1146: How to Reclaim Your Focus and Unlock Your Genius with Memory Champion Nelson Dellis

Pete Mockaitis
Nelson, welcome!

Nelson Dellis
Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about becoming more of an everyday genius. You are a six-time memory champion. Could you tell us one of your most amazing feats of memory ever?

Nelson Dellis
Let’s see, I’m most proud of having memorized 10,000 digits of pi. That was a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
10,000 digits. Wow! Now that sounds like a record to me, I don’t know.

Nelson Dellis
Oh, it’s not. Although, you know, if we’re talking about how many digits someone has used their memory to store, it’s many tens of thousands. The unofficial record is, like, a hundred K, but the official record is 70,030. Yeah, both are insane.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wild. How does a person do such a thing?

Nelson Dellis
Well, first you have to have the desire to do such a thing. I’ve known of people who have done it without really much of a technique other than brute force repetition and a lot of time. That sounds horrible. And I would ask the question, “How?” That sounds crazy.

But those who are more well-versed in memory techniques would look at numbers and have some way of converting them into more meaningful things, things that are easier to visualize in your mind than these abstract symbols. And then encoding it all into some elaborate story that connects them in order.

And that is the basics of memory techniques in a nutshell, honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
So now I remember reading a book about this in terms of, like, each digit becomes a letter or sound, like one becomes T or D, and two becomes N and so forth. Is that what you’re talking about in terms of making them more meaningful?

Nelson Dellis
That’s one of the methods. With abstract symbols like numbers, for example, the system is to, yes, convert it into words that, then, you can visualize, right? You look at numbers, it’s maybe hard to visualize them, maybe not individually, like, if I see a seven, I can visualize a seven or seven things.

But if you are talking about a huge sequence of numbers, there’s only 10 different digits. So if there’s a lot of digits, you’re going to get a lot of those repeating. So it’s hard to think of, like, “Oh, I’m picturing a seven, then I’m picturing an eight, then I’m picturing a seven.”

It would be easier if you could collect groups of numbers and then have images preset for certain combinations. So instead of saying, I don’t know, 124, I see Michael Jordan, maybe, you know, that would always encompass with one and two and a four together, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, okay. So, like, he’s number one, and his number is 24. So he’s one, two, four.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, you’re not too far off. My system is a little…

Pete Mockaitis
Wait, wasn’t he 23? Wasn’t 23 his number? And I’m not a sports guy.

Nelson Dellis
Exactly, No, no. So 024, the 24 is Kobe Bryant. That actually was his number. So all of the 24s, this is the way I do it. There are different ways to do it. Some might argue that my way is a little more complicated, unnecessarily, but it works for me.

Anyways, so 024 is Kobe Bryant. So all the 24s, things that end in 24 are shooting guards in the NBA. So 124, I made Michael Jordan because, you know, after Kobe, he should be number one, right? Yeah, and then I just go through a bunch of different NBA stars there for the 24s.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that was fun. So then you’ve taken some time in advance to construct this whole rubric.

Nelson Dellis
Language, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s like a Nelson only. It’s pure custom, what does 24 mean to you? What’s one-four mean to you?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah. And that’s the most important part about coming up with visuals to remember is the more meaningful they are to you, the more rich they are with associations to you, the better they’re going to stick.

So, yes, somebody could learn my system. And, again, this is, yes, a pre-learned system so that when I’m encountering numbers in competitions or day-to-day life, I have a way to look at them and already have something set up to visualize instead.

But it is maybe not advised to take my system and learn it as is because there’s going to be a lot of images for numbers that mean nothing to you. Like, I have my personal friends in there. I have characters from books and shows that I’ve enjoyed throughout my life.

Some people might have never seen those shows, you know. Or, basketball, maybe nobody cares about basketball. And while you could, I guess, learn to visualize Michael Jordan, but why not choose something that’s, you know, you like to visualize or that’s easy for you to visualize?

Pete Mockaitis
But I think that speaks to a principle. Well, you tell me, a potential principle in terms of, if something is deeply meaningful and emotionally resonant to you, it is more memorable. Yeah, sometimes, people say, “Pete, you have the most amazing memory that you remembered this thing.” And I was like, “Well, no, that thing was very important to me in that moment of my life,” versus, I guess, for everyone else, was just like, “Yeah, whatever.”

