When You Want To Get Good At

Experts Step Outside Their Comfort Zone And Study Themselves Failing.

Truman Capote Famously Claimed To Have Nearly Absolute Recall Of Dialogue And Used His Prodigious Memory As An Excuse Never To Take Notes Or Use A Tape Recorder, But I Suspect His Memory Claims Were Just A Useful Cover To Invent Dialogue Whole Cloth.

Our Lives Are Structured By Our Memories Of Events. Event X Happened Just Before The Big Paris Vacation. I Was Doing Y In The First Summer After I Learned To Drive. Z Happened The Weekend After I Landed My First Job. We Remember Events By Positioning Them In Time Relative To Other Events.

To Improve, We Must Watch Ourselves Fail, And Learn From Our Mistakes.

To The Extent That Experience Is The Sum Of Our Memories And Wisdom The Sum Of Experience, Having A Better Memory Would Mean Knowing Not Only More About The World, But Also More About Myself.