The Power of Forgetting by Mike Byster Read Free Book Online

processing—memory creation—your mind can then begin to work much more efficiently and become more powerful, giving you a huge advantage throughout your life. You can think of it as creating an assembly line for your brain. First, you compartmentalize the raw materials—the data—and then you input the data, one piece at a time, through a sequence of processes, sending the pieces onward to various places depending on how they need to be treated and whether they should be deposited in your short-term memory, put in your long-term storage tank, or entirely forgotten and tossed out to the junkyard.
    Every chapter in this book is going to help you build and successfully run this assembly line like a well-oiled machine. It’s not something you can do overnight, and it’s also not something you can just build once and leave alone. Have you ever been amazed by a waiter’s ability to take the orders of a table of six or more people without writing anything down? How does he or she get it right? It’s even more impressive when people complicate their orders with personal requests—“Dressing on the side, please,” “Can I substitute a baked potato for some fries?” “No cheese,” and so on. Howdo they remember it all? Waiters are good at what they do because they do it a lot! Practice. Practice. Practice!
    Knowing that brains require constant maintenance and the occasional repair, I work my brain every single day to keep it up to speed and stay ahead of the pack. My hope is that you will work your brain with the exercises in this book and that some of the strategies you learn here will become second nature. I don’t expect you to become as obsessive about number and letter crunching as I am, but I do expect that you’ll create new mental habits that will ultimately strengthen and expand your brain so that it can do incredible things. You’ll find yourself in the car, for example, playing mind games with yourself or your passengers. You’ll read street signs, license plates, and storefronts differently. You’ll look at the whole world from a new perspective. And in doing so, you’ll break away from your own pack.
    Remember, I’m not here to make you just “average.” This is not about trying to catch up. This is about blowing everyone else away. All of us enter school as youngsters and are surrounded by classmates with a variety of talents and strengths. That is when some of us find ourselves way ahead of others because we’re mixed in with a wide range of ability levels. But as we grow older and mature into adults, we often find ourselves surrounded by peers—people who share our general characteristics, values, and intelligence. The pool of talent gets smaller and more similar to us in our particular environments, and that’s when we can find ourselves fenced in by people who are just as sharp as we are—or even sharper. It becomes harder and harder to edge ahead of others and make ourselves stand out. We have to work so much harder to get that A, obtain that job or promotion,achieve that acceptance letter, succeed in the business world, or generally move forward in life the way we want to. And it’s these moments that can come to define the rest of our lives.
    Yet when we stop and focus on our brains, we have the potential to do just that—to leap ahead. You can accelerate your success whether you’re in school, working a job, starting a business, or seeking a whole new career. You can get more done in less time, juggle competing demands with ease at work and in your personal life, and take multitasking to new heights that allow you to take care of true priorities effortlessly (and not feel guilty for letting a few things slide). You also can break out of your status quo and elevate your socioeconomic position to a loftier position. Imagine, for instance, being able to walk into a room and remember everyone’s name. Or being a business owner or retail employee who can recall the name of every customer