Making your own story

A good way to generate long-term retention is building a great story. Our autobiographical memory is usually very good, and we remember the stories we own for a long time.
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Who should use it?

Most of us can remember stories very well. Some of us remember jokes, while others remember gossip, fantastic tales and other stories. You should really think which stories you remember the best, and try to use that sort of stories for learning. Storymaking is relatively slow process, it is great for intuition but not so great for small details and facts. It is best to use sories when long-term retention is more important than learning speed, and intuition is more important than specific details. It is also good to supplement more structured memorization process with great stories that improve long-term retention and fun of learning.

Building stories for learning

Some subjects are complex and highly hierarchical. Other subjects are simpler and can be formed into a story. Typical stories do not capture all aspects of the subject, and try to capture and generate an intuitive understanding of the issues. When I was learning accounting, the professor compared his job to a nurse with a newborn baby. Cache flow is the food and poo of the baby. The balance is the baby’s weight. Sales and revenues the weight gained by the kid. This simple story is the most memorable aspect of my business studies, and an intuitive understanding I use since…

Stories from examples

Most of the examples we get are already stories. When we learn about a historical event from the viewpoint of a participant, or learn a legal precedent involving several parties, or learn a successful marketing campaign, we learn simple stories designed to build deeper intuition. It is possible to map some of the more complex subjects we handle by simple stories describing them. If you have trouble remembering these stories, you probably do not empathize with them. Try imagining the situation from the point of view of the participants, what they feel and why the particular story is the most important thing for them.

Convincing by stories

Stories are very convincing. They bypass mental filters each of us has and educates us in subtle ways. Having many stories and many examples, you can easily change the opinions of other people. One of the convincing story making mechanisms is questioning different people and taking some points of view ad absurdum. This is one of the basic Socratic methods. You can imagine arguments with various historic figures defending their ideas. If your story will be good enough, you will remember all of the arguments of all the parties. Using particular stories to convey ideas is good not only for humanitarian subjects but also for math, physics, biology etc.

Use cases

When trying to remember a technical paradigm, it is convenient to remember a story that brought this paradigm to life, e.g. use case. The technical solutions we currently have were typically generated due to pain and financial investment associated with very specific projects, that would fail otherwise. By finding and memorizing the right stories, we improve our technical intuition and remember the relevant issues for a long time.

How to build stories?

Typically stories start from an image. Quite often we can visualize the whole story as an animation or a movie. To remember the story really well we should feel empathy to the hero of the story. A good story usually has a build-up describing the context, culminations that surprise us and demonstrates the main principles, and epilog where we get the emotional reward for the story. Occasionally there are monologs or dialogs showcasing the main ideas. The dialogs are often very graphic to ensure we remember the story. Typically we do not start from scratch, but already have some sort of basic story outline from the background information, what we need is embellish this information with colorful details, make it emotional and exciting, so we remember it. It helps to have great teachers and try to mimic the way they build their stories. Fortunately, all of us had great teachers at some point in our life, and most great teachers rely on stories as their main tool. Try to think how they succeeded and copy that behavior.

Beliefs and justifications

When we memorize the stories, it is important to think not in terms of specific actions and their results, but in terms of beliefs and justifications which drive the characters behave the way they do. The conflicts between various belief systems make for interesting stories we learn from. Try to have a conflict within your stories.

Speeding up the stories

Our perception of time depends on the amount of interesting events within the relevant timespan. We can condense a number of events, replacing the story text with animation, and pack a long story in split-second sequence. Alternatively, we can add details to each scene in our stories and make them perceptually longer.

Reviewing the stories

We should review our own stories from time to time using flashcards or similar method. If we write down our stories and illustration to them we need to review them fewer times. As a rule, the more time we invest in creating our stories, the less time we need reviewing them: we will remember them anyway.

Summary

Generate memorable stories to remember specific examples, analyze conficting views and generate intuitive understanding. The more time you invest creating and embellishing the stories, the less likely you will be to forget them in the long run.