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The Story


On 29 August 2006, my alarm woke me up in London at 6am, precisely 3.5 hours before the 1st event of day 2 of the World Memory Championships. My mind was still buzzing after a very successful, yet scary, first day of competition, and my approximate 2 hours of sleep had to be enough to get me through the second day of competition. My Nokia 3210 had been my handy companion (alarm clock and memory timer) for many months, but it had a battery life the size of a canary’s knee cap! Quickly I plugged it in to keep charging as I proceeded to get ready for the competition.

Fast forward 3.5 hours… There I sat, quietly at my desk, ready for the first event of the day, the 5 minute numbers event. The aim: to see how many random numbers competitors could memorise in 5 minutes. I reached down to get my stop watch and at that exact moment the distinct image of my mobile phone still charging at home jumped into my “trying to be calm” head. I had left the flipping thing behind. Serious schoolboy error…I am not kidding when I say that this is the equivalent of going skydiving without a parachute, or scuba diving without an oxygen tank. Yes, a stop watch is that crucial to memorising huge amounts of information quickly and accurately!

What did I do next? I unsuccessfully rushed around like a chicken without a head, asking each of the 33 contestants from 15 countries, if they had a spare stop watch to lend me. My last attempt at finding a stop watch involved running, with my tail between my legs, to the front of the auditorium to ask Phil Chambers, the adjudicator, if he had a spare one. Phil silenced the crowd and spoke the following words that I will never, ever forget.

He said “Good morning everybody and welcome to day 2 of the World Memory Championships here in London. Just before we begin, does anyone have a spare stopwatch?” At which he decided to pause, turned his head to me and gave me a rather pathetic look, and then said “Because Daren has forgotten his stopwatch at home!" Did I mention that the event was televised to over 100 million people across the globe that year?!

In 2000 I desperately wanted to go and study but did not have the funds to do so. My parents’ combined yearly salary at the time was a mere R28 800 ($4114) so I decided to look for people to partner with me, by helping me go off and study.

I didn’t know where to start until inspiration hit me like a ton of bricks at 2am one morning as I was lying in my cabin at a leadership and outdoor camp where I was working at the time. I was inspired to write personal letters to five top businessmen in my neighbourhood, and sent out a further 40+ standardised letters to various companies and business owners across South Africa.

I didn’t “beg” for money, but offered a value proposition to each business and business owner. Each letter was written from the depth of my heart and was written in a way that showed I meant business. I sent the 40+ letters by post, and personally delivered the other five to top businessmen whom I had come to respect over the years. For some reason I had a really good feeling about one man by the name of Greg Till. Four days later I received a call from Mr Till who said that he wanted to meet me to discuss the proposal.

I remember running down the beat-up dirt road where I was staying, screaming at the top of my lungs. One small whisper of a thought and a good feeling about Mr Till might just result in my dream coming true. I didn’t mention: I wasn’t wanting to go to some local college, but to one of South Africa’s top universities, the University of Cape Town…1665 kilometers from home, at a cost of an estimated R40 000 per year for four years.

A dream worth chasing - a battle I really wanted to fight. If I had saved every cent from the job I was currently at, it would have taken me two and a half years to pay back just one year’s fees.

I arrived at Mr Till’s home at 5pm sharp. We sat down in his living room and he started asking me question after question about my dreams, my plans, and why he should invest his time and money in me. It was by far the hardest interview I have ever had. He told me that this was definitely not a free ride and that I would be hearing from his lawyers within a week.

In my mind I thought I had just gotten myself into a 10 year payback contract which would have officially ended my freedom and life right there and then.

A week later I received a letter from Mr Till’s lawyers saying that Mr Till would pay 100% of my first year’s fees, books, travel, accommodation, food, spending money…EVERYTHING, and my second to fourth years’ fees would be determined by how well I did in my first year. The only catch? I had to perform. If I failed just one subject he would withdraw all funding and I would be on my own.

My first maths test was just 3 weeks after arriving at university in my first year. I thought that by putting in an estimated 70+ hours of work I would pass, but only got 37%, which happened to be one of the highest marks I received for the class tests that year.

I had never been an academic but soon became known as the guy who studied 8 hours extra every day, on top of going to all the lectures, and some lectures twice a day! Flip…come to think of it, I was actually quite a nerd in my first year! But I had a goal, and a man who I respected believed in me.

One of the biggest secrets to developing a near perfect memory is to have a big enough reason or desire to know whatever you wish to learn. The greater your desire, the greater the likelihood of the information being lodged into your long term memory bank.

The Threat of Failing Forced me to Work More Intelligently!

There were so many tests and exams that I failed outright, after putting in hour after hour of sweat and tears. It was an incredibly difficult and lonely time in my life and I got to a stage where I just could not put in more time - things needed to change drastically.

The night before my first year final maths exam, I broke down in tears as I honestly believed that there was more chance of my falling pregnant than passing the exam. I was so emotional because I had literally put two-thirds of each month’s spending allowance into extra maths lessons and had been attending these extra lessons religiously from the second week of the year! I had also paid half a month’s salary the previous year to study Matric maths again, as I had to get above 50%,.which was the minimum requirement for the course I wanted to study.

