School tells you WHAT to learn, Matt DiMaio teaches you HOW to learn it.
Now in his 5th decade of producing attention-getting results, speaker, trainer, and published author, Matt DiMaio has written 3 books and is also the creator of the popular YouTube channel: “Be Smarter Faster” where he teaches accelerated learning skills that have helped tens of millions of students and gained a worldwide audience.
Since 1980, he has continued to research, teach, and publish the very best tips, tactics, and techniques that enable students of every age to learn everything and anything faster and better.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Matt DiMaio about improving your memory and leaving a legacy with a book.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How memory is a learned ability, and anyone can learn to harness it.
- How imagination is the greatest power that humans have.
- How writing a book leaves behind a legacy that will leave your mark on the world.
- How there is a difference between a school teaching you what to learn and the ability to discover how to learn.
- How paying attention and caring can help you find your car keys.
Connect with Matt:
Links Mentioned:
youtube.com/besmarterfaster
anincrediblememory.com
Guest Contact Info:
Email
maestromarketing@live.com
Facebook
facebook.com/MattDiMaio
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/mattdimaio
Rob Kosberg:
Hey, welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here. Excited to bring you another great guest for the Publish, Promote, Profit podcast. I have Mr. Matt DiMaio here with us today. Matt is the memory guy. School tells you what to learn, Matt teaches you how to learn it. He’s in his fifth decade of producing attention-getting results. It’s hard to believe, I mean he barely has any gray hair. He is a speaker, trainer, and published author. He has three great best-selling books and we’re going to talk a little bit about those. You have a great YouTube channel, Be Smarter Faster, which I really like. You have a cool saying around that. You teach accelerated learning skills that have helped tens of millions of students and gained a worldwide audience. Matt, thank you so much for being with me on the podcast today my friend.
Matt DiMaio:
Rob, I got to tell you, it is a sincere pleasure that you invited me. I’ve listened to your other podcast, seen the caliber and the quality of your other guests, and quite frankly, I am honored and pleased to be in such auspicious company. So, I’m excited to be here as well
Rob Kosberg:
Well with words like that, holy cow. You know, I love to hear that. So no, seriously, thank you. I’m honored and honored to be able to talk to you. I mean, you’ve done some pretty amazing things. You got started in this a number of years ago as kind of the memory guy, and that’s probably not the best terminology, so maybe tell us a little bit about it. You have the YouTube videos out there where you go into an audience of 500 people. You remember every person’s name, which blows my mind. So, talk to me a little bit about that expertise and, I would assume, learned skill that you have.
Matt DiMaio:
That’s a great place to start because sometimes people wonder if I’m some sort of a Martian, if I have some special gene that allows me to learn things fast, and the truth is it’s like learning how to ride a bicycle. Nobody is born knowing how to do it. It becomes a learned ability. Now, some people take it to extreme lengths, and they go racing on the Tour de France and all of that with their bicycles. But everybody starts out the same way, wobbling around when you first learn how to get the training wheels off. And what happened with me is rather than just memory, and a lot of people know me for doing demonstrations of memory power because when I walk into a room and recall dozens or hundreds of names, it becomes impossible to argue with me as to whether or not these ideas work. There are very few speakers out there that are able to give you proof of concept upon saying hello. You’ve just have to read their bio and hope that they actually know what they’re talking about, but when I’m able to do practical demonstrations and show them, and then as I go through my presentation, I actually reveal to them what the techniques are that allow me to do these things. It’s a very mechanical process. Rather than just memory, which is really the last part of the learning process, I talk about the entire scope of how to learn everything and anything faster and easier than you ever dreamed possible.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow. I want to know that.
Matt DiMaio:
When you learn faster, you can earn faster. Look, we live in a world of information overload. Those who can’t keep up, run the risk of being left behind. Most people didn’t really gain the practical mechanics for how to learn stuff when they were in school. As you pointed out, in my bio I talk about how school tells you what to learn, but they don’t teach you how to learn it. For example, all your life people will say, or teachers or parents will wag their finger at you and say, “Pay attention,” and yet, did you ever take a class in how to focus, how to concentrate, how to pay attention? Unless you’re in martial arts or meditation, probably not. Every great sales trainer in the world tells you, “Well, it’s not just about what you say, you’ve got to be an excellent listener. God gave you two ears and one mouth. You need to listen twice as much as you talk.” Well, what the heck does that mean? What are the mechanics of being an excellent listener?
Rob Kosberg:
Let me stop you right there for a moment because you’re teasing us a little and I want to know some of the foundational pieces of this because that’s really powerful. I think, like you said, everybody starts riding a bike, they’re all wobbly, some go on to the Tour de France. I think there is some genetic makeup in the ability to remember, but clearly there’s foundational building blocks involved. Give me what some of those are if you can.