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, exactly. Our brains are designed to remember novel things that stick out, and then the stuff that’s every day, commonplace. Like, it decides usually to drop that information. It treats it like noise.

And if you think kind of evolutionarily way back when, our brain was designed to remember these novel things, because it usually was tied to survival, right? Like, “This plant here has this pattern on it,” visual, “if I eat this, I will die because it’s poisonous with this pattern on it,” right? So simple things like that.

Nowadays, there is so much information, I think our primitive brain doesn’t do a very good job of isolating the things that are actually important because it’s not so tied to survival anymore, versus things that are noise.

Even though you may have the intention of you’re completely interested in this thing, your brain might be not so convinced, you know? And so it doesn’t stick, even though you’re paying full attention to it.

So it does start with things that you’re more interested in, that are paying attention to, tend to be memorized better, but it’s a complicated world out there, and our brain is trying to figure it out.

So if you can tap into kind of its evolutionary traits, which is we remember pictures that are associative and filled with sensory information and are meaningful, those are the things that you’re going to remember.

A great example is like, think of 9/11, right? We all remember where we were, what we were doing, sometimes even what we ate that day, what we were wearing that day, what somebody said that day, and that’s because that day was all of those things.

It was memorable. It was emotional, terrifying, scary, and it was out of the ordinary, for sure. We saw things on TV that we will never see in our lives probably, so it sticks out. Versus, you know, last Tuesday, what did you do?

Probably went to work. Did the exact same thing you usually do. Maybe a slight variation here and there, but nothing to the effect of something that dramatically different.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we learned, your subtitle is “Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More.” We talked about a hack for numbers, which is kind of interesting.

But I’m guessing for your person who is interested in becoming awesome at their job, memory contests are not their job, but you’ve got some goodies for us. Tell us, what’s sort of your main message or big idea in the book, Everyday Genius?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, so the main point of the book is that I believe that there are plenty of mental abilities that we can train and learn that are associated with genius. And in the process of learning them and mastering them, you tap into that and could even convince yourself that you have a higher intellect, that you are genius, or can tap into genius from time to time.

What I learned over the years doing the memory thing, I didn’t have a background in memory techniques. I had an average memory, but I learned about them. I trained them obsessively, to a point where I could win these competitions and do break records and such. But it wasn’t a gift I was born with.

And that was always an amazing thing that, “Oh, wow. I thought memory was a fixed thing. And that super smart people had good memories and dumb people had bad memories,” right? But it’s not like that. It’s memory is a skill. And that was a huge thing for me to kind of unlearn.

And then, over the years, doing 10,000 digits of pi or 20 decks of playing cards in an hour, crazy feats of memory, people will throw out that label of genius just because they don’t understand it or don’t think it’s possible.

And I hate that. I’m not a genius. Like, I’m just like anybody else. I just have a skill that I learned. And I could teach you how to do this skill, and the person down the street, how to do this skill.

So genius is definitely a subjective term, ultimately, you know? People use it very flippantly. If they see something that looks smart, you consider someone smart, but that might not be the end of the story. Someone might not actually be as smart as you think. They just showed some quality of intelligence in a moment, in some situation. but I think we all can kind of uncover that.

And that’s what the book explores, the different pockets of mental abilities that can be taught and learned if you spend a bit of time on them, or understood how they worked. And then you can have some fun with it, right?

You can do it for show. You can do it for improving your life. You can do it to just be a better person. It’s up to what you what you want to do with it, but we all have access to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you lay out a few core skills of genius. Can you share those with us?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, so I started the book off, the first half of the book kind of laying this foundation, which, and again, this is largely my opinion, but I think many people might agree that memory is a cornerstone of genius.

I think if you have a good memory, you can do a lot with that to do some genius kinds of abilities. So that’s talked about at the beginning of the book. And in tandem with that, long-term learning, better study tactics. So being able to take your memory and use it for the long-term.

Reading faster. I think if you can read more, that’s how you learn more. That’s how you learn more about the world. So if you can consume more written content, more books, you can increase your knowledge base.

I also talk about focus and attention. So if you can master the ability to hone in on something when it counts and to block out distractions, you, of course, can put more efforts into learning things or outputting more, right?

