@MissDSchnei and I were having a random chat the other day about the TV show Suits where one of the main characters, Mike Ross, has a photographic memory and becomes a successful attorney at a very prestigious fictional law firm. As an aside, If you have Amazon Prime, you can stream the first four seasons for free.
Mike Ross has a gift and is able to read a book once and quickly and memorize it. As a lawyer, this plays perfectly because any case that goes to trial and has a verdict it sets a precedence. And we questioned, is Mike Ross really intelligent? Does having an excellent working memory capacity really mean you are intelligent? I’d like to think I have a great memory and can remember names and faces. It never occurred to me that I was employing this trick, but I learned to use is to create a mental picture of the person and remember their features. If it’s a colleague at work, I will remember their business function to add a little extra visualization. One of the tricks to remembering people is to over exaggerate a feature of a person, but I never want to do it because I’m afraid of a Freudian slip. A friend of mine introduced me to reading this book, MoonWalking With Einstein, and it reiterated what I was already doing to remember people. It’s an interesting read of a journalist following along a team of people that participated in the US Memory Championship. The book did discuss a few techniques to improving your memory, but that’s not the goal of the book.
You could read a little bit more about the US Memory Championship at Wired. And another article from Wired about how Google is destroying our memory. It’s pretty true, because I am no longer remembering many things because finding something online is so easy.
What am I trying to get at this?
Anyone who plays in the manufactured spend game is intelligent. Without a doubt. This is another abstract post that I want where you should open your horizons. My buddy PF Digest wrote this post way back when we first started our blogs. He found this really interesting article where a former Verizon employee outsourced his own job. Excellent article to read. Can you believe that? Was he being being too smart? Too lazy? We do not know what his motivation to do it, but we have an idea of what he was trying to do. Earn a nice salary without doing anything. An insider tells me as part of cost savings Verizon removed physical tokens companywide and deployed soft tokens. I can’t help but wonder if it’s because of this guy. In a sense, he was looking for arbitrage within his own job like how we are playing with credit cards.
I want to present you this question: the next time you are out and about or even at home, ask yourself, how can I make this better? When you figure out how to make things better, doing all this arbitrage gets a little bit easier. An avenue arose where I did something 3 times and immediately saw there’s new opportunities to make this better so I am going out of my way to slow my process down until the solution is in. Why 3 times? Because a good friend of mine told me you don’t want to exacerbate waste. 3 times is good enough to figure out where you stand and understanding the process.
PS The character Mike Ross is shown as highly intelligent with an amazing memory for his creative solutions to various situations.
IMO, excellent memory does not equal intelligence. Intelligence can be greatly helped by an excellent memory, but true intelligence is using the knowledge you have (i.e. memory) to figure out something new.
Avid reader of your posts, somewhat for the out and out tips, but mainly for these posts. I’m incredibly impressed at how well you write these deep posts, while throwing in a wealth of nuances and hints for the MSing game. I tip my hat.
Jake, thanks for the kind words