A great movie of the last twenty years or so is Memento, starring Guy Pearce and Carrie Anne Moss about a man who suffers from Anterograde Amnesia, which causes short-term memory loss, as well as the inability to form new memories. This condition was the result of an attack years earlier in which his wife was killed but he survived with a severe brain injury. To try and maintain his identity and understanding of who he is and what he is supposed to do, which is trying to find the people responsible for their crime against his family, he tattoos specific memories all over his body. His hope is that each day, when he awakens with no memory, the story told through his body ink will click and he will know enough to continue his mission rather than spending the day trying to simply remember anything at all. It is a brutal and extreme depiction of what short-term memory means for those afflicted, and told in an interesting, suspenseful way – Check it out!
The movie recap serves only to open the topic of memory and how it impacts our lives and our day to day work and career, albeit in a dramatic way. We hear so many phrases about memory, and its impact. If you Google ‘memory quotes’, you will find thousands available. Some touch on business
‘To be a great liar you have to have a great memory, and I have no memory’ – Ozzy Osbourne
‘Happiness is good health and a bad memory’ – Ingrid Berman
‘A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial’ – Clifton Fadiman
There are a near-infinite amount of quotes beyond these of course, and they often suggest that a great memory is not only not important, but can hold you back, prevent happiness, and offer more regret than anything else. When it comes to business, we all know of those people who can tell you what customers were doing thirty years ago, previous generations, whether they lived it or read up about it. They may have been around for decades with the same company or in the industry such that they can quote what worked, what failed, and what was learned from both to bring us to the business world we have today. People generally love to hear people regale the stories from years gone by, particularly when it helps connect them to their work and career in the present. There of course are very good reasons, and instances, when the timing of a strong memory will serve you. Which is better for business is the question, and here are thoughts on both.
A Longer-Term Memory Will Help You:
- Remember Names, which many people feel is a sign of how much you value them. Customers specifically, and some execs, want to know that you consider them a VIP and knowing their name can make all the difference in your relationship…and any future relationship!
- Remember Business Plans, Strategies in business can have a great impact on how you do business going forward. Just like fashion, hairstyles, baby names, etc, things are cyclical and come back around. When you have an arsenal of business strategies from years gone by, you won’t necessarily replicate them, but you know what elements within them were particularly effective and can bring them back into a current strategy, rather than reinventing every wheel.
- More quickly identify the needs of a project, initiative, or team to build. Part of what makes a business leader effective is the ability to make quick decisions. They are able to do that by knowing, based on experience, which is tied to memory, what to do next. They do so by knowing how, who and what worked in the past and leverage that knowledge to build a plan with similar pieces and elements, believing it will give the new project the best chance to succeed.
A Shorter-Term Memory Will Allow You To:
- You don’t let go of thoughts and opinions you had years earlier. While people change, business changes, the world changes for that matter. If we’re stuck in our memories of how things were years, even decades earlier, it will always be hard to move forward, and even harder to feel good about it when you do if you believe it is not as good as it was ‘back then’.
- You fail to show grace for people who have changed. We all meet each other at different stages of life and career. While we know that those in the middle or latter half of either have a great deal more experience than those just entering the workforce. So, who is more likely to make a mistake, which usually a behavioral mistake? It’s the new workforce. We forgive our children, family, and close friends for bad behavior, having a bad day or week. However, we sometimes hold onto a single instance of poor behavior or period of low performance of a co-worker from years earlier, and think only of that for too long, while that person may have gone on to mature and become a true success in their work since then.
- You struggle to move forward because you are hanging onto too much of the past. While most of us can remember at least the bullet points of the more important life events that we’ve had, there are times when we would like to not remember as much detail as we do. When someone has hurt you, wronged you, backstabbed you, spoke ill of you, whether you witnessed it directly or heard through the grapevine. Some will hang onto these memories and feelings forever, and if that’s you, you will pay the price for that forever. As much as you think you are perpetually holding the ‘culprits’ accountable for their transgressions by never forgetting, you are actually hurting only yourself. You are the only one who remembers it, and is choosing to carry that anger, angst or pain associated with whatever happened, which often you exaggerate more and more as time goes by. You need to let it go, forgive those responsible even just to yourself, so you can come to peace with it, which will allow you to slowly forget and come to peace with it.
Being able to recall important things at the right time is a great skill, and one that people make a great living at proclaiming they can teach you how you can have one too. But you will do just fine in business if you possess qualities like Forgiveness, Grace, Honesty, and Loyalty, all of which can substitute for the perfect memory and greatly supplement an average one. A wise person once told me that those areas are far more worthy of your focus. I wish I could remember who it was…
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