And then, using those foundational techniques, I go into more nuanced parts of genius. Social genius, like how to interact with others around you. Mental calculations, so being able to calculate with numbers faster. Creativity, problem solving, even in the last chapter, it’s a little woo-woo out there, but intuition.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, that’s a lovely lineup. Well, let’s hear, when it comes to, let’s talk about memory and social at the same time, if I may. How can we do a better job of remembering people’s names and faces?

Because I think that can make a huge impression in terms of like, “Oh, wow, like that person, he remembered my name and he said it to me. He seemed happy to see me.” It’s just like it skyrockets your likability real quick. So give us some hacks for this one.

Nelson Dellis
I mean, Dale Carnegie said that the most interesting person is the most interested person. And I think there’s nothing more than, bigger than, or showing more interest than if you remember somebody’s name. And it’s just a little memory trick, right?

And it’s such a small thing, it’s just this little word, sometimes a longer word, but a word that represents this person, but it’s so powerful and so meaningful. So I treat it as this very special, delicate thing that a person can present to me.

And I want to know this thing. I want to store it in my mind because I know how powerful it could be. And so memory techniques will serve you perfectly for this situation. And, again, tapping into what I mentioned about the numbers, you’re taking some piece of information. It’s not a number this time. It’s this word, this label of a human that’s in front of you, and turning it into a meaningful picture.

And so what that typically means is you hear a name, hopefully, maybe, but sometimes maybe not, it reminds you of something. Maybe a person you know, close to you, or a celebrity, or someone, an athlete, whatever has that same name. You can think of that person. There’s a picture suddenly in your mind for that name now.

Or, maybe if you don’t, maybe if you can take a syllable, the first syllable of the name, or a couple of the syllables, and those individual atoms of the name, maybe come up with a picture, create a picture for you. Like Nelson, maybe you think of Nelson Mandela, okay?

Maybe you don’t, maybe you’ve never heard the name before. So what could you do? Well, Nell, Son, okay, maybe Nell makes you think of like a nail, like a hammering nail. And then Son, sun in the sky.

So both are pictures, right? Either Nelson Mandela, even maybe Nelson from the Simpsons, if you’re a Simpsons fanatic, he’s a character on the show, or you have this image of a nail being driven into the sun. So that’s a representative thing for the name. That’s a little more tangible than this collection of letters that’s somewhat abstract.

The next thing is to find a way to always be able to reliably pull it back when you need it, pull it out of this person when you have to call them that name to remember it. And that’s where this other part of memory is super important, which is how we organize and store information.

There are methods to do this, and we don’t really think about it when we try to remember something. But one of the techniques, and this applies for names, is anchoring it to something that will be helpful to retrieve it.

And for names, it’s the person. The person is who’s going to show up, whether it’s online in the form of a picture or in front of you at a party. They are the one that shows up, and at that point is when you usually have to remember their name, right?

So you can attach it or anchor it to a physical feature. I think that’s the best way to do it because you’re usually looking at the person in the face, so why not choose something that you notice on the person’s face?

So whether it’s a big nose, like a five o’clock shadow, a big forehead. I’m just pointing out my flaws here. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even have to be a flaw. It’s just whatever you notice. Maybe they have pretty eyes or like a little dimple or a little wrinkle, whatever.

And you could come up with a story or some kind of way to attach the image to that feature. The weirder, the better, the crazier, the better, but that’s what makes it memorable, unforgettable.

So if I imagine Nelson Mandela jumping off the edge of my huge nose, the next time you see me and my big nose, you’re going to think, “Oh, there’s Nelson Mandela jumping off his nose. Nelson.” You say this all in your mind though. You don’t say this out loud. You can get into some trouble there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, talking about getting into trouble, I’m wondering, like if I did choose your five o’clock shadow, and then you showed up clean-shaven, like am I out of luck, like, “Oops”?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I would lean towards not choosing things that could change but, again, yeah, somebody could get a facelift, too, and then what do do, right? But I honestly think that the technique is really good for in the moment, getting the information in your mind quickly.

And then a big part of being able to remember it, say, the next time is a bit of review. So when you’re learning the person’s name and interacting with this person and talking to them, or you’re perusing around the party, like schmoozing, learning other people’s names.

When you come back or say goodbye to that person, or maybe you look around the room and you see that person, tell yourself, “Okay, this person, that was Nelson, okay,” you review. Like, we need to review things to remember them for the long term.

The technique I just said is very good for getting information in your mind quickly, and it often imprints for quite a while. But if you truly want to remember names for a long time, you have to be super intentional about all of it. You have to review it.