Matt DiMaio:
Absolutely. The point that you just made regarding the bicycle analogy, you’re right. Some people are genetically predisposed to being extraordinary athletes, but literally anybody can learn how to ride a bicycle well. Not everybody can become a pro. Just like anybody can toss around a football or a baseball, not everybody can make it into the pro leagues. I’ve taken it to extreme lengths to prove a point. Now, ultimately, when you’re looking at how you learn things, we talk about the concept of how an idea sinks in, and we use that terminology without really understanding how it sinks in. Well, I’m going to come back to that in just a quick moment, but before I tell you what those six things are, I want to give you the two foundational blocks that everything is based on. There are two things that are absolutely essential in understanding how you absorb information. The greatest power that human beings have, and sometimes when I do seminars, I ask them, what’s the greatest power you have, and people are rambling all over the place. They have no idea what it is and if you’re not even sure, how can you maximize it? The greatest power that human beings have is imagination. All creation comes from first holding images in your head. All creation comes from that. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a musician, whether you are a painter, a builder, a carpenter, or a mathematician. You first have a sense of imagery of some sort in your head. The second thing that human beings are really good at is connection. The way your mind works, the way your synapses work, is that they connect one thing to another. It’s like when I was a little kid, tinker toys, and these days, Legos, you connect this one to that one and pretty soon you can build these massive structures. If you listen to the way little kids learn stuff, they’ll look at you and go, “Daddy, grandpa, uncle, auntie, you mean, it’s like… It’s like…” This is like that. They’re looking for the connection. So, simply what I do is I show people how to use imagery and then make connections with that imagery to what it is that they’re learning how to do. For example, I’ll give you a quick example about people’s names and I’ll talk about why people don’t remember stuff as we go here, but typically you and I, we’re at a cocktail party, we’re at a chamber of commerce event, we’re at a social networking and we meet each other and I come over and I go, “Hi. How are you?” You go, “Yeah. Nice to meet you. My name is Matt.” “My name is Rob.” “Oh, hi.” We chit chat for a while and we drift off to other parts of the room. Well, there’s three causes of forgettory. You know, everybody wants to talk about memory. I want to talk about the three causes of forgettory. The first cause of forgettory is that you don’t get it. If you don’t get it, you can’t keep it. Sometimes somebody will introduce you to a buddy and they go, “Hi, I want you to meet my friend, Mr. Blah blah,” and they go, “Yeah. Nice to see you. How you doing pal?” If you didn’t get the name, you can’t keep the name. This is a real problem when you’re meeting people with foreign names. The second cause of forgettory is that you don’t care. Now people go, “Oh Matt, but I care.” Yeah, you care, but you don’t care enough to do something about it. It’s like if somebody wants to get in shape, but they don’t go and exercise. You know, you care, but you don’t care enough to do anything. I teach kind of a mental filing system. If you put things away where you know where they are, it’s easy to find them when you need them. The caring means you need to care enough to do something about it. So, we’ve got, you don’t get it, you don’t care, but the third one is by comparison. That is, you don’t believe. You know what you don’t believe? You don’t believe you have a superhuman capability to remember whatever you want right now. You already have it. It’s already built in. People go, “Oh, I can always remember a face, but I can never remember a name.” They go, “Oh, I must be getting the Alzheimer’s,” meantime they’re in their 30s. “Oh, I’m terrible at remembering people’s names.” Saying that kind of stuff to yourself is not the result of a bad memory, that’s the cause, because you live up to it. Why try if you already know you’ve got a bad memory? So, “My memory stinks, why bother to try anyhow?” What I do is I take the process and I break it down in little chunks. Let’s go back to the introduction between Matt and Rob. The first thing that I want to do is I want to get Rob’s name. I recently did an event for the US Endo Chamber of Commerce, where everybody had three and four syllable Indian names, and they were blown away that I could remember 50-60 people that I had met during a cocktail hour a couple of hours earlier when the event started. You’ve got to pay attention to getting the name right from the beginning. If you’re not clear on it, ask them to repeat it. Sometimes you ask them how it’s spelled. If you don’t get it, you can’t keep it. My belated little Italian grandmother taught me the secret to being able to learn anything and everything faster, and better, and remember it in just two words. Now, anytime you can teach something as big as how to learn anything and everything faster and better, and remember it, and do it in just two words, those are really important two words. Do I have your agreement?
Rob Kosberg:
Yes, I agree.
