Two Time USA Memory Champion and memory training expert and memory speaker Ron White shares his journey on his biggest memory training project of all time! :
It is March 28, 2011 and as of yesterday I have officially began my biggest memory training project of ALL TIME! It is going to be HUGE!
For this project, I will memorize 18,000 pieces of information in consecutive order and I hope to have it complete by mid-May. Then I will rehearse it for a full month after that and then display it to the world the first two weeks in July.
It is going to be BIG….a David Blaine style memory stunt…
What is it? Well, I can’t tell you! I am not trying to tease you but I just can’t share. Why not? Well, believe it or not here are those in the memory training world who don’t want me to succeed as much as you and I want me to :)
Sure, like anyone else I have competitors and this idea of mine is so creative, so powerful, so…well frankly memorable that any of my fellow memory experts who heard the idea would think….’WOW! Why didn’t I think of that?! That is awesome! I am going to do it before he does!’ Then I would have spent 3 months on this memory training project only to have it wasted :(
A few years ago, World Memory Champion Ben Pridmore was going to break the Guinness World Memory Record of memorizing Pi and he memorized it to 50,000 places and then just a month before Ben was set to break the record a Japanese man broke the record by reciting Pi to 80,000 digits! What a heart breaking thing for Ben!
I will tell you this, it is going to require me to have 2,000 to 3,000 ‘memory files’ or loci. If you don’t know the memory palace method of loci then check it out here memory palace method of loci. Essentially, I am walking around my home town of Fort Worth and snapping 2,000 photographs in a specific order and then using these photographs to memorize my project.
I promise to keep you updated on my memory training project but more importantly I want to encourage you to set a goal for something that you want to memorize that would be interesting to you. For Ben Pridmore that would be 50,000 digits of Pi, for Jerry Lucas (memory guy in the 1980s) it was the NYC phone book on the David Letterman show and for me…well…I am going to keep it a secret just a little longer :)