I do a tremendous amount of review for the people I meet. I’m a different story because, as a memory champion, of course, everybody expects me to remember everybody’s name. So there’s a lot more riding on me remembering a name than most people.

But I keep, like, a name journal, so when I meet people after the event or the party or whatnot, the meeting, I always keep track of the mnemonics, and the names, and the people and the context of those people, and I review that from time to time.

And some of those people in that book, I will never see again. They’re just filling up pages in my name book for no reason. But in the off chance I bump into one of those people, and I can say their name months later, years later, it’s so powerful, right?

They’ll think like, “Wow, that person remembered me? Whoa, I must have made an impression,” or, “What an interesting person. Wow! It shows a lot that he thought about me,” and who knows what they’ll think, but it’s usually a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, now can you give us a hack for just learning better, in general. Like, I’m trying to pick up a skill, whatever that might be. It’s coding. It’s AI. It’s copywriting. I’m trying to figure out some new stuff.

Nelson Dellis
So now you’re getting into the process of learning, right? And so to learn, obviously you got to have techniques to remember things quicker. That helps. The review part is so much more important because, if you truly want to know something to your core, it needs to be almost automatic, right?

So there’s this idea of two kinds of memory. There’s declarative memory, where you can pull things out, think about it, and then declare it. Kind of like remembering somebody’s name. And then there’s procedural, which is another fancy way of saying muscle memory.

So let’s take the example of remembering somebody’s name. This is a good example. When I’m learning somebody’s name for the first time, I’m using this technique, right, to store their name. And then, when I see them, I’m going to have this effort to kind of collect it, to declare it.

But there’s a point where, let’s say, you know, you just started this job, you started working with this one person, you learned their name using a technique, and you use it every day, and they become close to you, you become friends. You’ve worked together for five years.

In five years, let’s say you are very close to this person, you know this person’s name, you don’t have to declare it anymore. They are Bob instantly. Like, it’s part of you. You don’t even have to think about it. Like, think about your siblings and your mother, like you know their name. You don’t have to pull it out of your brain. It’s just there, right?

That’s procedural. It’s something that’s rehearsed so much that you just know it, right? So the goal is, with long-term learning, whether you’re learning a language or some programming language, you want to get it to a point where you don’t have to sit there and get it out of your brain.

But there will be a point at the beginning where that has to happen. That’s just how our brains work, unfortunately. So the question is, “How do we hack getting things from our declarative, which is always the first step, into a procedural process, into muscle memory?”

And, unfortunately, while declarative has tons of little hacks, all these little memory techniques, and that’s what all of chapter one is about, the procedural isn’t as easy to hack. The best strategies we have are active recall. So actively trying to access the information in our mind.

So by closing your eyes, and you don’t have to close your eyes, but just to prove the point further, you know, when you’re trying to get the information out, the more you access it, the more you kind of fire those neurons, those connections, the better it’ll become automatic.

And that shouldn’t be a surprise to many people, right? The more you do something mentally, the more automatic it becomes. You strengthen those neural pathways and then it becomes more automatic.

But a lot of us, when we study, we think about it wrong, right? We think we have our notes in front of us and we just look at it again and again and again. And you feel like you have this sense of familiarity with the information. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got it.”

You’re going even through it and you’re maybe even ahead of where you’re reading saying, “Yes,” and saying it before you read it. But that’s not active recall because you have the information in front of you. It’s not true declarative, right?

So if you can put that information away and struggle to get it out, which it always is a bit of a challenge, but that’s where the magic happens, right? When you do that active recall, go through that process of the nitty-gritty of pulling it out, that’s where you are building these neural pathways, strengthening these neural pathways to procedural.

Space repetition, so there’s plenty of studies around this where, if you are doing everything, studying for something all in one session, well, yes, you could use memory techniques and it might work for the short term. In the long term, you will forget more of it.

Our brain likes to work on things for a little bit, take a break, and then come back, because I guess there’s that, in that moment when you come back to it, you do have to kind of struggle with it to get it back to where it was. And I think that repetitiveness of, or that repeated action of going back to it, almost starting a bit more from scratch is where you strengthen those neural pathways again.

And then the last tip on that is something called interleaving. So if you can, in a study session, let’s say, interleave, in a similar set of what you’re studying, different kinds of things.

