How to develop incredible memory

The cultivation of the memory is too important and too useful to waste it on trivial or unimportant matters. If you must exercise your memory, put your will behind something that has lasting power. That means you must go to it as you do to the work of gardening, or any other productive work. Take it steadily, and note your result, and then see that it is checked up with exactitude. Do not be satisfied with something "fairly good," but demand of your mind exactness, and promptitude, and by and by your mind will get accustomed to giving you what you demand of it, because you have taken the care and made the effort to give the mind what it needed in order to have something to give back when you asked it to. No memory can give what it has not in it. No memory will have in it what is not carefully placed there, either by design and effort, or by continuity of contact, which amounts to the same thing. Therefore if you want a good memory, the rule is simple, both for yourself and for your children. Make one ! Patience in detail, clearness of vision, utterance and expression, vividness of contrast, and variety and distinction in association, all these help. But the great agent is the will.