Matt DiMaio:
Here’s grandma’s two words, pay attention. Have you ever met people that are so broke they can’t even pay attention? The first thing is, you need to pay attention to the person’s name. Secondly, you need to care that you remember it. Make the effort. Say to yourself things like, “I’m going to remember him. I’m going to remember her.” It’s all of that belief type stuff. I’ll give you a quick example. Here in the Tampa Bay area I belong to a business group and one of the people who’s a professional photographer travels all over the country. He’s a really in-demand photographer named Rick. Rick not only does business events; he does weddings as well. He was invited up to Atlanta for a really high-end wedding. A week later he came back and he reported to me, “Matt, Matt, I can’t believe it. I got to tell you this story. I went to this wedding and I used what you taught me, and I remembered everybody in the wedding party’s name. I remembered everybody in the reception that I met.” I went, “Rick I’ll bet you didn’t even use any of the imagination and connection techniques that I teach. You just used the three causes of forgettory didn’t you?” “Yeah, yeah, I paid attention. I cared. I kept telling myself I’m going to remember them and guess what? It worked.” Remembering people’s names is probably one of the most important things you can do to help you earn money in this world. You know, you’ve heard it a million times, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. That’s why the topic of the first book that I wrote is called, How to Remember People’s Names.
Rob Kosberg:
Talk to me about your books. Maybe we could change gears a little bit and I’d love to hear why you’ve decided to write and continue to write the books. What have your books done to get your message out? When you speak in front of an event and there are 500 people there and you’re dazzling the audience, that’s 500 true believers now. I assume though, that there’s perhaps in books a better way to get your message out. Talk to me a little bit about your books, why you wrote them and what they’ve done for you.
Matt DiMaio:
You know, writing the books for me was not so much a business decision as my way of leaving a legacy. I didn’t do it primarily for the financial gain. I did it as a way of saying, “Hey, I was here, and I mattered.” My third book, Straight A Strategies for Successful Online Learning, was actually written with a very specific purpose. As a result of all of the political illness associated with COVID, the schools were turned upside down and parents’ lives were turned upside down when for a whole year their kids were stuck at home. My own daughter is a student at Florida State University. Partway through her freshman year in college she was supposed to come home for spring break, and she wound up never going back. She spent her entire sophomore year with us here in the Tampa area. Instead of doing what she should have been doing, all her classes were online. For her junior year she’s going to be going back up to Tallahassee. The idea of writing a book like that was to really make an impact on the lives of students that were floundering around in a brand-new area. That book hit the number one bestseller status within just a couple of weeks of being released on Amazon. What it did for me is it drove a lot of people to my YouTube channel. It also got me bookings on radio shows because people want solutions to real world problems and my books, rather than being philosophical, provide solutions to the types of common problems that people have. I’ll give you an example. My third book is called, Forgetful No More, and that deals with the subject of, do you ever put down your keys, your wallet, your eyeglasses, and then later on you have to play treasure hunt to find them? You ever walk into a room and you don’t remember why; you’re in the middle of a conversation and you got the answer to that question on the tip of your tongue and it just won’t come to you, or worse you’re in the middle of an exam and you know the answer to that question and you just can’t get it to come to you? Well, in the book, Forgetful No More, I talk about how to get things to pop into your head, how to not leave home without that important report you were supposed to bring, how to make sure that when you’re driving to the store with your shopping list and you think of three more things that you realized are not on your list, how to make that you’re able to buy them when you’re in the store and not be halfway home and go, “Oh, I forgot the stuff that I was going to buy.” I solve practical problems. As a result of that business has increased because when you can solve people’s problems, they want to know how you can help them solve whatever problems that they’ve got. It’s become more of a mission and a passion than merely a business decision.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. You said the books have led to opportunities for media, and PR, driven clients to you, helped you grow your YouTube channel, et cetera. It didn’t sound like there was a strategy, at least in the beginning. You said that you wrote them initially for legacy, which is fantastic. A very, very important reason to write your book is to leave your knowledge and information behind. I sense that’s changed a little bit. Are you beginning to write and create to continue to grow your business and get more opportunities, those kinds of things?
Matt DiMaio:
Well, I am a capitalist so, yes. I am profit driven. I am financially driven. I mentioned in our pre-talk that I turned 69 this past March. I started my 70th year. It’s stunning to realize that I’m already here. By the way, for people who talk about age being the reason that you can’t remember things, I kind of put the kibosh on that sort of thinking by virtue of what I’m able to do. Now that I’ve had some success with my books, I’m really going to be throwing more gas on that fire and really approaching it from more of a business direction. I find that the books help build my YouTube channel. My YouTube channel helps build the books. It gives me an opportunity to get my word out. The most important thing that the books do is give me a base of credibility. You know, you tell somebody you’re a YouTuber, great, maybe they think you publish funny cat videos, but it gives you more credibility when you talk about the fact that you’ve got multiple books out. As a matter of fact, I’ve just started working on my fourth and fifth book. One of my books is going to be, Building Brilliant Kids. Parents are looking for the advantages that they can give children when they’re really little to give them the mechanics of how to learn things fast. Can I tell you how I got started with all of this stuff?