So let’s say if you’re studying for a language, and you do a lot of problems or questions or quizzes or testing yourself on verb conjugations, and then maybe you just do straight up vocabulary training, and then maybe, I don’t know, you study basic phrases or something like that.

They’re all different, right, but they all have to do with you learning language. But if you can go in between and kind of alternate, maybe every 15, 20 minutes, that is proved to be better than just studying for one big chunk of time, say, verbs, right?

So we found that if we switch up the task, but keeping it in the same domain, actually we learn better. And I think it’s a similar principle to space repetition. But, yeah, it’s a tedious process to learn. But if you understand how to hack the brain in that sense, you can learn more efficiently and faster.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting with active recall, in some ways, you need a little bit of a prompt in terms of like, “What is that thing I’m retrieving?” And so, I suppose there’s many ways you can do this. Like, people use flashcards, or I guess now with AI, you can just say, “Hey, this is what I’m trying to learn. Ask me questions now, one at a time. Go.” And so then you’re practicing the active retrieval.

But I’m hearing you that the key point there is I’m not looking at the thing. I am hiding, I’m covering up the thing, and I am depending on my ability to pull it out from the depths of my memory.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, that’s better for learning, and there’s different ways to do it. As you mentioned AI, you know, it’s proven to be, or increasingly been proven to be detrimental to our memories because we’re doing a lot of cognitive tasks, using the tool rather than ourselves.

But, I think, as a sparring partner, as a coach, or a quizzer, I think it could be super powerful because it can give you all sorts of ways to do that active recall. Another great method, I don’t know if it was invented by him, but it’s been coined as named by him, it’s the Feynman method.

So Richard Feynman was a legendary physicist who was really well-known for being able to explain things, complicated things, in physics really well. And the technique is, basically, when you’re learning something, try to explain it to somebody else in the most basic way possible.

And as you explain it, you’ll quickly find out what you truly know and don’t, and it’s a way of kind of refining the weaknesses and strengths of what you’ve studied. And, again, it’s active recall in disguise.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, now let’s hear about focus in terms of just being able to hunker down and do stuff.

Nelson Dellis
Well, in this day and age, it’s extremely difficult to focus, and so I feel like a big part of finding how to pay attention to something is figuring out what are the points of distraction for you, and being ruthless in kind of eliminating them preemptively.

Thinking about there’s, like, this planner in your mind that says, “Okay, in the future, Nelson needs to focus on this. So I’m going to make sure that, when he’s working, the distractions are at bay.”

And there’s plenty of tips on how to do this. It depends on what is the source of your distraction, but, oftentimes, it’s the internet or your phone or some device. So blocking that in some case, maybe going analog during a session, putting your phone out of sight while you work on a task.

The goal with paying attention, you want to have this deep work at your disposal. And oftentimes, we’re really doing what’s called shallow work, where we’re like low value, low focus tasks that don’t really push you forward, like you’re checking your email, you’re responding to messages. You’re not doing the deep work that you need to do, the deep focus.

And it often comes to your environment. Like, put yourself in a place isolated and work on this problem or thing that you need to get done, and you’ll have tremendous focus on that thing.

Another thing is we get tired, especially nowadays, where we’re so used to being stimulated all the time. It’s not our faults. Devices around us are designed to distract us as their main purpose.

And so, if you can put these things at bay, but also train your mind to work for longer and longer periods of time without being interrupted or needing to kind of satisfy yourself with dopamine hits somehow, so there’s this idea called a Pomodoro technique, where you can set a timer, preferably an analog timer so you don’t have your phone near you, but for 20, 25 minutes.

And the idea is that you work intensely for 20, 25 minutes, and that’s doable, right? If you can say that to yourself, “I’m just going to work hard, focus on this one thing, nothing else for 20 minutes,” and then you get a five minute break to do something mindless.

And then you dive in back again. Do another Pomodoro session for maybe 20, 25 minutes again. And you can stack these, and then every maybe three or four, you can take a longer break.

And it turns out it’s a lot easier to get work done. And, oftentimes, you maybe get started with 20 minutes, and you end up working for an hour because you just needed to get started.

