The Power of Forgetting (2 page)

I’ve seen these lessons help people from just about every walk of life, from young students to retirees hoping to preserve their mental faculties, from entry-level employees to executives, CEOs, and those in serious leadership or political
positions, and from parents to teachers, mentors, entrepreneurs, inventors, doctors, lawyers, restaurateurs, writers, and philosophers.

By the end of the book, you will have amassed your own unique collection of tools that make sense to you—and that work! And you’ll never think about “forgetting” in quite the same way again. Indeed, the act of forgetting creates the defining line between the cool cats who accomplish a lot in life and the harried people who are constantly set back by their frenzied attempts and who always feel rushed.

In the third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Carlson, told the class that we had to memorize the planets of the solar system. I vividly recall her instructing us to move to the back of the room, saying, “Don’t return to your seats until you have all of them memorized.” She then added that we should think about the following sentence: “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas.”

Obviously, she had given us the clue to getting all of the planets stitched into our brains quickly. It took me about five minutes to memorize the list from Mercury to Pluto (which technically is no longer a planet, but it was back then). In the fourth grade, my class was sent home with the task of committing all fifty states and their capitals to memory. Contrary to what you might think, I still didn’t know how to make this easy for myself.

I studied all night long, staring at the list of states and capitals: Bismarck, North Dakota; Columbia, South Carolina; Salem, Oregon … Some states seemed to have unlikely
capital cities, while others were just plain hard to remember, let alone spell (Montpelier, Vermont?). I thought perhaps the words would magically melt into my brain if I just glared at them long enough.

My parents kept coming into my room yelling, “Michael, get to bed already!” But I wouldn’t give up.

The next day I felt defeated, tired, and overwhelmed. I didn’t have the capitals memorized, and trying to push all that information into my brain at once made me barely able to recall anything at all (except for my own state’s capital of Springfield)! Thankfully, my mother came to the rescue and helped me to come up with a song that would allow me to recall all of the capitals accurately and on the spot. And it worked.

From that moment on, I knew that I’d have to find not only my own ways of remembering information but also my own ways of organizing and filing away important data. It was also then that I began to really hone my skills in pattern recognition and make it an addictive habit. I became adept at finding hidden codes, formulas, and shortcuts to performing quick mathematics, playing with words in a different order to exercise my mind, and making up weird and bizarre stories or poems to store information I’d need to recall later.

If I were to ask you to picture a green apple in your mind, you would have already done so by the end of this sentence. That’s about how fast I can solve lots of complex math equations. I know—it’s a bit freaky and unbelievable. When I perform these feats for live audiences, the crowd always roars: “No way. You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s not possible. I bet you were just born this way!” But then I have to tell them the truth: I was not born this way.

When I look back and try to pinpoint the moment I realized that forgetting was the linchpin to my brain’s capacity, I keep coming back to a moment from college. I was sitting on a bar stool with a group of friends around me. I asked one of them to give me a four-digit number, which I then squared in a matter of seconds (e.g., 3,567 times 3,567), and I arrived at the correct answer. Making this calculation in my head isn’t about being a “human calculator,” which is what my buddies liked to say. Much to everyone’s surprise, it’s about knowing shortcuts that entail lots of
forgetting
. How so? Well, when I perform this math in my head using an alternative route (no, I’m not lining up the numbers and performing traditional math whereby I carry the one and drop the zero), I actually have to do a lot of forgetting—using certain numbers in my step-by-step process while I leave behind others mentally and stop pondering them.

Another way to think of this process in very practical terms is to consider a scenario where you’re challenged to go buy a basket of strawberries as fast as possible. You bypass the meat and packaged-food section, and as you enter the produce section of your supermarket, you don’t look at anything but the destination. You don’t let the apples, oranges, bananas, or pears distract you. You dash right past all the other colorful fruits and vegetables until you reach the prize in the shortest distance possible. That’s a crude way of explaining what I do in my head when I make quick calculations. I take the most direct route to the answer and I don’t let other inbound thoughts interrupt my process or sidetrack my journey to the end result. In the case of Kathy, the woman I mentioned at the beginning, she let too many distractions in her morning send her brain into overdrive. By
the time she tried to focus on real work, she’d seen too many fruits and vegetables, so to speak, and she’d let too many of these colorful interruptions steal precious energy from her creative mind. But if she’d known to avoid these mind-numbing intrusions by dodging the allure of the Internet and mundane e-mails before 9:00 a.m., she could have arrived at work ready for action (and ready to tackle everything with aplomb). She probably would have enjoyed her morning with her family more, too.

Rest assured, I’m not here to tell you when you should and should not check e-mail or surf the Internet. I’m not going to tell you what you can and cannot do in this book; this isn’t a “diet.” But I will give you plenty of ideas for setting healthy boundaries in your digital life so you preserve as much mental energy as you can throughout your day. That way, you always have reserves ready to fire on all cylinders when important to-dos need to get done. (And unlike most diets, these ideas won’t leave you feeling deprived or restricted!)

