The idea of writing a guide to creating a Training Plan, and steps to see it through, has been beating around in my brain the past few days, so I’m going to do it here where I can share it with you guys. I’ve used this stuff to practice and become good at other things in my life, and have just started using it to get better at mnemonics.
Disclaimer: These techniques are by no means invented by me. About 80% of ideas here come from books I’ve read, and the last 20% is just me re-discovering ideas people already knew.
INTRO:
Okay, so you want to become a Grandmaster of Memory, win your countries Memory Championship, beat the socks off of Dominic O’Brien at the world championship (or whoever is the world champion right now), or remember the first 20-kajillion digits of Pi, you know, just in case.
Well to do that, you need a plan. It’s one thing to just mess around with something, but it’s quite another to want to become proficient at it. If you want to become one of the best at, let’s say memory in this case, you need to come at the topic strong. This leads us to The Uncomfortable Truth:
The Uncomfortable Truth: There is no such thing as talent. There is only amounts of previous effort put in to become proficient at something.
There are no shortcuts. Everyone who is good at something has put in the effort, no exceptions.
Now, you’re probably asking, “But Kiyote, what about my friend X, who picked up the bass and played it well without any practice?” Ask him how long he’s been playing the guitar, or some other instrument. Skills are transferable. If you’ve played professional soccer all your life (sorry, “football”), you’re in a much better position to run the Boston Marathon than a person who needs to start training from scratch.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Now to get to actually creating a plan:
STEP 1: Have a Goal
It’s less important as to what this is, as it is you have one. Keep this goal as UNrealistic as possible. You need to set it way beyond your current abilities to give yourself something to work towards.
Also, as a fair warning, this will change. Often. One day you may be fighting to become a grandmaster, the next world champion, the next, smartest guy in your office, who knows? That doesn’t matter, but having the goal makes the rest of the steps clearer.
STEP 2: Creating a Schedule
You need to plan how you’re going to go about learning. If you don’t create an actual plan, you’re not going to learn at the same pace as if you did. You’re going to take a very lackadaisical learning process that may be fun, and fine in a lot of situations, but not if you are working towards a specific goal.
Somethings to keep in mind:
More frequent is better than longer. Doing thirty minutes a day is better than doing an hour every other day, which is better than four hours three times a week. You want to make this as close to a daily routine as humanly possible.
Be realistic in scheduling, but push yourself. Don’t say you are going to practice four hours a day in the beginning. You will burn yourself out. You may find yourself working up to that level, but really, it will exhaust you, you’ll give up and not come back, if you do it from the start. Instead, try half-an-hour a day, and find out how difficult it is doing that.
Figure out the kind of scheduling that works best for you. Some people like planning a period of time, say from 6-6:30 in the evening, to work at memory training. I’m a busy guy, so having a deadline of 12 midnight works best for me, which is to say, by midnight I need to have done 30 minutes of practice. Either way is fine, it’s whatever works better for your type of person.
Write/Type this all out so that it is as clear and unambiguous as possible.
Accept the fact that this schedule is now GOD. You place this schedule above all else, it is perfect in every way, and immutable. If you said you would work from 5-5:30, and you work from 5:01-5:31, you’ve failed. If you didn’t finish your daily training until three minutes past the midnight deadline, you’ve failed. And never, EVER try to build up a queue.
More on failing later.
STEP 3: What Actually Goes In the Training
Take a look at your goal, and figure out what sort of training it will take to achieve it. If it’s not clear, ask someone else for their opinion. The training should be just beyond your ability.
Write/Type it up clearly.
This will also change often, and each time it does, re-type it up as clearly as possible.
STEP 4: Keep a Daily Training Journal
Keep a journal of what you’ve done that day, the sort of training you did, and your notes and thoughts on it. It doesn’t have to be long everyday, but the more in depth you go, the better.
This is going to seem repetitive and annoying as all hell. “Oh my god, memorizing my vocab list today was so hard. Was it because I didn’t drink enough caffeine and get enough sleep? Whine, whine, whine, whine.” This is how it’s supposed to look, and if you’re working at the right level, it should seem more difficult than easy. Which leads to the next step:
STEP 5: Continuously Make Your Training More Difficult
Your training will never be easy. If spend half an hour a day to memorize twenty numbers, after a year, it will still be difficult to memorize twenty numbers. If you keep working at the same level day in and day out, you’ll get to the OK Plateau, where you can kinda do the exercises, but never get any better.
This means that you need to continuously make your training more difficult even before it feels like you should. Your training should consistently feel like falling, where you magically place one foot on the ground to catch yourself before repeating the process.
STEP 6: Take All Of The Stuff So Far and Make It Public
In order to actually keep on a training regiment, you need to raise the stakes. Saying to yourself “I’m going to become Grandmaster of Memory!” isn’t going to get you anywhere. Even just posting on a forum your goal isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Write up your plan and give it to like-minded people you respect. Make it clear to them that they are allowed to comment on anything you do, and nothing they say will be taken as offense. Especially if they give you tough love for missing a deadline, or not working hard enough.
Like minded people in real life work the best, but it’s better to have a like minded person on the internet. They respect what you are doing, and can give you good feedback.
STEP 7: Accept Everything Other People Suggest as PURE GOLD
You are the worst person in the entire world to judge your own performance. Helen Keller could have judged your performance better than you can. This means that you need to rely on other people to be able to judge what you need to do better than you can, even if it doesn’t make any sense.
If someone suggests to you that your memory training can be improved by standing on your head while wearing a clown nose, then you head out to your nearest clownery to buy yourself a clown nose, and keep doing that until you get why they told you to that.
If for some reason you cannot possibly do what they say (“Clownery?!? Where do you think I live, Quebec?!”), ask for clarifications and substitutions (“Would a red sharpie work instead?”).
STEP 8: What To Do When You Inevitably Fail
If you are doing everything right up until this point, you are attempting to work outside of your limits. This means that you will fail, which is good! If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough!
The most common failure is overshooting your training difficulty level. If you set a daily training practice of memorizing 1000 numbers in three minutes and you’re not getting beyond 50, maybe it’s too high. Keep trying to get there for a couple of days, don’t give up right away, because you want to keep challenging yourself, but if it is still way beyond your reach, try to scale back a bit. Make this change public in your daily journal.
A more major failing missing a scheduled practice, which as I said earlier, is GOD. The best thing to do is make your confession right away, as soon as you see it going to happen, or just as it happens. Make this confession just as public as your journals, and encourage people to give you tough love. Don’t make it a habit, if it happens regularly, consider reworking your schedule.
OTHER THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND:
Sleep: I am an amazing work-a-holic and over-achiever. I try to maintain a persona of working 20 hours a day, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I make sure to sleep between 8-8.5 hours a night. As you sleep less, your productivity goes down exponentially. As I start hitting 7 hours of sleep, I can come nowhere close to meeting my daily goals, even though I gained an extra hour and a half.
Exercise: As something I keep learning again and again, regular exercise is in the same category as sleep. It may feel like I’m gaining time by not working out at least a couple of times a week, but the efficiency of what I’m doing goes down much faster than the time I lose just doing it.
Diet: What I’m the worst at, but I feel like it should belong here. I’m a vegetarian, but not one of them good ones. Too often a Pringles can in my lunch and dinner. But it seems to me like it belongs here as something that can have a negative effect.
CLOSING NOTES:
The most important thing you can do is to make a decision to make a commitment. Nothing comes easy, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to consistently challenge yourself and attempt to reach levels that you never thought were possible. If you keep up with your training plan, you will look back at what you’ve done think to yourself, “How the hell did I manage to do that?!?”
