You know how you see yourself now. Is it possible for you to imagine yourself learning quickly, enjoying studying, doing well in school?

You can prove this for yourself. For one full day keep the thought in mind that you are a genius. Imagine that things come to you easily, that learning is fun and easy for you.

Even if something occurs that would seem to prove you are not a genius, keep thinking that you are. Let nothing, for one full day, interfere with this role you are playing.

Now, try it again for another full day. Do the exact same thing again. Remember, let nothing change this picture you have in your mind that you are a learning genius, that school and studying are fun.

If you really get into your studies and see learning as fun, great results will follow. Do not force things to happen. Do not struggle. Just spend more and more time doing what you love--learning!

If you follow the advice above great things will happen for you. Many of you may already be doing this, may already be learning geniuses. If so, keep it up! If you feel you need improvement, remember to imagine your success first. When you see it in your mind, it will happen! Act like a learning genius and you will become one!

Now comes something I feel is very exciting. The following are five techniques that will more than double your speed of learning when you apply them.

Think of these as your Learning Tool Box. Just as a carpenter has a hammer, screwdriver, and a pair of pliers in his tool box, you can have tools to help you learn easier and faster. Use these five techniques frequently and I guarantee you will become a learning genius. You will astound your classmates, teachers, and parents.

At this time, I will not go into great detail about how to use these techniques. But I will tell you enough to get you headed in the right direction. You can easily find information about these and similar techniques from other sources. You can learn a lot by experimenting on your own.

Anytime you use an acronym or initials to help you remember something you speed the learning of it at least 10 times! Get into the habit of making acronyms of things you have to remember and you will be making a great start to becoming a learning genius.

Similar to acronyms are acrostics. You can try learning the name and order of the planets on your own, or you can use an acrostic: My Very, Excellent, Mother, Just, Served, Us, Nine, Pizzas. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

You should find many uses for acronyms and acrostics in your daily learning activities. I know they have helped me tremendously in learning and public speaking.

Often students are given lists of three, five, seven or ten things to remember. Here is a simple, wonderful technique that will allow you to learn lists of things ten times faster, and better, and in order.

The technique is: Remember a list of ten words that rhyme with the numbers one to ten. Then, associate the item in the list with the number that corresponds with it.

It should take about one minute or less to learn these ten rhyming words. Once you have learned them, you will automatically know what order they go in. You will know the words backwards, forwards and in any order.

You can have a lot of fun memorizing the first ten presidents, the seven wonders of the ancient world, the five longest rivers in the world, or whatever list you want, by associating the rhyming words with the item they correspond with in your list.

One tip, try to make your associations a little wacky. For example, I've never forgotten my association formed years ago for the first president of the United States: I imagined George Washington shooting down a cherry tree with a gun. I could have imagined him washing a gun in a crazy way!

Rhyming words will work for any list up to 10. Seldom do you ever have to remember 12 or 17 or 55 things, but there are fun ways to do it if you want to. I learned the 192 countries of the world, and I knew them forward, backwards and in any order.

There are many ways to use memory pegs, some of which we have already been using. Acronyms and Rhyming Words are pegs of a sort. Pegs are very convenient places for us to put things so we can remember them.

The ancient Greeks used a peg system called loci. They would imagine various items in their homes in a specific order. They might imagine their front door, the doorknob, the doorstep, the floor inside the door . . . . Then, when they had things to remember they would associate the things with the items related to their house. Using this method, some Greeks could remember astonishing lists of things.

The peg system I used to remember the 192 countries of the world, I learned about in an old book called The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas. There are millions of copies of this book available in used bookstores and libraries. You could buy a copy today on Amazon.com for $5.00 plus shipping. I notice the price inside my book: 50 cents! I must have bought it at a garage sale! What the system does is teach you how to convert numbers (which cannot be visualized very well) into words, which can. Then, when you have words that correspond with any number, you can remember very long lists of things forwards, backwards, and in any order. Read about the peg system in Lorayne's book on pages 101-111.

When you work with these memory and learning techniques in the spirit of fun, you can learn to use them very fast and effectively. This technique will obviously take a little more time than the others in Your Tool Box, which can be learned and used almost immediately.

I found that learning the memory peg system described in The Memory Book was a wonderful way to spend time while on a long trip by car!

By the way, you likely can find a description of the memory peg system (which was originally popularized by Gregor Von Feinagle in 1807) in many other books by Lorayne and others. For example, William Hersey in Blueprints for Memory promises to teach you the system in less than an hour.

People laugh when I tell them about this learning tool. I don't care. I still think it is one of the simplest and best methods I know. I met a college nursing student who used the method to perfection. I also use it frequently.

The tool is Flash Cards. There's something about being able to look at a card and hold it in your hand that makes the information almost concrete. You can quiz yourself endlessly with cards. If you get all the material you need to know on the cards, you can almost guarantee a perfect score on any test. The nursing student I mentioned had a giant ring of cards. She held them up to me and said, "This is everything I need to know for the nursing exam!" I guarantee you she did super on the test. Flash Cards . . . I think they are swell!

Make your own cards. Use color markers or other artwork to make your flash cards fun, if you want. My first collection of flash cards were 3,000 vocabulary words on small pieces of paper I fit into cute little packets I made from 3x5 cards. Nothing fancy here, but I gained more from this activity than I did from almost anything else I did in college. I astounded my professors with my vocabulary (which was usually better than their's!), and knowing so many quality words helped my reading and writing. There is little you can do to improve your education more important than enlarging your vocabulary. And it is so easy to do!

The computer is great and the internet is wonderful, but for sheer learning power the lowly cassette recorder provides me with a most satisfactory experience.

Over the past ten years I've gotten into the habit of recording books that I want to know by heart on tape. And I listen to these books when I brush my teeth, get ready for work, or drive. I believe most folks have 30-60 or more minutes a day that could be invested this way without interfering with anything else that might be done.

Yes, you can buy books on tape, or check them out of the library, but I prefer to hear my own voice. I have expensive tapes recorded by others (such as Harry Lorayne), but I still prefer my inexpensive homemade ones.

You do not have to do this technique. You can be a learning genius using the four tools previously described or others you may find. But I have to tell you this a tool I like having in my tool box! I would not make the tapes if I did not enjoy the process and think it worth while. After ten years of doing this hobby, I now have hundreds of tapes, and they are among my most treasured possessions.

It takes time to record your own books on tape, so I choose only books I will want to listen to forever, that really have information I want to learn deep in my bones. There are books that if you knew everything in them you would be very smart indeed! These are the books you want to find and tape. Making a tape of just one book and listening to it over and over might be a great joy and help to you.

Now, before you get started, I want to tell you the purpose of using these techniques: To have fun! When you have fun, you automatically double your speed of learning. So, the great secret of any learning activity is to figure out a way to make it fun.

Don't look at these tools as another way to turn learning into a chore. Play with them. Use them in ways that are fun and that work for you.

In my Magic of Reading show I use several memory devices or tools to make sure that everyone in the room remembers everything I say! I find these tools help the audience learn faster and better, and they also help me, as a public speaker, deliver the program!

I love memory! If I had fallen in love with memory techniques as a kid I would have blown the doors off my classmates in school. Dr. Rich Davis, I must confess, was not a good student until he learned how to learn in college. If you are not a great student now, this may be a way for you surge ahead in the future. If you are a good student, these techniques will only make you better.