Talk about your failure when you first started looking for a solution. Maybe there was a conspiracy against you, a false belief, a misunderstanding.
When I was in school, I was a straight A student which may seem weird because how was I struggling or failing in school? Well from 8th grade till 11th grade, I was unable to eat breakfast for almost 4 years because I made myself sick!
Just thinking about it makes me sick... I was sick everyday because I was so stressed out from school. Was I going to fail a test or miss points on my homework? How do I remember all the information in my classes?
I put a lot of pressure on myself because I thought if I didn't good grades, then I wouldn't get scholarships or get into a good college. I also wanted my mom to proud of me for being the first person in my family to get straight A's!
These thoughts haunted me everyday...
I spent most of my free time studying just to make sure I understood the material and my homework was perfect. I would even go in before school started to ask the teachers questions about the assignments even though my work was correct.
My school prepared us to get ready for college so we had so much more information to learn, homework to do, and tests to take. In my math class, I would take quizzes everyday!
I didn't believe there was a better way to learn and remember information so I would study like crazy to commit all the material to memory. No matter what I tried, I always ended up spending hours studying and reviewing.
I thought there was a conspiracy against me because I was never taught the right way to learn or study. None of the students had the right way to learn just the traditional methods. Do you remember learning how to learn and remember information?
The only way I had to learn information was to repeat it over and over until it was committed to memory... for only a few days. After a couple of days, all the information disappeared!
But this is the traditional way to learn information: keep repeating information and hope it sticks. It is not effective or efficient at all!
I remember reading a chapter in my history book and when I was done with the chapter, I didn't remember a single thing! How lame is that!? I read everything the chapter said but none of the material wanted to stick in my mind.
I was super frustrated and stress out with this way of learning! You can see why I made myself sick because of the method I had to use to learn information. I just had to hope things stuck and if they didn't, my stress levels would go through the roof.
But one day I learned about memory competitions and how all these people could memorize decks of card, numbers, binary, and more!
Memory techniques made it possible to memorize all a lot of information in a short period of time and be able to recall it perfectly!
I sat down at my TV tray table, created my card system, and then I memorized a deck of cards in 30 minutes! I thought I was the coolest person ever haha I was shocked that I actually memorized a deck of cards because I couldn't remember Spanish vocabulary but I could remember a deck of cards!?!
But there was a problem...
I didn't need to memorize cards, binary, or any of the competition material for school. I had to learn Spanish, vocabulary, history, math, chemistry, and other class subjects. So I wasn't sure on how to apply memory techniques to these topics...
