Nelson, how the fuck do you become a memory champion?

Yeah.

Trust me, when I was a kid, I'd never thought that I'd be one or have anything to do with a good memory.

But I started, wow, it's like since 2009-ish

because my grandmother had Alzheimer's and I was concerned for myself if that was my future.

I was young. I was in my 20. So not a problem that was near nearby, but I just was curious,

what could I do now to improve my memory and one of the first

things I discovered was these memory competitions and lo and behold the people who compete in

these things can do phenomenal feats of memory through trained practice and that was the hook

for me that was just like okay well, well, maybe I could do that.

And it just kind of took off from there. So you decided you wanted to learn like tricks to

improve your memory. And that's how you discovered there's this whole like Olympic circuit of

memory champions that compete all around the world. Yeah. And then so, so what did you start doing to, how did you work your way up to this level? Because I'm sure there's like a lot of work that has to be done until you can like get to that level. Yeah, you know, I didn't know at first. Like when I first was interested in memory in general, I was like, well, I want to improve my memory, but like, what can I do? What are tangible things I can do? And then when I heard about the memory championship, I was like,

okay, here are records and events that happen at a competition that are measured. I can use those as

like benchmarks to train myself. You know, it gives me a quantifiable thing that I can work towards.

And so that was really helpful for me because I need goal-oriented steps like that to

master things. And yeah, I just kept getting better. I had meticulous notes on my performance

and I would train my memorization of numbers, memorization of playing cards, names, lists

of words, all the things that

were in the competition. And I just try to get better and better, try to get to the current record

that existed at that time. And all with the goal of, you know, just bettering my memory, not necessarily

to win or be the best, but it just became such an obsession of mine. Yeah. Every day, every minute, I'd just be trying to memorize stuff.

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