Rob Kosberg:
Please do, and then we’ll give them some links. Give us that last word and some links where you have some new stuff coming out and let’s let them know where they can find you.
Matt DiMaio:
The year was 1980. I was living in New Jersey, which is where I’m originally from. I’m an Italian from New Jersey. I was working for a chain of computer programming schools. This was a year before IBM was going to release its first PC to the public. The world was still operating on punch cards. Some of your listeners and viewers are old enough to remember them. Most of the students that were attendees at my school were young adults looking for a career change. They didn’t come fresh out of school. They hadn’t been recently studying. Their study habits were terrible. As a result, my school had an unacceptably high dropout rate. My income was directly tied to our ability to collect tuition. I did not like getting chargebacks. I began to research what could I do to help prevent my students from dropping out. I began to research the subject of how to be a better student. I went to Villanova University and after two years, I realized I’d rather be a professional musician so I left school, and I never did pursue music at that point because I got into business, discovered I was really good at selling, and wound up having an amazing career building large sales forces for all kinds of different companies. I couldn’t use my own example as a student as a model to help these students out at my schools, so I began to research the subject. I discovered information about studying textbooks is different than reading a novel. How do you read faster than you ever did before? How do you focus, pay attention, become a better listener? What are the mechanics? How do you take notes better? I began to teach a short class called, What School Never Taught You About Learning, where I condensed all of this stuff about note taking, and test taking, and focus, and concentration into a 90-minute session. I taught it twice a semester to the same group. The first time, about two weeks into their classes they were already rocking and reeling going, “I need help,” about two weeks before they graduated so that they would really do well on their finals. Not only did I stop the dropout rate, or drastically improve it, but we vastly improved the job placement rate, which was the big deal. That’s when the amazing thing happened. I began to get calls from the companies that hired my graduates wondering what we were doing different at our school because our graduates were outperforming students who came from the competition or came from our school in the past. They wanted to know what the secret was. The kids had an unfortunate nickname for me at our school. They called me Matt the memory man. I began to get calls from professional organizations, the Data Processing Managers Association, the Association of Systems Managers, all of these professional organizations began to invite me in to do after-dinner speaking engagements to talk to their professionals. I would do shtick. I would memorize magazines. I would memorize a deck of playing cards. I would end every meeting the same way, I’d call everybody in the room by name. Then, I would sell tickets to my upcoming live seminar. I got started because what I taught generated real-world results for employees and as a result, I used those techniques to help me build large and successful sales organizations for lots of different types of companies. Selling is a process of learning and teaching and learning and teaching. The prospect has got to be able to understand and learn the information well enough that they’re willing to part with their money at the end of the process, but you’ve got to first get your brand new recruit salesperson up to speed, and have the product knowledge, and learn the pitch, and learn the content. So, it’s all about learning and teaching and learning and teaching. Since that’s what I specialized in, I was able to employ these ideas in a way that was in addition to schooling. Now that I’m technically retired from normal business, I’ve been helping students all over the world through my YouTube channel and my books.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. What a cool 40-year career you’ve had and what a great way to further propagate your training and the things that you’ve learned. So why don’t you tell us where people can find you on YouTube and tell us what upcoming stuff you have that you want to give some links for to let our listeners know about it.
Matt DiMaio:
Well, there’s three things. The first one is, you can get a lot of free information on test taking, studying textbooks, how to pass exams, how to get motivated to study, that sort of thing at my YouTube channel, youtube.com/besmarterfaster, be smarter faster, because that’s what you’re going to learn how to do, how to be smarter faster. All that content is free. Then I have a brand-new video training course called, An Incredible Memory – How to Have an Incredible Memory. Go to anincrediblememory.com. What makes this special is I break the process down into little bite-sized videos of anywhere from about a minute to about five minutes where I address each individual part of the problem. I really get into, for example, how do you remember numerical information? People have dates, addresses, times, invoice numbers, part numbers, profit and loss information. The amount of numerical information you’ve got to learn for business and for school is staggering. How do you do it? I break the process down. How do you remember people’s names? I break it down, everything from the introduction all the way on through. How do you do this imagination and connection stuff? How do you stop forgetting your keys, or losing your wallet, or playing treasure hunt to find your TV remote, and all of those forgetful type stuff? I break it down into little tiny bite-sized pieces. It’s all at anincrediblememory.com with a lot more courses to come.
Rob Kosberg:
Awesome. Well, those are great places for people to go, and I think you’ve spelled out exactly what it is that they’re going to get and receive. I love it. Thank you for being with us. Thanks for sharing a little bit of your magic and also how your books have kind of furthered your career and your message out there. Thank you for being on the Publish, Promote, Profit podcast.
Matt DiMaio:
My sincere pleasure. Thank you for having me and God bless you.
Rob Kosberg:
God bless you too, my friend.
