Remember Every Name Every Time : Corporate America's Memory Master Reveals His Secrets

by Benjamin Levy; Mark Lasswell

• ISBN13: 9780684873930
• ISBN10: 0684873931
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-23
• Publisher: Fireside

Summary

"I'm sorry, but...I can't remember your name."

Even the boldest corporate leaders are terrified of forgetting an important name at a crucial moment. They know that forgetting a name can cost them an important deal -- and that remembering it can cement a lifelong business relationship. That's why they have studied with Benjamin Levy, whose astounding memory feats have made him one of America's most highly sought-after corporate entertainers. Now, for the first time, Levy steps off the stage and out of the boardroom to share his surefire techniques with you.

In Remember Every Name Every Time, Levy takes you step by step through his time-tested, executive-approved memory program. With his techniques, you'll effortlessly

remember the names of people you've just met for the very first time, no matter how rushed the introduction, no matter how stressful the circumstances

remember one name, five names, thirty or more names at events ranging from high-powered board or client meetings to business dinners and employee gatherings

remember even the most difficult names and the most nondescript faces -- for the long term.

Realistic business scenarios, bite-size summaries, and dozens of full-color photographs help you hone your skills. In case you ever do forget a name, Levy even offers savvy tips on how to handle the situation with grace and aplomb.

Rounded out with firsthand advice and anecdotes from some of Levy's world-renowned CEO clients, who reveal why remembering names is a vital skill in today's economy, Remember Every Name Every Time gives you the tools you need to create a great impression at any business occasion and send your career soaring higher than you've ever imagined possible.

Author Biography

Dubbed "The King's Magician" by Fortune, Benjamin Levy has appeared before heads of state, European royalty, and the corporate royalty of Fortune 500 companies. His clients include the chairmen of Advanta, Allstate, Bristol Myers Squibb, Compaq, Johnson & Johnson, J.P. Morgan Chase, Loews, PaineWebber, Prudential Financial, Seagram, Sprint, and Xerox. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Prologue Everyone Wants a Great Memory. Guess What? You Already Have One ...	9	(6)
Introduction	15	(10)
Part One: The Basic Technique
It's Not Your Fault	25	(10)
It's Not Your Fault. Then Again, May be It Is ...	35	(6)
Why It Matters	41	(10)
The FACE Technique: Focus, Ask, Comment, Employ	51	(24)
Memory, FACE and Science	75	(6)
Facing the World	81	(8)
Part Two: The Advanced Technique
The NAME Technique: Nominate, Articulate, Morph, Entwine	89	(14)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner	103	(20)
Unforgettable Faces	123	(8)
Naming Names	131	(8)
The Conference Room Challenge	139	(18)
Part Three: The New Memory Expert---You
Challenging Names, Challenging Faces	157	(14)
I Need It All!	171	(16)
If You Do Forget	187	(10)
Memory That Lasts and Lasts	197	(10)
Closing the Deal	207	(6)
Appendix America's Top 40	213	(8)
Acknowledgments	221

Excerpts

PROLOGUE

Everyone Wants a Great Memory. Guess What? You Already Have One...

Read this brief chapter now, before you leave the bookstore. You'll discover that you already possess tremendous untapped memory-power.

"People are always saying to me,'I can't believe you remember my name!' I think that remembering names is the heart of good business. It creates a positive environment in the office that helps retain employees, and it's very effective, in a business relationship, in getting the other person to have a good feeling about you."
Thomas C. Quick, President, Quick & Reilly/Fleet Securities, Inc.

I bet you're one of those people who say, "I've got a terrible memory for names." I know that, because it's one of the most common complaints you'll hear -- even from highly intelligent and successful people, in all walks of life. Throughout this book, you'll hear "I just can't remember names" from giants of business and industry as well as those on the first rung of success. In my career, I've been fortunate to work with some of the world's most successful people. I've heard it over and over again.

But I'd like to let you in on a little secret....

They're wrong.

Why? Because anyone, and I mean anyone, can develop their memory's natural power with a little help -- the help you'll find in this book.

You probably wouldn't be reading this unless you thought that you could use help in that department. And yet, have you ever considered how to improve your memory for names and faces? Have you tried to learn a technique that would help you remember them? Probably not -- no doubt because you're convinced that your memory for names and faces is "terrible." I hear that lament all the time and, frankly, it drives me crazy, because I know that most people's memory is simply untrained. I also know that you already possess an innate ability to remember much more than you ever suspected.

People who've never had a skiing lesson in their lives don't automatically say, "I'm a terrible skier." No -- they say, "I don't know how to ski." Some people may be natural skiers, who just clamp on a pair of Rossignols for the first time and fly down the mountain. At the other end of the spectrum are people like me -- those who break a leg just by looking up at a chair lift. In between these two types are the vast majority of people, who can benefit enormously from lessons with a ski instructor. Well, I'm here to be your mental ski instructor. (Who knows? Maybe you're a natural who just needs to be pointed in the right direction!) I'll show you the techniques I've developed over the past two decades as a corporate entertainer. Techniques that enable me -- night after night after night -- to remember the names of more than 100 guests at business get-togethers, all of them people I've just met!

Starting Right Now, Unlock Your Memory Power!

The most effective tool for memorization is the brain's ability to form visual images. Seeing something in your mind -- reading a description, then looking away and revisualizing it -- is more effective than simply plowing through written text. As an example, I'm going to tell you a surreal little story that -- although admittedly wacky -- will nonetheless give you an amazing insight into how memory works. It won't take long, just a couple of minutes at most. At the end, I promise that you will be rewarded with concrete, indisputable evidence that your memory is more powerful than you ever imagined.