The exercises outlined in this book are much more than play. When researchers at Princeton determined back in the 1980s that I could do things with my mind that most people can’t, such as multiplying big numbers in my head and reciting the letters of long words in alphabetical order within seconds (e.g., taking the word “rainbow” and spelling it as follows: abionrw), they were stunned to learn that I was the only self-taught person in their study. It’s generally accepted that either you’re born with a brain like mine or an “accident,” such as a seizure or concussion, cracks opens previously inaccessible areas of your brain to unleash its full power. I’m living proof of a third option: self-training the brain to utilize more of
its potential. And now many of my students are also living proof. I hope that—very soon—you will be, too.

The book is organized into two parts. The first part, “The Power of Forgetting,” will set the foundation for your journey. It will take you on a quick tour of how ignoring certain information at the right time while continuing to think and concentrate plays into memory and a high-functioning brain.

Part 1
will also help you recognize patterns in words and numbers that will help you distinguish between what’s important and what’s irrelevant. This will ultimately help you to streamline your brain’s ability to organize, focus, and problem-solve quickly (as well as ace the next part of the book).

In
part 2
, “Mastering the Six Skills of a Productive Thinker,” I’ll share the six vitally important learning skills that are rarely taught in formal education and are essential for unleashing your full potential: focus, concentration, data retention, thinking outside the box, organization, and forgetting. My hope is that you’ll feel like you are on a guided expedition: You’ll learn as much from the narrative as you will from the activities and exercises. Every chapter includes indispensable information for anyone—whether you’re about to enter the schoolroom or the boardroom. You’ll discover:

I’ve created a mix of exercises in this book, from easy to very difficult, and I doubt that they will all appeal to everyone.

So if you find yourself trying to complete a brain workout that frustrates you or drives you crazy (and makes you want to hurl the book across the room), don’t beat yourself up. Skipping a few of the exercises won’t be the end of the world. You’ll still gain a tremendous amount of knowledge and smarts simply by reading and trying your best.

That said, let me remind you that in some cases a hard exercise might be a terrific way for you to identify a problem
area in your life, so sticking with these harmless, low-stakes exercises even if they’re frustrating at first might help you overcome an obstacle that you didn’t know was keeping you from great success. Even though I’ll be showing you how to conduct some wild math in your head, such as squaring a four-digit number instantly, these exercises are designed to work your brain in the very ways that help you to expand your overall brainpower. And I’m talking not just about mathematically inclined brainpower but about all kinds of mental acuities that allow you to retain massive amounts of information, be sharper and quicker at work and more engaged at home, maximize your creativity, and maintain a sense of clearheadedness. Obviously, I don’t want you to throw this book across the room when you encounter a wall in solving any of my problems, but take note when you in fact
do
come across a particularly difficult exercise. This is likely a sign of where you can work harder and “spot-treat” an area in your brain that needs attention and strengthening. Everything about your brain will benefit when you do so.

My program can help anyone—anyone who tries, that is. As I’ll reiterate throughout the book, the lessons and strategies presented here work best if you find ways to apply them to your own life.

If a certain technique doesn’t work for you after you’ve tried it a few times, then dump it from your personal toolbox. Move on to another, more effective method that will help you to “forget.”

Keep in mind that if you cannot seem to get the right answer to a certain exercise, that doesn’t mean it’s not working. These lessons (and their relevant exercises) do have to
be practiced and learned. Back during your years of formal education, my bet is you were much more willing to accept setbacks as part of the learning process and to just keep trying. As adults, however, we tend to be more impatient. We want quick results. We’re inclined to avoid what is difficult or what we don’t think we’re good at and instead spend our time on what comes easily and effortlessly. Most of us in the adult world haven’t been in a traditional learning setting for a long time.

Give yourself permission to fail a few times. Pretend you’re trying to get on a bicycle for the first time. Eventually, these skills will become part of your daily habits—and you won’t even know it, but you’ll experience the tremendous positive outcomes of allowing yourself to learn something new that did not come easily.

As students of life, we are never really done with learning. We are confronted with new information daily, increasingly so in our modern digital age. I hope you will return to this book to remind yourself of certain strategies and to refresh your forgetting skills. Having the tools to navigate through the influx of data we encounter—and forget what’s not important—increases our chances for success. Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, a student, an executive, or simply an “average” person hoping to enhance the speed, effectiveness, and overall health of your mind, this book will equip you with a set of skills that will return multiple benefits to you in the future.

And that future can be as early as today.

So turn the page and let’s start with a quick quiz to gauge just how good your ability to remember things is now. Fair warning: I predict you’ll score about a C on this test, which I
share with lots of audiences, but by the end of the book you’ll be able to pass it with flying colors.

Let’s try a little experiment. I want you to read the following list of ten items to yourself once—just once. It should take you no more than fifteen seconds. (Ideally, this exercise shouldn’t be done in a book, because there’s too much room for cheating; so please follow directions here. Ahem!) After you’ve looked through the list, I want you to turn away from the book, take a two-minute break, and then come back and see how many of those items you can write down on a piece of paper. Okay, ready? Here’s the list: