At 17 I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, had no special interests, and barely held down a part-time job I’d gotten over summer vacation.
I needed some help, some guidance as to my next step, and even though I wasn’t sure what I wanted, I knew I didn’t want a career stacking shelves in a supermarket.
This led me to start checking out some of the local bookstores in my area on a Saturday afternoon; Just before that, I had been reading a very interesting book on hypnosis and I was fascinated by how the human mind works and how it can be trained using the power of suggestion.
Like many books on the mind, the hypnosis titles occupied the “pop psychology” section, which today is mostly known as self-help and personal growth.
As I flipped through the books on positive thinking and the power of the mind, one small title stood out: “How to Develop a Super Power Memory” by Harry Lorayne. I instinctively picked it up and was absolutely absorbed in it.
After reading a good 10-15 pages (much to the chagrin of the bookstore owner), I bought it and devoured it all in a few days; and that’s when I started to get a little angry and eventually quite angry.
For much of my school life I found learning immensely difficult, this affected my self-esteem greatly and added to my feelings of low self-esteem and inadequacy and after reading about Harry’s methods I realized that they weren’t just quite easy to learn but were based on principles of memory dating back to ancient Greece!
If I had been exposed to this information in school, I could have chosen a whole new direction for my life and not the one I just fell into. To this day, I often wonder why, even now, accelerated learning and mnemonic techniques are not an integral part of the educational system.
From that moment, I made the decision not to dwell on what could have been, and instead to focus on what I can do now in this moment to create the life I want.
After reading that book, I decided that I would learn all I could about other mind training techniques and use them to improve my life; this started an intense reading schedule where I literally read a new book every week.
It is a habit that has totally transformed my life as it taught me that the solution to any problem or problem I was facing was contained in a book somewhere and all I had to do to solve it was simply find that information and then apply it.
If you are currently facing challenges or problems and feel like you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this; You have not done it!
TD McKenzie
