When I was 15 years old and starting to build stereo equipment, I would write all these audio companies and ask for their catalogs.

A few weeks later one would arrive. I became addicted to trotting out to the mailbox every day, holding my breath as I looked inside, hoping there would be another catalog.

One day a French company sent me an exceptionally slick 200-page catalog. Every page featured a different speaker with a full set of specifications. It had all the technical graphs and curves and everything.

I would flip through the pages and notice that they had, say, four versions of one speaker type. One had a small magnet. One had a big magnet. One had one kind of voice coil. Another had another kind of voice coil.

I would study the differences point by point and figure things out.

They didn’t come right out and tell me, for instance, exactly what changes when you slap a bigger magnet on a speaker. I was inferring it from the differences among the speakers.

I had to figure it out for myself from limited information.

Later, when I worked at Jensen speakers, I became known as the go-to guy for teaching new hires how to solve “speaker puzzles.” ‘Here’s how you twist the speaker Rubik’s Cube to get…fatter bass, more sibilance in the vocals, less distortion at 700 Hz…’

Today you can find out on Google what I figured out by inference from those magazines.

But Google won’t teach you how to solve new speaker puzzles yourself. Knowing that information won’t help you with new problems no one has had to solve yet.

That demands inferential thinking.

That takes practice in the art of limiting information and making connections. It takes uphill pedaling.

Another thinking art that’s dying a slow death is memorization.

Memorization is a powerful way of thinking. Just ask any musician. Memorization leads to mastery.

But who wants to do all the uphill pedaling of memorization when all the world’s knowledge resides in the “palm of your hands”?

Imagine, back before the invention of the printing press, what did people do? They memorized things. Not much made the cut! Only the most profound, important, and eternal truths.

Homeric epics. Sacred scrolls. Scripture.

People would meditate on these. Memorize them. To the exclusion of ‘barnacle’ information.

They would discern layer after layer after layer of meaning by practicing the art of memorization.

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, for example, takes only a few minutes to read, but can be poured over and plumbed for layer upon layer of insight and wisdom.

The more you memorize, the more the mysteries of the text reveal themselves.

But what do we memorize today?

Why memorize when the internet knows everything?

Why memorize when memory is cheap?

Why memorize when CHAT-GPT will access all that information and generate content for me?

Our minds are forgetting how to think.

Perry

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.