PSTM: Human Frailty, LIfe, and the Major System

The Idea: Our brains suck. You know it.

You and I forget it all the time, because sometimes our brains seem like marvelous creations. You remember the smell of your 2nd grade classroom. You instantly get transported back in therapy to that one test you didn’t pass over state name abbreviations and how you couldn’t go to the subsequent pizza party (Damn you all, still bitter)

But you fumble over someone’s name. Someone right in front of you.
My name is Andrew, and I work with another manager named Adam, and I’ve pretty much pre-forgiven every employee for calling me Adam in the heat of the shift.

The tiniest distraction and we’re prone to wrecking cars, forgetting our garage codes, and stumbling over common words that somehow left our minds.

We often feel that this is a personal curse. We should be better, different. Maybe if I studied more, and paid more attention and meditated just a bit more, I could be mindful enough to grab ahold of all the slipperiness of life. Maybe then I could transcend my mortal limits.

I do think there is another way though.

A gentler way to accept ourselves and move forward.

You’d have to read the advice part to see my proposal.

The Advice: Stop fighting your nature and lean in. I’ve become obsessed with not dwelling on the frailties of my mind, but amplifying its strengths.

Example: Your brain does not do a good job holding onto random numbers. 3.1415 and 1.618 mean something if you’re into math, but our brains let them just slip away, especially if we are not nerds.

The glorious thing about the Major System, my current shiny new tool, is that it takes cold, stale numbers, and turns them into words.

Every number is given a sound. You take those sounds and make words with them

3.1415 becomes Mad riedel (picture an angry wine glass maybe?)
1.618 becomes Dodge Dove (Imagine a Dove flying at you that you have to dodge).

When you overcome the initial burden of memorizing the phonetic correspondence, you can very quickly tie numbers to words, and your brain is way better at remembering places, shocking pictures, and interesting things vs cold hard numbers.

It has been a GOD SEND

Hope you like it.
Link HERE if you want to learn more about it.