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- #024 – How To Improve Your Memory & Grow Your Network
#024 – How To Improve Your Memory & Grow Your Network
Quote, Podcast, Mental Model, Hack, Tweet.
Dimitri Gremos
August 23, 2023
Welcome to the Five to Thrive newsletter
Bringing 5 interesting ideas to your inbox every Thursday morning to ignite your curiosity and drive your growth.
read online on my website
read time 3 minutes
#024 at a Glance:
Quote that will get you thinking: Having good days.
Podcast you should listen to: The man behind the infamous Fyre Festival disaster.
Mental Model: The SuperMemo Model.
Hack you should try: How to grow your network when you hate networking.
Tweet I liked: A cool way to visualise progress.
Quote that will get you thinking:
“Not only is it a good day to have a good day, it’s the only day. All the other days are stories, you’re not living them now. Today is all there is, tomorrow is made up. Live in the present.”
Podcast you should listen to:
The Diary Of A CEO E202: Billy McFarland
Billy McFarland is the co-creator of the infamous Fyre Festival. Remember that? That luxurious music festival in the Bahamas that turned out to be a complete scam? If not, maybe this will jog your memory…
After spending 4-years behind bars for lying to investors and using the mythical tropical island festival as a way to pay off his debts and a mirage to free him of his insecurities.
Only months after being released from prison, Billy brings his raw experiences from behind bars to this intimate conversation, discussing everything from the motivation for the festival, his spectacular fall from grace, and how he plans to pay back his debts and build back from nothing.
Mental Model:
The SuperMemo Model
Jan Cox once said, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you remember.” And to a large degree, she’s right.
One of the benefits of living in the digital age is the sheer volume of information we have access to. From my home in Sydney, if I want to, I can simultaneously watch podcasts from Joe Rogan, read books from thousands of years ago, scroll through Twitter, watch reels on Instagram, and the list just goes on and on.
However, one of the curses of having more exposure to information than any other generation the world has ever known is that it becomes increasingly difficult to remember all of it – especially the important parts.
Polish researcher, Piotr Wozniak, developed The SuperMemo Model to improve both the retrievability and stability of long-term memory retention. It works like this:
After learning something, you should ideally refresh your memory of it at the following intervals: one, ten, thirty, and sixty days afterwards.
The SuperMemo is, in many ways, the foundation of what we now refer to as ‘spaced repetition’.
Most of the research I looked through boiled down to 30-minutes of focused retention on day one (reading, writing, saying what you remember out loud, etc.) and ten minutes on each of the subsequent intervals (i.e. ten days after, thirty days after, and sixty days after).
Look, it is a bit of effort no doubt. But in an age when not many people spend time committing things to memory, being able to recall vast amounts of useful and interesting information on queue can be a bit of a superpower…
Hack you should try:
How to Grow Your Network When You Hate Networking
I came across this article from Josh Spector (a creative entrepreneur who I look up to) which answers that exact question in 9 actionable ways.
The ones that personally resonated with me most were Number 4 and Number 9.
You can check out the 3-minute article here. It’s worth your time and at the very least will get you thinking about some of these scenarios.
Tweet I liked:
Using girlfriend’s paper stars to track ticket sales for the AMO Summit. On the right is what’s sold; on the left is what I still need to do.
103 days to go; I’ve got work to do!
— Jacob Donnelly ☕️ (@JayCoDon)
3:39 PM • Jul 15, 2023
I really like this idea. Such a cool method of visually representing our progress.
What’s something that you’re working towards or something that you want to keep track of that can be visually represented in this way?
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
Grateful for your support.
Stay hungry, stay humble, & stay curious. ⚡
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