MAVERICK'S MONDAY MORNING MARKETING MEMO

October 26, 2026

How to Build a Memory Palace and Actually Use What You Learn

When I was a kid growing up in Philadelphia, I read constantly. I was at the library two or three times a week, checking out whatever I could get my hands on. Sometimes I read the same book enough times that a librarian would eventually just give it to me.

But I had one problem: I forgot most of what I read.

It felt like pouring a gallon of knowledge into a glass with holes in the bottom. I could spend hours reading, learning, and thinking, but later I would look back and find only a few droplets left—some basic ideas, maybe a couple of facts, but nowhere near everything I had put in. Pasted text

That bothered me for years.

Then, in one of the last places you would expect, I learned about a technique that changed the way I thought about memory completely.

I Learned About Memory Palaces in the 82nd Airborne

When I was in the Army at Fort Bragg, I became friends with Sergeant Keeter. He liked fiction. I liked nonfiction. One day we got into a conversation about memory.

He told me about Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter. In the books, Lecter uses a memory palace—a mental structure where information is converted into vivid images and placed in specific locations so it can later be retrieved.

That immediately got my attention.

I had already encountered mnemonic techniques before, but much of what I saw was focused on memorizing decks of cards, long strings of numbers, or digits of pi.

That wasn't what interested me.

I wanted something practical.

I wanted to remember psychology, history, business, science, philosophy, people, strategies, frameworks—information I could actually use to make better decisions and navigate life more intelligently. Pasted text

That is what the memory palace became for me.

Your Brain Already Does This

The basic idea is simpler than it sounds.

Think about the house you grew up in.

You can probably close your eyes and walk through it right now. You know where the kitchen was. You know where the stairs were. You can probably picture your bedroom, the front door, the backyard, maybe even furniture that hasn't existed for decades.

Now think about something even simpler.

Where is the ketchup in your house?

You probably didn't have to search your memory very hard. The location just appeared.

That is the principle.

Instead of leaving information floating around randomly in your head, you give it an address.

A memory palace organizes information spatially so that concepts have somewhere to live. When you need them, you know where to look. Pasted text

Think of learning like bringing groceries home.

Most people dump all the bags on the kitchen floor and hope they can find what they need later.

A memory palace is putting the ketchup in the refrigerator, the cereal in the cabinet, the meat in the freezer, and the cleaning supplies under the sink.

You're not merely collecting information.

You're organizing it for retrieval.

Start Small

If you're doing this for the first time, don't build some gigantic imaginary castle with 50 rooms.

Start with four or five rooms.

Make the layout simple and easy to visualize. I prefer clear rectangular rooms with an obvious path through them.

Then choose what you want to learn.

Maybe it's:

• psychology
• history
• investing
• philosophy
• medicine
• sales
• music
• politics
• science
• names and faces

It doesn't matter. The palace is only the filing system.

For your first room, I recommend around 18 concepts. My established rooms often contain 27, but there is no reason to start there.

I also organize concepts in clusters of three. I find three particularly easy to retrieve as a unit. Pasted text

So you might enter a room and have concepts 1, 2, and 3 on the first section of wall, then 4, 5, and 6 on the next section, and continue around the room.

Now you need images.

Turn Abstract Ideas Into People, Places, and Things

This is where the technique becomes powerful.

Abstract information is often difficult to remember.

Images aren't.

Suppose I want to remember a list of human motivations. Instead of trying to memorize abstract words floating in space, I attach each motivation to a memorable person or character.

In one of my rooms, I use characters from True Blood.

Safety is associated with one character. Security with another. Pleasure with another.

The character is not the information.

The character is the bridge to the information.

That distinction matters.

When I write the room down, I write the actual concept I want to know—not merely the mnemonic character. The image exists in my head to help me retrieve the concept. Pasted text

You can use actors, fictional characters, friends, historical figures, objects, absurd scenes, sexual imagery, violence, humor—whatever creates a powerful mental image for you.

The stranger and more emotionally vivid the image, the easier it tends to be to retrieve.

The Goal Isn't to Walk Around Your Palace Forever

In the beginning, you may consciously walk through your room:

one, two, three...

four, five, six...

Eventually something changes.

The concepts start becoming automatic.

If somebody mentions Sigmund Freud and defense mechanisms, I don't necessarily have to consciously enter a building, open a door, and slowly inspect every object.

The relevant room simply lights up.

I can retrieve repression, denial, projection, rationalization, displacement, reaction formation, regression, intellectualization, sublimation, and the images I've attached to them.

The palace becomes retrieval infrastructure. Pasted text

That is where this becomes much more useful than a memory trick.

Mental Models Become Available When You Need Them

I have a room for mental models.

Things like:

Occam's Razor.

Hanlon's Razor.

The Pareto Principle.

Sturgeon's Law.

First-principles thinking.

Regret minimization.

The value isn't being able to impress somebody by listing them.

The value is that when a real problem appears, those models are available.

Instead of relying on whatever thought happens to pop into my head first, I have frameworks I can draw from.

That's the difference between possessing information somewhere in your memory and being able to retrieve it when the situation demands it. Pasted text

The Palaces Eventually Begin Connecting

This is where it gets really interesting.

At first, you build isolated rooms.

Psychology is over here.

Economics is over there.

History is somewhere else.

Chemistry has its own room.

Genetics has another.

But eventually the rooms begin connecting.

A discussion about capitalism may activate economics, which activates industrial history, which connects to political philosophy.

A conversation about human behavior might activate psychology, biology, incentives, personality, and social dynamics.

A scientific concept may connect chemistry to genetics and then into the history of science.

The information stops behaving like isolated facts and starts behaving like a network. Pasted text

That is the real payoff.

Thirty Minutes a Day Adds Up

I approach memory training the same way I approach physical training or playing the drums.

You don't become strong from one workout.

You don't become a drummer from one practice session.

You accumulate repetitions.

I play drums regularly. Rudiments that once required conscious effort eventually become automatic because I practiced them repeatedly.

Memory works the same way.

I recommend about 30 minutes a day.

Spend part of that time maintaining what you've already built and part of it adding something new.

The individual session doesn't seem dramatic.

But repeated sessions compound.

After hundreds of days, you've built something completely different from what you started with. Pasted text

Build a Library Inside Your Head

We live in an age where virtually every fact imaginable is available on a phone.

That's useful. I use AI and technology constantly.

But having access to information is not the same thing as knowing it.

If everything lives outside your head, you still have to stop, search, read, interpret, and then figure out how that new information relates to everything else you know.

When knowledge is already organized inside your head, you begin the problem farther down the road.

You aren't searching for the framework.

You're using it.

That is why I continue building memory palaces.

I don't care about memorizing something merely to prove that I can memorize it.

I want a mental library I can draw from when I'm talking to somebody, solving a problem, studying something new, making a decision, teaching, arguing, writing, or trying to understand what is happening around me.

The point isn't to remember more trivia.

The point is to make more of what you learn available when you actually need it.

And you can start with one room.

I’m Maverick, the Marketing Consultant—your Marketing Consultant.

To your success !