​Our mental capacity for storing data is a strange thing. Why do we remember specific facts, figures, dates, incidents? Why don’t we remember others?
 
What is it in our human makeup that puts something into the memory banks, keeps it there, then allows you to extricate itself, as necessary?
 
I’m not sure there’s a formula for what we remember. There is probably some brain science and studies that indicate the triggers for our memories and how we store information, but I doubt a strong enough formula can reliably predict what we save, store and evacuate.
 
Useless storage is another category that’s hard to figure. I’ll give you a case in point. A good friend of mine can crush incredibly arcane questions on Jeopardy with great rapidity. This is an art (and memory) form.
 
How does this person do it? Was there specific schooling in her background that allows her to pull up the information quickly to pose the proper question in Jeopardy? Does it come from relentless reading? Did teachers emphasize certain learning tactics as she grew up? Does her brain pick up on certain cues? Is the stored information in her brain massively useful? I don’t have a clue.
 
Coming up with those Jeopardy questions doesn’t make anyone a genius per se, but it does mean they are very good at remembering specificities and can push that information to their vocal cords to press a button to win the contest. It is clear though that SOME function is served by retaining that type of data.
 
Having that information stored in your brain isn’t crucial to survival. It might help you get ahead in the world, yes, in certain professions.
 
Another friend of mine jokes repeatedly when she defeats the bot in various app games, like “Connections” or “Wordle.” She loves crushing the machine, demonstrating human agility and ability over software programming. I’m with her there.
 
Her mind, too, stores a lot of what she says is “useless data.” I’m astounded on a regular basis on how thoroughly and quickly she wins at these games based on being able to pull things up from her memory and make connections.
 
I think she doesn’t give herself enough credit and deflects the praise, but her high level of skill at those games gets back again to the question of, “Where did she learn all that stuff? Where did her initial learning (and then the storage) of this information come from?”

Until brain storage studies more completely explain how one brain keeps something and another disposes of information upon contact, we willl never know the answers to these questions. Maybe, decades in the future we will know more.

For now, what I know is that these friends trounce me in “Jeopardy,” “Connections” and “Wordle” on a regular basis. They are nice to me, complimenting me when I surface occasionally with some random tidbit of information out of the blue that makes sense on Jeopardy or Connections. But their abilities are far beyond mine.
 
Everyone’s brain is different. Both of these friends have brains that function at a much higher level than mine when it comes to crushing it in games requiring memory storage, retrieval and integration. Mine? I don’t know, I was probably looking out the window during grade school, daydreaming, watching the clouds. 

​There is a ton of literature on self-improvement. You can’t go anywhere on LinkedIn without encountering something about how to meet and exceed your goals. Our culture is inundated with information that says you can be anything.
 
The truth is not everyone can be CEO of a major organization. Only one person gets that job. Only one team wins the Major League Baseball World Series annually. No other teams win the trophy.
 
We are saturated with these types of messages, focusing on what you can become and how to get there, being the best. Set goals. Measure them. Stick to the plan. Execute. Work hard. Train.
 
How often do you see someone fall off their weight loss plan?  How many alcoholics or drug addicts re-succumb to their demons? Far too many people.
 
When messaging directed at us keeps telling you to grab at the golden ring, it is hard to take a step back and look at yourself and embrace the “possible” instead of the “highly unlikely.” We are urged upward over and over.

Yet, you can make major changes in your life and improve. That can be done. And improvement DOES makes a difference on where you can go in life. I saw this type of change in a basketball official (referee) last week.
Over the weekend, I served as a clinician at a basketball camp in Pennsylvania, helping officials trying to work their way onto a staff for Division II and Division III college games. During the two days of observations, I had the opportunity to see one of our officiating campers who had attended the previous year.
 
His improvement from 2023 was astounding. His court presence stood out. His mechanics were impeccable. The way he communicated with his partners was exemplary. He was a leader on the court and his judgment stood out.
 
I came up to him during a break in play and praised all of those qualities, and asked how he had gotten so much better in one year. His response? “I watched a lot of video,” he said.
 
I nodded in understanding. It was clear he wanted to take the next step in his officiating career and that he was serious about it. He made the decision to commit to doing things differently, implementing tips he’d received the previous summer.
 
He demonstrated that clear improvement is possible by determining what needed to be fixed in his game, studying how to look better and then changing what needed to be changed. It didn’t happen overnight. It happened over the course of a year with dedication to his personal journey. Those changes were his to make and to his credit he stayed with it and the results played out two weeks ago when he rose to the top of rankings in the camp.
 
His improvement stood out as an example to me, and should be an example for others. Seeking out useful feedback that you can add to your arsenal works for basketball officials, leaders, coaches, partners in relationships and just about any aspect of life.
 
The steps where we move up in life are never easy. He put a tremendous amount of physical and mental effort into improving. We all can do that with resolve and desire. The results become clear over time, and the feeling, the accomplishments are that much more tangible. It doesn’t mean you are number one, but it does mean you are headed in the right direction.

​A couple of weeks back, I started driving to the baseball games in our 62+ league with another guy on our team. We’ve known each other for four years. During that time, you play catch, take batting practice, cheer each other on during the game, shoot the breeze in the dugout about serious and not-so-serious topics.
 