Here's the Key

See the story. Don't just skim. Don't even just read the story. Truly visualize it. If I mention a fire, try to see the fire in as much detail as possible. Is it orange at the top and blue at the bottom, or the other way around? Are sparks flying? Does the smoke smell wonderful, like a roaring fireplace on a cold winter day, or does it burn your eyes and lungs? If you concentrate on the story, visualizing each image in vivid detail, you'll get a firsthand demonstration of the memory power you already possess -- power that Remember Every Name Every Time will show you how to harness and use in running your company or building your career. This power will even help you sail through the kinds of social situations which in the past have left you feeling mortified about forgetting someone's name.

Okay, here's the story. Start reading. And remember:

VISUALIZE!

You're in your office when the acrid smell of burning tar begins to fill the room. You start to go out into the hall to investigate but stop short when you see the office door. The door has a big letter X ON it, sloppily painted in tar so hot that the X ON the door is still smoking and sizzling. You rush into the hallway to see who's responsible for this vandalism and are stunned: the hallway had only recently been painted a lemony yellow, but now its pristine surfaces have been wrecked, every WALL MARRED by a series of these foul-smelling, smoky X's. You follow the trail, the pungent odor becoming stronger as you get closer to the source of one WALL MARR after another. Then you turn the corner and your jaw drops in astonishment: GENERAL Douglas MacArthur is standing there, complete with corncob pipe and aviator sunglasses, holding a bucket of tar and a sticky paintbrush is his blackened hands. GENERAL MacArthur is so startled at being caught that the pipe drops out of his mouth, falling with a hiss into the bucket of tar.

Take a break right here and try to recall what you're just read. Look away from the book for a moment. Think about what has happened in this story so far.

You're back? Did you think about the story? Did it all begin in a generic office building? Did someone imitating Zorro scratch the letter Z on a window? Was General Colin Powell the culprit? No, it all started in your office, and it was the letter X on your door and in a hallway, painted in tar by General MacArthur, right? This information would be almost impossible to get wrong if you truly visualized it: the smoke curling up from the tar; the walls' fresh coat of yellow paint; the gleam of MacArthur's aviator sunglasses. Every detail, brought into sharper focus by your own imagination, etches the story into your memory. Okay, let's get back to it and...

VISUALIZE, VISUALIZE, VISUALIZE!

MacArthur drops the bucket and brush and runs down the hall and out of the building to his car, a perfectly restored red FORD Model T. MacArthur gives the old-fashioned hand crank a turn and the FORD sputters to life. He jumps into the driver's seat and roars away in a choking cloud of exhaust. At the first intersection, MacArthur jams on the brakes, because looming ahead of the GENERAL, in place of a traffic light, is an ELECTRIC chandelier -- with red, yellow, and green lightbulbs -- that is made to look like MacArthur himself. The GENERAL-shaped ELECTRIC chandelier is hanging so low that the car smashed into it, sending a spray of glittering red, yellow, and green glass shards into the air. As MacArthur speeds away from the collision, he spies you in the rearview mirror and bellows from the open car, "I shall return!"

That's the end of the story. Run through it again in your mind, recalling in as much detail as possible the little adventure that begins with the mysterious appearance of a hot-tar X ON your office door, followed by similar WALL MARS; the discovery of GENERAL MacArthur as the perpetrator of the door and wall vandalism; MacArthur's escape in a FORD Model T; and the car's spectacular run-in with a low-slung chandelier that depicts the GENERAL in ELECTRIC red, yellow, and green lights. By concentrating on these details, you'll still have a vivid memory of the story if MacArthur ever makes good on his promise to return.

What Was That All About?

Now here's the surprise I promised: Without even realizing it, you've just memorized the top five companies of the Fortune 500. That's right. Here they are:

1 Exxon -- your hint in the story is the X ON the door and in the hall
2 Wal-Mart -- the WALL MARS of hot tar makes this memory stick
3 General Motors -- signified by GENERAL MacArthur
4 Ford Motor Company -- MacArthur flees in a FORD Model T
5 General Electric -- as revealed in the smashing tribute to the GENERAL with ELECTRIC lighting

A Little Trick with Big Implications

Skeptics might pooh-pooh this exercise, saying that most people could remember a list of five names without visualizing anything. Agreed. But they'd certainly struggle to remember the list days or weeks later. They also might have trouble remembering them in correct order right from the start. Was that General Electric or General Motors that was number three? Following the line of the story, you'd never mix them up.

But there's much more at work here than just remembering the Fortune 500's top five.

On the simple matter of remembering the names of companies, the story could go on and on, with one event leading to another in its improbable and cartoonish way, until you've committed to memory the top 25 or 50 or 100 companies in the Fortune 500.

Once the narrative sequence begins, it can be extended to embody almost any list you want to memorize.

How to memorize lists is not what this prologue is about, though. I just used this example to help you glimpse the power of your own mind, your ability to enhance your memory through concentration, visualization and imagination. Even in our two-minute drill, you put those skills to work in a concerted way that provided a tangible memory reward. The story needed to be strange, even startling, because a string of unremarkable details wouldn't have captured your attention. The generic and bland is forgettable. The peculiar and amusing is not.

Over breakfast tomorrow, imagine the smell of burning tar that begins the tale, and you'll be delighted to find that you remember not only the whole story of General MacArthur's alarming visit, but also the Fortune 500 top five. Again, that's a very modest sample of how your memory power can be trained. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to tackle all five hundred.

You've Unlocked the Door. Now Step Inside with Me.

Even before learning about me and my techniques for radically improving your ability to remember names and faces, you've gotten a glimpse of the untapped memory power you already possess. Believe me: you don't have "a terrible memory for names." You've got a terrific memory for names; you just need to find it, train it and put it into action. That will happen for you with the help of this book.

Copyright © 2002 by Benjamin Levy