However, that evening something incredible happened. I met with a friend who had a yearly aggregate of 88% and it was not rocket science that he thought and studied differently to me! The paper we were writing the next day was a multiple choice test, so we decided to take the past 2 years’ tests and study them. My friend sat with me and showed me step by step how to do each of the questions.

He didn’t go on and on about the theory behind each question, he just showed me what I needed to do to get to the correct answer - a concept that was totally unfamiliar to me! Little did I know that I actually walked into the exam needing 74% just to pass the year. If I had known that, I don’t know if I’d have had the faith to attempt the exam.

As I turned over the paper and looked at the examples, I was totally amazed at what I saw. Each and every example was in the same format as the ones my friend and I had practised the night before- the only difference was that the numbers were different. I had tapped into someone else’s thinking and this was about to save my bacon - in a HUGE way. I managed to get 21 answers correct out of 23 and walked out an hour early, having cracked 92%! Did I mention that I also ran down the road outside the exam room, screaming my lungs out at sheer disbelief and relief at the fact that I had somehow pulled it off!

Up until my third year, I was averaging about 35–45% for essays for my major subject, Organisational Psychology. Each essay was around 1800 words, but despite putting in between 15 and 20 hours per essay, I was still failing.

The insight I received from my next strategic move opened up a whole new world that I never knew existed. This revelation, once acted upon, literally enabled me to reduce my learning time by a third, and caused my marks to shoot through the roof to 80%+! Here’s what happened. I met with a Doctorate student by the name of Marcel who knew exactly what students needed to do to get a 1st class pass of 75% and above. I had met with many other tutors, but never one like Marcel.

She sat me down and told me EXACTLY what I needed to do in order to succeed in any future assignment. She even whipped out this grid-like thing that compartmentalised the different scenarios of possible essays. It felt like I had been let into an Alibaba’s cave of “How to Ace any Essay with Ease.”

I now prepared my work in a way that would get me good marks, and because I knew exactly what to do, it not only added an immense amount of focus to my work, but enabled me to get it done in a fraction of the time. Now that’s working intelligently! It took me one term to perfect what I had learnt, and 2 out of my 4 essays got tied-highest marks in the class of over 150 students.

In my 4th year, after applying some of the key techniques and strategies that you will learn with us, I managed to learn 100 pages of work in just 3.5 hours and cracked 73%, the third highest mark in the class!

Where did These Strategies Come From?

I decided to take learning strategically to a WHOLE new level! I studied about 50 top memory and study skills websites on the Internet and read books written by some of the most successful memory competitors on the world-wide memory circuit. I even flew across to the UK to meet a man by the name of Michael Tipper who had won the silver medal at the World Memory Championships. Michael has helped over 1 million people around the globe study more effectively, and he was mentored by the 8 times World Memory Champion, Dominic O’Brien. I flew to London to meet with Michael roughly every 6 months for about 3 years, and then started competing in international memory competitions.

I am incredibly grateful for having had some of the world’s greatest memory gurus as my personal teachers. Many of these memory giants are way smarter than I am. My passion has been to learn from all of them and make this information available and accessible to people like you.

My all-time favourite memory story is about my friend Ben Pridmore, who I mentioned earlier, and who was the World Memory Champion in 2004, 2008 and 2009.

The first time he memorized a deck of shuffled playing cards it took him 48 minutes. His method? Most probably the same way you are learning. This happens to be the most common, yet most ineffective way to learn information. Many refer to this as “parrot fashion or rote learning”, but it is the equivalent of trying to cut down a tree using a hammer!

The next day Ben saw something that totally blew his world when he watched Andi Bell memorise a deck of playing cards in just 34 seconds. Ben knew there had to be a better way of doing things and after learning the secrets of how to develop a world class memory, he subsequently became the World Memory Champion. In 2007 he became the fastest man alive to memorise a randomly shuffled deck of playing cards in just 26.28 seconds!

Every single person I compete against has some form of weakness when it comes to memory.

I am known for forgetting random things like my keys. Ben Pridmore, the current World Memory Champion, is famous for forgetting people’s names. The list goes on… BUT then again, we are also famous for our ability to store and recall huge amounts of information, quickly and accurately. As I write this, I can memorise the perfect order of 12 decks of randomly shuffled playing cards in 1 hour, one deck of cards in 90 seconds, and an 800 random-digit number in 1 hour.

I need to be up front with you from the beginning. I am not going to teach you random memory “tricks.” I am going to teach you how to learn way more strategically than you ever thought possible. You will learn how to remember whatever you choose to consciously remember.

There is no doubt that what you will learn will impress your family and friends, but I am going to take you far beyond this wow factor to a point where you will have a clear vision of what you want to achieve in your learning, and most importantly, an action packed, step by step process of how to achieve your extraordinary goals.

In June 2007 I started working with 15 year old Adithi Naidoo from Cape Town, South Africa. Just 7 weeks later she won the overall bronze medal at the World Junior Memory Championships in Bahrain in the Middle East. Adithi is disciplined. She is focused. She has a brilliant attitude to life. She knows what she wants, and she lapped up everything I had to teach her, like a thirsty camel that hadn’t had any water to drink in a month.

It’s your call as to how far you want to take this, and how high you want to grow. It’s my job to give you the information that will radically enhance your memory and speed of learning - your job is to use it. To know and not do, is the same as not to know.