Practice this mental exercise of walking through the rooms, and looking at items in each room, in a set order. You should find that this type of memorization, because it’s based on visual images of familiar places and things, will be much easier than the rote memorizing you might remember from your school days.
The second step in preparing to memorize a deck of cards is to associate a memorable person or thing with each of the fifty-two possible cards. To make this process easier, try to maintain some logical association between the card and the corresponding image. White provides the example of associating Donald Trump with the King of Diamonds, as diamonds signify wealth. Practice these associations until you can pull a card randomly from the deck and immediately recall the associated image. As before, the use of memorable visual images and associations will simplify the task of forming these connections.
The two steps mentioned previously are advance steps—things you do just once and can then leverage again and again in memorizing specific decks. Once these steps are done, you’re ready for the main event: memorizing as quickly as possible the order of fifty-two cards in a freshly shuffled deck. The method here is straightforward. Begin your mental walkthrough of your house. As you encounter each item, look at the next card from the shuffled deck, and imagine the corresponding memorable person or thing doing something memorable near that item. For example, if the first item and location is the mat in your front entry, and the first card is the King of Diamonds, you might picture Donald Trump wiping mud off of his expensive loafers on the entry mat in your front hallway.
Proceed carefully through the rooms, associating the proper mental images with objects in the proper order. After you complete a room, you might want to walk through it a few times in a row to lock in the imagery. Once you’re done, you’re ready to hand the deck to a friend and amaze him by rattling off the cards in order without peeking. To do so, of course, simply requires that you perform the mental walkthrough one more time, connecting each memorable person or thing to its corresponding card as you turn your attention to it.
If you practice this technique, you’ll discover, like many mental athletes who came before you, that you can eventually internalize a whole deck in just minutes. More important than your ability to impress friends, of course, is the training such activities provide your mind. Proceeding through the steps described earlier requires that you focus your attention, again and again, on a clear target. Like a muscle responding to weights, this will strengthen your general ability to concentrate—allowing you to go deeper with more ease.
It’s worth emphasizing, however, the obvious point that there’s nothing special about card memorization. Any structured thought process that requires unwavering attention can have a similar effect—be it studying the Talmud, like Adam Marlin from Rule #2’s introduction, or practicing productive meditation, or trying to learn the guitar part of a song by ear (a past favorite of mine). If card memorization seems weird to you, in other words, then choose a replacement that makes similar cognitive requirements. The key to this strategy is not the specifics, but instead the motivating idea that your ability to concentrate is only as strong as your commitment to train it.
Rule #3
Quit Social Media
In 2013, author and digital media consultant Baratunde Thurston launched an experiment. He decided to disconnect from his online life for twenty-five days: no Facebook, no Twitter, no Foursquare (a service that awarded him “Mayor of the Year” in 2011), not even e-mail. He needed the break. Thurston, who is described by friends as “the most connected man in the world,” had by his own count participated in more than fifty-nine thousand Gmail conversations and posted fifteen hundred times on his Facebook wall in the year leading up to his experiment. “I was burnt out. Fried. Done. Toast,” he explained.
We know about Thurston’s experiment because he wrote about it in a cover article for Fast Company magazine, ironically titled “#UnPlug.” As Thurston reveals in the article, it didn’t take long to adjust to a disconnected life. “By the end of that first week, the quiet rhythm of my days seemed far less strange,” he said. “I was less stressed about not knowing new things; I felt that I still existed despite not having shared documentary evidence of said existence on the Internet.” Thurston struck up conversations with strangers. He enjoyed food without Instagramming the experience. He bought a bike (“turns out it’s easier to ride the thing when you’re not trying to simultaneously check your Twitter”). “The end came too soon,” Thurston lamented. But he had start-ups to run and books to market, so after the twenty-five days passed, he reluctantly reactivated his online presence.
Baratunde Thurston’s experiment neatly summarizes two important points about our culture’s current relationship with social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and infotainment sites like Business Insider and BuzzFeed—two categories of online distraction that I will collectively call “network tools” in the pages ahead. The first point is that we increasingly recognize that these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate. This reality no longer generates much debate; we all feel it. This is a real problem for many different people, but the problem is especially dire if you’re attempting to improve your ability to work deeply. In the preceding rule, for example, I described several strategies to help you sharpen your focus. These efforts will become significantly more difficult if you simultaneously behave like a pre-experiment Baratunde Thurston, allowing your life outside such training to remain a distracted blur of apps and browser tabs. Willpower is limited, and therefore the more enticing tools you have pulling at your attention, the harder it’ll be to maintain focus on something important. To master the art of deep work, therefore, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.
Before we begin fighting back against these distractions, however, we must better understand the battlefield. This brings me to the second important point summarized by Baratunde Thurston’s story: the impotence with which knowledge workers currently discuss this problem of network tools and attention. Overwhelmed by these tools’ demands on his time, Thurston felt that his only option was to (temporarily) quit the Internet altogether. This idea that a drastic Internet sabbatical* is the only alternative to the distraction generated by social media and infotainment has increasingly pervaded our cultural conversation.