You are not specific enough about the memory. If you start forgetting your own name or something like this, you should visit a doctor. But if you only forget some details from what you learned at school, that means that you already have learned many things; so many that your day simply is not long enough to review all of them (and you also have to focus on many other different things). You have to develop the art of note taking. The more you have to know, the more critical this skill becomes. It is an illusion to try keeping everything in your head just because that strategy worked when you only knew a little.
The difficulty of succeeding may mean that you have already picked most of the low-hanging fruit. Just like in a computer game, the higher levels get more difficult. The difficulty does not mean that you are less powerful; it means that you are powerful enough to work on the more difficult tasks. Also, some tasks require time and discipline; you simply cannot master them at your first attempt.
I think you have to apply two kinds of fixes: psychological and organizational. Don’t ignore either of them. It is important to make yourself feel better. And it is also important to use better tools. Without better tools your success is limited. But your mind remains the most important of your tools.
Many thanks. My memory issue certainly isn’t any sort of disorder, and indeed the sort of success I’d like to have with it are of a high level. There has been a decline in the last few years of my (formerly exceptional) abilities here, and I need to find ways to increase my attention to it as a graspable and controllable challenge/problem.
Generally my ability to deal with attention, focus, and memory issues correlates to my day-to-day mood and self-confidence. I’ve found a coach through the community here to help me find ways to combat these slightly more fundamental issues. It is good, though, to see the wide variety of talk here about improving focus, overcoming “Ugh fields,” and the like.
Fundamentally, my issue is one of keeping a particular skill in practice, and so I appreciate your practical suggestions. University offers an environment that more constantly practices skills such as learning, remembering, and new-paradigm thinking. My work environment offered similar challenges for a year or so, but I’ve since gained an expertise that is more valuable to use than to grow.
Today I gave a presentation to a group of 50 software developers in my company, and I was pleasantly surprised at my abilities. Apparently all of my on-the-fly speaking skills (which I had presumed dead since school) were just latent, if out of practice until the adrenaline kicked it back online. This was in no small part due, I suppose, than some mental tricks I’ve learned here into convincing myself of my future success, based on previous successes.
Just typing for my own benefit now. Thank you very much for your advice!
Glad to be useful. In similar situations I often don’t know how much the advice I would have given to myself also applies to other people.
For me, the greatest memory-related shock was about 1 year after finishing university. I found my old paper with notes for the final exam, and I realized I didn’t understand half of the questions. Not only was I unable to answer them, but I had problem finding any related association. For the whole year in my job I was doing something completely different, and I forgot many things without even being aware that it happened. (The problem is, despite having studied computer science and working as a programmer, I never use 95-99% of what I learned at school. I know a lot of theory, I should be able to invent a new programming language and write a compiler with some basic optimization; but in real life I mostly do web interfaces for databases, over and over again.) Now I am sorry I didn’t make better notes at university. But at the time, I was so proud that I understand everything. I didn’t have experience with what happens when you simply never think about a topic for years. If you are 24, this may be already happening or going to happen to you, too.
A few years forward, my programming career was progressing: I wrote code for two years in Java, then seven years in something else. Then I returned to Java and was like: oh, here is the forgetting again! This time I was lucky, because I simply downloaded the official documentation, read it from the beginning to the end, and most forgotten memories returned quickly. (I didn’t have the note-making skill yet, but I already had the habit of always looking at the authoritative documentation first.) But then I realized that “learning to forget” is a stupid strategy when it comes to really useful things, so I started to make notes. (First I spent a lot of time trying to find a good software for that, and then ended writing my own. Today, I would probably use some existing tool.) Now when I learn something related to programming, I immediately start writing notes. At the beginning, they are chaotic a bit, but I can always refactor them later. I tried to use the same habit in other areas of life, but somehow it didn’t work. Recently I started using Anki when learning human languages. The difference is, with human languages, you need to keep it all in your head, all the time, because you never know when you will need a word. With computer languages, remembering is not necessary, only the ability to find it quickly; and it is good to have the knowledge divided by topics. I could use Google for many questions, but some topics are rather difficult to find this way (either because many people ask the question and nobody provides an answer; or when many people provide incorrect information), and I believe I can write the information in the format best legible to me.
For the mood, reminding yourself of your past successes is very good. Sometimes people don’t see the forest for the trees. A great success may require thousand days of work, and when you wake up on the day#470 and you don’t see any progress compared with the days #469 and #468, it is easy to believe that you are not going anywhere. If you have a list of successes, and you see that every other year something great happens, that puts things into better perspective. (But it also goes the other way round. If you procrastinate, it is easy to believe that you are on the way to your next goal, when in fact you are going nowhere.)