It’s one way you get to know a person – playing sports. Competing together on a team is a lot of fun, and I’ve always enjoyed the camaraderie.
 
A major reason I decided to play baseball again at this stage of my life was to meet new people and make new friends (I also play on a 55+ age bracket team). You slowly get to know your teammates, their idiosyncrasies, how they tell jokes, how serious they are, whether they listen to what you say, whether they are a space cadet. Hanging in the dugout together teaches you those things.

But had I developed “friendships” after four years? Probably not. Since starting to drive to games recently with the one teammate mentioned above (I will call him “M”), that bond has grown and we know much more about each other, our lives and those of our families. It got me pondering on how friendship develops and how long it takes before you really get to know someone if you don’t interact consistently with that person over an extended period of time.
 
The conclusion, as I look back on periods of my life having moved to a new area, is that it takes about four years to really call someone a close friend. You can be “friendly,” but that’s not the same.
 
Much intervenes. When you have kids at home, you are focused on raising them properly and others you know (outside of immediate family) take a back seat as you focus on doing your best as a parent. My wife and I are past that stage of life, so the ability to hang out with others has increased, but you still must have the energy and desire to put into meeting new people and forums which interest you and other individuals – having those common interests that help you bond.
 
As I look back on my younger years, our family moved from northern New Jersey to Kankakee, IL for the start of my high school year. Through your classes and extracurricular activities, you are put into situations where you consistently see students your age. The ones who tend to befriend you when you are the newcomer have typically not turned out to be the ones who become long-term friends. That takes more time.
 
Instead, the kids who befriended me (and probably my two brothers) early on were those who didn’t have too many friends themselves. Being the newcomer, the tend approach you sooner. You hang out, get to know them, spend some time together and then slowly expand your reach. You come in contact with others who share more of your interests and slowly you start to hang out with them.
 
Looking back, this winnowing/adjustment period takes well over two years. In the second to fourth year after a move, you slowly start to assimilate with others who share interests that build deeper friendship bonds.
 
It’s a funny thing, and it took driving in the car with M to the games as we had one-on-one time to listen, focus, pay attention, ask questions, where we’ve raised our time together from “friendly” to “friendship.” And it was just about the same as that high school timeframe period of adjustment – four years.

​Last week, a meme surfaced that was new to me. There was no image. Just a statement: “Well, another day I made it through without applying the Pythagorean Theorem.”
 
For some reason, I launched into laughter. It was so perfect. All the things we are taught growing up that we never use as adults. The meme caught this sentiment so off-handedly that it instantaneously cracked me.

It also got me thinking about all those other educational requirements that serve no function when you leave school. This could be something from third grade, something from high school or perhaps college. We are taught useless information that has no connection to your job, career and just generally becoming an intelligent human being.
 
For example, when was the last time you applied any concepts from your high school sophomore geometry class? The only thing I remember from that class was one of my good friends stealing my mom’s homemade chocolate chip cookies from my sack lunch. She liked my mom for those cookies without even knowing her in person.
 
Similarly, in college, as a business major, I had to take a calculus class. Yup. Figure out those differential equations, dude. Here’s what old Google has to say about that, “A differential equation is an equation that provides a description of a function's derivative, which means that it tells us the function's rate of change.” Sure thing. Got it. Let’s move on.
 
What I REMEMBER from that class was our corny professor (or perhaps he was just a teaching assistant) and how passionate he was. He would write so hard on the blackboard that he frequently would snap the chalk and toss it in the waste basket while making moaning sounds. Quite strange.
 
One day, during homecoming week, there was a fire engine outside on the quad and it kept clanging its bell. He got increasingly frustrated, squealing and yelling towards the window. Finally, he propelled the chalk at the window, where it shattered into multiple pieces.

Silence descended on the room as he looked at the glass with glazed eyes behind his brown horn-rimmed glasses. Then one of the guys from our dorm floor who came to class stoned every day started laughing uproariously. That broke the tension and gives me one of the few useful lasting memories of that college calculus course. Memories aside, I’ve still never used anything from that class since the day I left it with a C-.
 
That Pythagorean Theorem meme sets off amusing memories, and also gets you thinking “what if?” What if we were schooled with more useful classes, ones that applied to our daily lives and helped us become better human beings and able to manage our personal affairs?
 
Why, for example, aren’t we taught anger management? With all the shootings across the U.S. since the late-1990s, why don’t we mandate a class that teaches us how to handle anger (our own and that of others), to dial back our emotions, listen to others, show empathy, handle crazy people?
 
We need English, arithmetic, biology, astronomy, earth science, history, basic math. We use all of those classes when we get fully immersed in the world.
 
Yet many more classes could help many of us: financial planning, cooking, understanding the different world religions. We’d lead fuller lives, more intelligently, more connected, more understanding. Hopefully, anyway. There are probably some more funny memes out there we can use to poke fun at what we’re taught that prove useless as we move through life. Maybe that can lead us towards classes that make sense and help us to survive and thrive in this complicated and highly technical world.