converts an ad-filled article from a website to a clean text with white space in the background and no other nuisance (I love this service and highly recommend this to all).

2. Ebbinghaus believed that physiological factors, such as stress and lack of sleep, hinder our efforts to retain information. In my case, I work out regularly and I sleep for 7 + hours from 8:30 p.m. to 4 a.m. daily. My workouts and sleep routine have a lot to do in dealing effectively with stress and anxiety at work or personal life. These 2 habits of mine have been game-changers for me.

3. I only read when my energy levels are high, else I don’t bother. I rather have a good time with my family watching a movie or catch up with a friend. But reading to learn, needs you to be in the zone. I do most of my heavy lifting between 4 and 8 am. That’s what works for me. You could have your own window of high productivity.

4. I pay up for good quality content or good quality hardcover books instead of cheap paperback ones. I have subscribed to many paid newsletters which are 10 times better than newspapers and 100 times better than News Channels. “Quality has a price to pay. So don’t hesitate to pay up.”

Implementation #

Now comes the remaining 70% of the learning i.e. where information becomes knowledge and gets implanted into your long-term memory. This only and only is possible once you start practicing what you have learned. This is where the rubber hits the road and you feel the heat of performing and delivering the goods.

You could be involved in professions that require your knowledge to be tested and that’s where your efforts could come in handy. In case your profession or business doesn’t test you on the skills you are working on, then create a discipline for your work to reach out into the world. Express online, create content online or take on additional responsibilities to present or showcase a particular topic.

I blog for this very reason. It is a laborious task of recalling everything I have learned about the subject matter and about writing professionally. If I do a bad job, I have an audience that won’t shay away from providing honest feedback, even if it sounds bitter. And if I do a good job, I receive a lot of feedback on it having helped someone in their Investment Decision, Mindset Alteration, or Habit Formation. It’s heartening to receive these messages and it keeps me going week on week. Dopamine does feel good 😃

Or you could choose to tweet. Reducing your knowledge to 280 characters requires a lot of clarity of your subject matter. The brain finds it easy to expand an explanation but compressing a topic to its most fundamental core needs an enhanced level of understanding.

I tweet again for this reason alone. I struggle with this activity even today but I am committed to getting proficient at Twitter and creating a highly engaged community around my subject matter. That would require a level of knowledge at par with the best in our industry, and many. of them tweet prolifically. I have written a whole piece on why one should be on Twitter and the same can be read here.

Or you could take on the most responsible of activities, in the process of mastering your subject of interest i.e. Teach. Teaching is a beautiful profession and with umpteen rewards for someone who is truly interested in imparting knowledge upon the students. Some of them are -

• Your students will force you to up your game to the next level so you are forced to answer all their questions. You would certainly like to make an impact and create an impression upon them. Not because you need the money, but because that is the standard you have set for yourself.

• Your students will induce you in chasing rabbit holes in related fields so that you are prepared for any related question or case study that is brought up by a student.

• You will need to up your game emotionally and mentally to maintain the interest level of the students while building relationships that allow your message to get through their defenses.

• You will need to become productive with your time at hand in order to manage your professional responsibilities, your family life, your health, your money, and the extra load that comes from your teaching vocation.

All this may sound like a challenge. But it’s fun for a lifelong learner. It is a pain for someone who teaches just for a paycheque. It saddens me to admit that I have come across only a few teachers who taught us with lots of passion and integrity. Most took it as a job and did what was required to be done. When I become a teacher (and I aspire to be one someday), I will pour in with all I got and deliver the best I can for the benefit of the students. Guess what, that would benefit me in so many indirect ways that I am keenly looking forward to serendipity playing its role in making this happen.

“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.” - Charlie Munger

YOLO in our culture has become a reference to rash decisions in the face of uncertainty. It has a negative connotation to it as it reflects casualness, FOMO, short-term thinking, and selfishness. But I would take the liberty to say that ‘If we only live once, why not become learning machines so that we can perform at our best and derive the best that life has to offer?’

Our mantra got to be -

I won’t just stop at just reading. I will learn.

I won’t just stop at learning. I will apply.

I won’t just stop at applying. I will execute effectively.

This is the journey of a lifelong learner and I invite you on this beautiful journey starting today. Take on any one hack/habit or routine mentioned above and play with it. It could be Instapaper, Readwise, Brilliant, or the exam preps that you have been postponing or a simple tweet.

Whichever medium you choose, I invite you to start. Today is already late 👍🏻

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Recommendations for the Week #

If you are keen on the developments in plant-based meat then this article will give you an insight into the current realities and challenges being faced by the industry. This topic fascinates me and I loved this article from Motherjones - Lab Meat Update

Carson Block is the Founder of Muddy Waters, one of the leading Short Sellers in the world. His firm was responsible for exposing the fraud at NMC in Dubai, Noble Group, Olam International, and many others. He released hir first ever Investors Letter and it deserves a read, especially when it has reference to the quirks of Elon Musk - Letter

Fascinating Evolution of Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, CBS & Columbia Records. If media businesses interest you, then this one is an energy-packed video that you got to watch.