Foreword  

Thank goodness for all the things you are not.

Thank goodness you are not, something someone forgot,

And left alone in some pukerish place,

Like a rusty tin coat hanger left in space.

Did I Tell You How Lucky You Are?

Dr. Suess

Mark Twain is reported to have said: "Everyone talks  about the weather, but no one does anything about it." Likewise, everyone brags about their bad memory. 

Make a change. Rather than saying that you have a terrible memory, you can say that you are doing things in your life to improve your memory. You can say I am trying to pay more attention. You can say, rather than wrapping myself up in guilt, blame, and shame, about how bad my memory is, I am going to start paying attention to the things that I remember and the situations that I am in that make my situation worse.  

Improving the weather will take teamwork, and may not ever be possible. Unlike improving your memory, this is really quite simple and up to you. I wrote this book for you. My team and I are here to help you and the people in your life who want to improve their memories.
The original manuscript was shared with me by a very dear friend. Among the thousands of people that I have met, few have reported having fantastic memories where they would never forget a face, and rarely forgot the name of the face when they wanted to remember. I have always been fascinated with such people.

I have been surprised when I have read hundreds of books on memory that no one spends time in plain English to lay out a clear way to remember what is important to them. My friend has been talking about this book for offering them free lessons, and nearly everyone he has offered has run away in fear. 

What you may not understand is that it takes tremendous courage to be intelligent.  The most repulsive thing that you will find with people who have poor mental health is the fear of change. Narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy will perpetuate guilt, blame, and shame, to think of a better, new, or different way of dealing with the future. 

Those who have poor mental health need everything where they want it, and will threaten anyone that will try to change the situation.  When we become more intelligent people, our ability to think about the many possibilities will grow, which will help with our survival, but the ones that are stuck in their mental shit will be very pissied. 

I wish that I could tell you that mental illness is unique to a certain percentage of humanity. This quite simply is a fact of humans, with all of the war, famine, corruption, and disease that we have faced, that all of us have places in our minds that are disordered.

Currently, I live in the United States. This country has spent the most amount of money than any other nation in the history of humankind on military, prisons, and. They have found a problem with war, soldiers, enlistment, boot camp, and the like present in the whole system… This is called post-traumatic stress disorder.  PTSD is thought to affect the soldiers who are on the ground the most. When therapists share notes on how many people are committing suicide, they find that the ones who do not want to live, let alone strengthen their Memory Super Power, are the drone pilots. 

It is so detached that all they see are dots on a screen.  The impact they make may have had much more terrible consequences than they have any idea what actually happened because of their actions.  

And we are a part of a similar problem. The United States spends half of its federal tax budget on the military. And can you tell me when you are working with veterans that are suffering from PTSD, who suffers more…is it the soldier, their family, their company, or their company?

Currently, half of the spending of the tax budget goes to the military, and half of the remaining goes to veteran benefits. The other half is split between corporate subsidies, and the other small remaining half goes to the rest of us.  

Rather than counting one, two, three, four…they count one,...a squirrel!

 We all carry around the most wonderful computational capacity to imagine, dream, and create, yet much of what we experience is just a mess in the attic. There are many things that we can do to change this in our lives, and these five things will help you find balance. 

When I started reading this book and considering the ideas, I wanted to jump in and understand them really well. 

Harry Lorayne published this book in 1956, and when he wrote it, he read it off the seat of his pants. A few of the paragraphs were redundant and had typos; if a person went through it quickly and pulled out the nuggets of what he was saying, they would understand it quite clearly. Most in our world do not read very quickly, and when someone is writing with the grammar of just one writer, it will never 

Many people have told me that they would "give a million dollars" if they could acquire a memory like mine.  Well, don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't turn down your offer of a million dollars, but, actually, the price of this book is all you need to spend.  

This isn't true in its strictest sense; you'll also have to spend just a little bit of your time and just a little effort to get the brain working. Once you've started on my system, you may be surprised as to how simple and obvious it really is.  

If you purchased this book expecting a theoretical harangue of technical terms, you are doomed to disappointment. I have tried to write and explain the system as if I were sitting in your living room and explaining it to you there.  

Although naturally, quite a bit of research was necessary,  I've discarded most of the technical ideas and thoughts because I found them difficult to understand and to apply myself. I am an entertainer and a memory expert, not a psychiatrist or a doctor, and I didn't think it necessary to go into an explanation of the workings of the human brain,  and just how the memory actually works in terms of cells,  curves, impressions, etc.  

So you will find that all the ways and methods in the book are those that I use myself and therefore feel qualified to teach to you.  

Psychologists and educators have said that we use only a small percentage of our brain power—I think the system here will enable you to use just a little more than average.  So, if you like your operations, you have been bragging about your poor memory; I think that after you've read this book,  you'll still brag about your memory, but to the other extreme. Now, you'll be able to boast of possessing a wonderful, fully retentive, and accurate memory!