So, oftentimes, the focus thing is a trained ability. And the more you work on it and the more you set yourself up to have success without getting distracted, the longer you’ll find that you can focus on things more intently. And when you can do that, you can get more work done, you can have better memory, read more, all those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I’ve heard with this, it’s cool, we can practice, we can get better and better. I’ve heard that the quote, “human limits”, given ultradian rhythms, is something like 90 minutes. Like, you probably need a break by then.

Although, occasionally, I don’t know, every once in a while, I get uber fascinated by something and it goes way longer. So what’s your take on this one?

Nelson Dellis
I agree. I mean, I think we all will get burned out at some point. And so I think, over time, I think prepping for that eventual mental deterioration in the session by breaking it up, it’s like in a workout, you have a lot of reps to do. It’s tempting to just get them all out of the way, but you might crash pretty quick versus breaking them up early into sets of 10.

Something that seems too easy, but you could do 10 at a time, and you could almost never stop, right? So I think the same kind of idea applies mentally that, even though it seems like, “Oh, I’m going to get an hour and a half of studying in,” it might be better to break that up into multiple shorter sessions so that you can actually be productive, fully productive, really not mentally fatigued for longer, and make more progress that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And this speed reading, how much of that is a real thing?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I’m careful about that term, and even though I call the chapter’s title “Speed reading,” I quickly changed it to “Focus reading” because I am aware of some of the associations or the connotations with speed reading.

There’s a lot of history in scam-y programs and bogus claims of people being able to speed read thousands of words per minute. The average person is somewhere between 300, 400 words per minute.

And so what my chapter is truly about is learning how to optimize or make your reading more efficient, and having the skills to be able to turn up the dial of your speed and to turn it down, right, because not everything needs to be speed read or read fast.

There are going to be things you just need to drink right and chug, versus like a fine wine where you’d rather smell it, take a sip, enjoy it, maybe even go back and have another glass, you know?

So I think reading is really up to what the person is trying to get out of it, and being able to kind of work with how they know their mind works and how to read better, and remember what you read better using some basic strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what are the strategies?

Nelson Dellis
Well, there’s a big part of, again, paying attention, so putting yourself in the right frame of mind to read, having an intention to read. A lot of people want to read a lot of things, but they just pile up books.

So being more intentional about getting through the books you’d like to actually read, which means making time for it. There are so many things that we spend time on that do not advance us in our books.

And if you can just make it more of a thing that you purposefully do every day, whether that means you have to carry a book around with you all the time, I always do that, or you have always got a book by your bedside or on your desk, and you take five minutes here, even just to get like a little chapter out of the way.

You’re always reading in some form. It’s like what you do. Just like maybe you’ve made working out an exercise just as important in your life. Reading should be as well. And I think there are so many benefits to reading. So it’s hard to tell me that maybe that’s not a good thing to read so much.

There are some other more physical, tangible techniques. For example, if you want to increase your reading speed, some suggestions in the book are, if you use some kind of pointer, I know it sounds very infantile, but what happens to most readers is, if they don’t have some kind of guide, they’re often subject to their eyes bouncing around the page or backtracking a lot.

So if you can have some pointer, whether it’s your finger, a pencil, a spaghetti noodle, I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
Uncooked, yeah.

Nelson Dellis
An uncooked spaghetti noodle, to guide your eyes across, you’ll find that you backtrack way less, if at all, and you can make more progress through the pages, the chapters that you’re trying to go for.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, when we read, we don’t read every single thing. Our eyes are constantly jumping in what’s called saccades. And if you look at somebody, for example, if you look at someone on a train looking outside of the train, you’ll see their eyes are like jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping.

That’s because it’s kind of trying to track the moving landscape. And even though the person looking out the window doesn’t feel like their eyes are like jumping like that, that’s just naturally what our eyes do. And we do it when we read as well.

And so what you can do, since we don’t need to read all the words, we’re actually skipping around a lot because we can cluster words, we can actually see things in our peripheral as well, and oftentimes we can piece together clumps of words, like just by context, right?

We know what’s going to come next, so do we actually need to read the word? Sometimes we aren’t, even though we feel like we have to. So what you can do is play around with this. I like to draw some, with pencil, some margins inside. Maybe, like, you can start kind of shallow, so maybe a half inch or an inch on each side of the page.

And then as you’re guiding yourself, you just stay between those lines and you realize that, “Oh, shoot, I’m not reading the outskirts of each line of the page. Like, I’m maybe missing hundreds of words per page if I do that,” but you still can remember and read what is on the page partly because peripheral is picking up on that, but also again, context, you can figure it out.

