Memory Interview: Everett Chew - Rising American Mental Athlete
This is the first interview of a series of interviews where I am seeing how improving your memory can change your life like it did for the people I am interviewing. I will be interviewing top mental athletes (Memorizers) and people who are using memory techniques/mnemonics in their daily lives. When I interview mental athletes, I am going to ask them about them competing in memory competitions, BUT I am going to go beyond competitions and see how having an improved memory affects their lives.
In this interview, I had the chance to talk to Everett Chew, one of America's rising mental athlete, and he shared a lot of great information with me. We talked about memory competitions, how memory techniques has helped in him in school, and the greater scope of memory improvement. Watch the whole interview below! Oh and you don't want to miss the last question I asked him...... It was the most important one!
I will do a quick text summary of some of the question we covered in the interview below the video. I am going to paraphrase Everett's answers as well just to make it more condense.
Tell me about yourself.
I am home schooled so I do a lot of my school work at home, and I generally have more flexibility that's why I have been able to pursue memory and memory competitions. I like sports such as basketball, ping pond, and table tennis. I am part of Trail Life where we do a lot of backpacking and hiking. I am into hiking and backpacking in my spare time. My favorite subjects are math and science.
How much time do you spend memory training?
I try to train 30 min. to an hour a day. The cool thing about memory training is when I am not in the mood, I just can't train. I only train when I actually feel like it and it makes it a lot more fun. If I am not in the mood then my scores will go way down. I train in the afternoon and evening after I finish my other activities.
How has memory training changed school for you?
I found memory techniques are very helpful for history and biology since I have a lot of memorization in these subjects. Before memory techniques/mnemonics, I would use rote repetition and just repeat the info over and over. This is what most people do who don't know memory techniques. It's painful. Learning information was boring but after learning memory techniques it was fun and I could learn info for my subjects faster. Memory techniques have changed the way I learn and speeds it up.
What was the hardest problem or challenge you faced when dealing with memory techniques/mnemonics?
The most difficult thing for me was improving my scores. I learned the memory techniques very easily. I got my card time down to 2:22 secs after 15-30 days of training and I just couldn't memorize a deck of cards any faster. I think everyone hits this challenge in some part of their training haha So what pushed me over the edge was changing systems and the plateau breaker. This was the biggest challenge for me trying to figure out how do I improve my score and be more consistent.
What do you want to achieve in memory competitions?
I hope to be able to compete in memory competitions for quite a while. My dream goal is to become an International Master of Memory. You have to score 6000 points in a competition and meet some requirements. This shouldn't be to hard as long as I train. I want to be the best memorize in the USA. And I hoped to be ranked in the top 20 by next year.
How has memory changed or affected your life or yourself?
Memory training really develops your creativity. I am generally not a creative person in the arts but improving my memory really helped me. I can come up with more creative solutions like a lot of math problems I do need problem solving skills. you can't just see the problem in one way. You have to look at it in many different angles and that is essentially what memory training is. You are connecting information together and trying to find the best way to do it.
So you got a quick review of what we talked about in the interview. But you should listen to the full interview so you can hear everything we talked about because you will get new perspectives on memory improvement, memory techniques, and memory training. Also you won't miss out on the last question I asked!
The next person I am interviewing has accomplished incredible things and has a powerful story about how memory techniques and memory competitions saved his life... Don't miss the next interview!
Let me know below who you want to hear from next!