John Graham
speaker
114 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
John Graham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so I got it fixed through surgery. At the same year, I changed schools. Completely new school, lockers. It was eighth grade, all new teachers, all new environment. And here I was, I couldn't carry more than five pounds of books to class because of my surgery. And I was healing and I had to leave five minutes early to avoid bumping into people.
And it was those extremely scary, anxiety-filled time. I remember walking to class Mr. Bailey's woodshop class every morning. And I would look outside and if there was snow on the ground, I had this irrational thought that my mom was going to get into a car crash because of the icy and that she was going to die. And I would worry about her all throughout class.
You could tell, you know, looking back, anxiety was very, very prevalent then because of how unsafe I felt in my environment and all the things that were going on.
We cope with it in so many different ways. I think me personally was productivity and achievement. accomplishment. I always needed to be doing something, earning something, achieving something, making something. And there's nothing wrong with that. But always being busy and rushed and thinking about the future can be very much a coping mechanism for that, just to bury those feelings.
I earned my third trophy, my third USA Memory Championship trophy about a year ago. And it was an amazing feeling. You're holding in your hand, it's like everything I've imagined and earned, and I love it, I'm so happy. And then I put it on my nightstand that night, and I felt immediately a little empty. And I thought, I need to prepare for next year.
I stepped back for a second, I said, this never ends, does it? Like I had a real life-changing moment. I said, this never, ever ends. And I realized all the money I was chasing, you know, the tens of thousand dollars a month or whatever goal I had or the travel or the family or, you know, the cars, all of that, anything external from me,
can't give you lasting fulfillment or happiness or contentment ever, ever. And that's always been my driving force. Achieve, get, acquire, accomplish, right? Accumulate. And it doesn't last. My life changed in that moment. It's not that those things are bad. It's not that I don't have those things. But to have that as your driving core force will never solve anything.
All of this happiness that we could talk about, this is all internal. It's an internal releasing of all the blockages in the way and the preferences that we have that block us from feeling that flow of happiness at all times.
Yeah, that's a good question. I was sort of a jack of all trades at the time, meaning I was afraid to dive into one thing exclusively. Magic came to mind. Not that I was a magician or anything, but I was like, I want to be really cool. I want to have an ability that everyone drops their jaw and like wonders what I'm doing and like amazing. And when I read that book, I thought, this is it.
This is a superpower. Not everyone knows about it, right? Everyone I meet to this day doesn't know about memory competitions in these feeds. So I thought, I'm just going to go all out. I'm going to win Grandmaster of Memory, that certificate that's behind me. I wanted to win that in my first competition.
And so for that, at the time, I needed to memorize 1,000 digits in an hour in one of the events, 10 decks of cards in one hour in another event, and one deck of cards in under two minutes. And I thought I could do that because when you read the book, you believe it's possible. So I trained for like four months, signed up for my first competition. This was in China. That's another story.
I'm traveling through China with my girlfriend, who's my wife now. Signed up. I'm sitting down at the first event, which is 30 minutes. We memorize names and faces on a piece of paper. There's like 300 people in the room memorizing, which basically looks like you're taking a test. It's super intense. My heart is pounding out of my chest.
Psychologically, I've never been that stressed before in my life. Never felt that much pressure. I almost got up and walked out. It was so intense. And that's sort of my story is how to overcome that, right? How to merge with that feeling. But I almost gave up and I bombed. I completely bombed in that competition.
Because there was a couple core things I didn't know what to do, like how to review. So I started talking to some of the best people in the world. Nelson Dulles is a friend of mine. He's a five-time U.S. champion. Boris Conrad from Germany. These people from all over the world were just gifting me insights. Like you talk, meet people who know what they're doing as mentors, as friends.
And I started befriending these people. And years later, I kept going. I learned from the mistakes I made. I learned how to train with that pressure because the pressure was the number one challenge for me. It wasn't the memory techniques. I could do that. I could visualize. I could store the information in my memory palaces. We talk about the techniques, but it was the pressure.
It was sitting down and having your heart race out of your chest, having the voice in your head tell you, you already made a mistake. You're going to F up. Look at all these people. They're better than you. And feeling like the mouth go dry, feeling the head go hot, all of those things, I had to learn how to perform under that.
Yeah, this is the best question. I hope people really listen to this. At the time, I was told by another competitor. His name was Brad Zupp, a friend of mine. He trained in Starbucks. So he would go to Starbucks, he would get his memory gear out on the table and have people walking all around looking at him like, what's this guy doing? Having the noise and train under those conditions.
So I thought, wow, that's really cool. I need to train under those conditions. And another champion, Ron White, he got a waterproof deck of cards and he would submerge himself underwater, holding his breath and memorize under the psychological pressure. He actually hired a Navy SEAL to train him for the mental, psychological, physical pressure.
And so I took those to heart and I started doing them myself. I call this chaos training. So most memory competitors will sit in their room. They'll put these nice ear blockers over their ears, get nice and quiet and learn the techniques and memorize. And there's nothing wrong with that.
But clearly when you're in a competition or a TV show and there's massive pressure, you crumble because you're not used to that. That's what happened to me. So I would literally get my stuff ready to memorize, my paper on the sheet, my timer ready. I would get down, do 20 pushups holding my breath.
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