And so if you can even narrow that further, you find you’re just, like, reading a very central narrow part of the page, you can still read the page. It’s really fascinating and fun to play around with.

And this is just to train you, right? Like I’m not saying go through all hundreds of pages of your books and put margins. But if you can train a little bit, this purposeful practice, again makes you better, this training, you can get better at doing that kind of automatically without having to guide with your finger all the time and write these margins in there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Nelson, tell me, what are some of the top hacks that absolutely most professionals could benefit tremendously from adopting that we haven’t already covered?

Nelson Dellis
I’m a big fan of the chapter on intuition. I know it’s a less of a thing that you can kind of hold and, like, purposefully grasp in your mind the results. But I think there’s some kind of intangible thing to it where people can recognize that it’s doing something for them or not.

And so that whole chapter is about tapping into kind of, like, this gut feeling and how to listen to it better and to hone it better for things that don’t necessarily seem like they’re in your vicinity to make decisions on or perceive.

And I know that sounds a bit out there, but there are techniques out there to hone that. And I don’t want to get too deep into it because it gets a bit weird, but I think the short of it is to listen to your intuition more.

Not that it’s always correct, but if you do listen to it more and open up to it, you’ll find that it often has something important to say, whether it’s about a deal you’re about to say yes to, or some turning point in your life, or the people that you hang out with.

I think if you listen to them, you get those bouts of intuition. I think you get more information about the world, and then you can have more at your disposal, right, more information. I think about what’s happening around you can only be better.

So I’m really happy about that chapter in the book. And I encourage people to kind of explore that a little more.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think that there’s a lot to that in terms of intuition. I don’t know the neuroscience, but I think I’ve heard, or at least my hot take is that our advanced brain nervous system has just oodles of associations all over the place from all of our experiences. And sometimes it’s not yet conscious.

Like, I could not articulate why I’ve got a weird feeling or a bad feeling about this contract or this deal. And yet, there’s something to it. And I like what you said. It’s not necessarily correct, like, “Oh, absolutely, trust your guide every time. It’ll never lead you straight.” I don’t think that’s true.

But it is surfacing information, and I think it’s funny. It’s almost like, well, I’m thinking about, we had Joe Navarro, the FBI agent who does body language stuff. And I think he said it well, in terms of like, you can’t like prosecute someone based on, like, a body language situation, like, “Judge, jury, there you have it, you know? He crossed his legs at the wrong time. He’s guilty of sin.”

But what you can do is say, “Hmm, this thing right here seems worthy of additional investigation, additional resources. Let’s go search the apartment of his mom. Oh, and what do you know? We found the key item there because we listened to those clues from from the body language.”

And, likewise, I think that when you listen to your intuition, and say, “Hmm, something about this deal feels off. I’m just going to run it by a lawyer.” And the lawyer says, “Oh, my gosh, this is a terrible deal. Look at all the things you have to do, and almost nothing that they have to do. Do not sign.” It’s is like, “Oh, okay, well, it was good move that I checked my intuition.”

Or you might talk to multiple trusted advisors, and said, “Ah, yes, it could feel sketchy. But, in fact, that is just how this whole industry operates, so you got to choose. Are you down with that or are you not?”

And then I think it really can be a valuable tool or indicator to point you into where we’re going to dig deeper.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, and I think, more than anything, our brains are very logical and rational, and we tend to always think with that, and I think that’s great. I mean, we should be logical about the real world and information around us.

But our brain isn’t always, like, what we think logically. It’s not always getting it correct, you know? There are many things that can alter what we think is correct, and the brain is not quite getting it correct.

So I think this mix of having a well-founded logic in life, but also using intuition when it needs to and listening to it more often, again, not necessarily to make the decisions, but to maybe factor in as part of your decision-making can really make a difference in how you navigate your life or your job, how to be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, anything else you want to share before we hear about your favorite things?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, no, I’m so happy with this book. I always talk about memory, and over the years, I’ve just been always fascinated by the brain, clearly. And I’ve kept little notebooks of all these cool tricks, mental tricks that I’ve been taught or stumbled upon because of my memory explorations, and it’s all in this book.