You are not specific enough about the memory. If you start forgetting your own name or something like this, you should visit a doctor. But if you only forget some details from what you learned at school, that means that you already have learned many things; so many that your day simply is not long enough to review all of them (and you also have to focus on many other different things). You have to develop the art of note taking. The more you have to know, the more critical this skill becomes. It is an illusion to try keeping everything in your head just because that strategy worked when you only knew a little.
The difficulty of succeeding may mean that you have already picked most of the low-hanging fruit. Just like in a computer game, the higher levels get more difficult. The difficulty does not mean that you are less powerful; it means that you are powerful enough to work on the more difficult tasks. Also, some tasks require time and discipline; you simply cannot master them at your first attempt.
I think you have to apply two kinds of fixes: psychological and organizational. Don’t ignore either of them. It is important to make yourself feel better. And it is also important to use better tools. Without better tools your success is limited. But your mind remains the most important of your tools.
Many thanks. My memory issue certainly isn’t any sort of disorder, and indeed the sort of success I’d like to have with it are of a high level. There has been a decline in the last few years of my (formerly exceptional) abilities here, and I need to find ways to increase my attention to it as a graspable and controllable challenge/problem.
Generally my ability to deal with attention, focus, and memory issues correlates to my day-to-day mood and self-confidence. I’ve found a coach through the community here to help me find ways to combat these slightly more fundamental issues. It is good, though, to see the wide variety of talk here about improving focus, overcoming “Ugh fields,” and the like.
Fundamentally, my issue is one of keeping a particular skill in practice, and so I appreciate your practical suggestions. University offers an environment that more constantly practices skills such as learning, remembering, and new-paradigm thinking. My work environment offered similar challenges for a year or so, but I’ve since gained an expertise that is more valuable to use than to grow.
Today I gave a presentation to a group of 50 software developers in my company, and I was pleasantly surprised at my abilities. Apparently all of my on-the-fly speaking skills (which I had presumed dead since school) were just latent, if out of practice until the adrenaline kicked it back online. This was in no small part due, I suppose, than some mental tricks I’ve learned here into convincing myself of my future success, based on previous successes.
Just typing for my own benefit now. Thank you very much for your advice!
Glad to be useful. In similar situations I often don’t know how much the advice I would have given to myself also applies to other people.
For me, the greatest memory-related shock was about 1 year after finishing university. I found my old paper with notes for the final exam, and I realized I didn’t understand half of the questions. Not only was I unable to answer them, but I had problem finding any related association. For the whole year in my job I was doing something completely different, and I forgot many things without even being aware that it happened. (The problem is, despite having studied computer science and working as a programmer, I never use 95-99% of what I learned at school. I know a lot of theory, I should be able to invent a new programming language and write a compiler with some basic optimization; but in real life I mostly do web interfaces for databases, over and over again.) Now I am sorry I didn’t make better notes at university. But at the time, I was so proud that I understand everything. I didn’t have experience with what happens when you simply never think about a topic for years. If you are 24, this may be already happening or going to happen to you, too.
A few years forward, my programming career was progressing: I wrote code for two years in Java, then seven years in something else. Then I returned to Java and was like: oh, here is the forgetting again! This time I was lucky, because I simply downloaded the official documentation, read it from the beginning to the end, and most forgotten memories returned quickly. (I didn’t have the note-making skill yet, but I already had the habit of always looking at the authoritative documentation first.) But then I realized that “learning to forget” is a stupid strategy when it comes to really useful things, so I started to make notes. (First I spent a lot of time trying to find a good software for that, and then ended writing my own. Today, I would probably use some existing tool.) Now when I learn something related to programming, I immediately start writing notes. At the beginning, they are chaotic a bit, but I can always refactor them later. I tried to use the same habit in other areas of life, but somehow it didn’t work. Recently I started using Anki when learning human languages. The difference is, with human languages, you need to keep it all in your head, all the time, because you never know when you will need a word. With computer languages, remembering is not necessary, only the ability to find it quickly; and it is good to have the knowledge divided by topics. I could use Google for many questions, but some topics are rather difficult to find this way (either because many people ask the question and nobody provides an answer; or when many people provide incorrect information), and I believe I can write the information in the format best legible to me.
For the mood, reminding yourself of your past successes is very good. Sometimes people don’t see the forest for the trees. A great success may require thousand days of work, and when you wake up on the day#470 and you don’t see any progress compared with the days #469 and #468, it is easy to believe that you are not going anywhere. If you have a list of successes, and you see that every other year something great happens, that puts things into better perspective. (But it also goes the other way round. If you procrastinate, it is easy to believe that you are on the way to your next goal, when in fact you are going nowhere.)