And I’m so over the moon about this book. And I think it’ll help a lot of people. And it can be fun, it can be serious. You can use it in so many different ways. And so I hope people go and check it out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lovely. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Nelson Dellis
This is always changing, but this one has always stuck with me, and it’s by Albert Einstein, who I talk about a lot in the book. and it’s that, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

And I’ve always loved that because, especially coming from him, you know, you’d think like of Einstein, he just knows so much. That’s how he figured everything out, but he actually figured everything out his staple discoveries from just imagination exercises.

And oftentimes, silly ones that, like, broke the boundary of what you’re supposed to think about, I guess, for some physics examples. And that’s how innovation came about for him. And I think that’s, in general, how innovation comes out is by bending the rules, which can only happen in your imagination.

And so I think if you think that way, that it’s more valuable to have these imagination, visualization skills, which you can train and practice, it’s often more important than what you know.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I’m a bit biased, but I was a part of a study at Washington University in St. Louis, where they were, you know, there’s been memory studies forever, and people have been subject to fMRI scans to look inside the brain, but they’re largely uncomfortable machines to sit in for very long.

So, typically, studies in the past have taken a lot of large quantity of people in the machine for very short periods of time, and kind of taking averages. They’ve never really done in-depth long hours in the machine study.

So they took me, how many hours did I do? It must’ve been at least 15 to 20, maybe more. And then they have maybe 10 controls, who also volunteered. I don’t know who these people were. They must’ve been incentivized, somehow.

But anyways, the results are finally, they were published this year, and they’re trying to get it published in some well-known journals. But, ultimately, what came out of it, there’s a few things that came out of it, but one of the most striking or kind of, I don’t know, controversial, but against what most people might’ve thought is that the hippocampus for most people is where the magic happens with memory.

There’s a lot of activity when somebody is using their memory. And for a lot of the tasks they had me do in the machine, it showed a very different structure, that I’m actually not using, well, I am using my hippocampus, but I’m using more of my brain, that the pathways and the parts of my brain that I’m using when I’m memorizing is completely different than the normal person.

And this is trained, right? So the ultimate finding of the paper is that memory training literally rewires your brain. And that’s always been said, you know, anecdotally, but now there’s proof.

This is literal proof that anybody can change the way their brain works. And also that memory doesn’t fully work the way we think it does because how can Nelson here be memorizing all these sorts of crazy things, and it’s not through the conventional systems that we see when people use their memory.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Nelson Dellis
I’d have to say Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Nelson Dellis
My brain, seriously. You know, it might be easy to say, like, “Oh, I have this app for this, and then I use tech or AI for this.” But, honestly, my favorite tool is my brain, and I really try to use it whenever I can, even though there might be an easier way, more efficient way. I don’t want to lose the ability to use my brain and to think.

And I feel more terrified than ever in modern day, just because I feel like we’re losing the ability to think. We’re outsourcing it so much that I don’t know what our future looks like, honestly. So I’m loving my tool in my head that I’m purposefully using to keep it strong and to fight the trend.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Nelson Dellis
My favorite habit is just always working out early in the morning. The first thing I get out of bed, and I do some intense exercise, that, to me, I don’t even, I mean, yeah, it’s just what I’ve programmed myself to do. And if I don’t get that done, my day just is shot. When I get my workout in early, it’s just sets the tone for productivity throughout the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear them quote it back to you often?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s using your memory, being intentional about memory, and understanding that the memory is something that can be worked on. If you say to yourself that, “I don’t have a good memory. I forget names. I’m just that person who is forgetful,” yeah, sure, you’re going to be that person.

You get to decide what your memory is. And I find that’s the most profound thing people get out of my talks or my content is that the brain is malleable, and that nobody has a bad memory. They just have untrained memories. And that’s usually the nugget that changes a lot of their perception on what their brain is capable of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Nelson Dellis
Best is just to go to my website, NelsonDellis.com. You can find everything about me there, my books, my coaching, memory coaching, my YouTube channel. A lot of content out there teaching how to do this stuff, and, yeah, exploring my books. But NelsonDellis.com, you’ll find it all.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome with their jobs?

Nelson Dellis
Yes, use your brain more. I know it can be challenging right now, and oftentimes, you use it and you’re maybe let down, but it’s, again, it’s plastic. It can be molded. It can be trained. So the more you use it, the stronger it gets. So give it a shot. You won’t regret it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Nelson, thank you.

Nelson Dellis
Thank you so much.