In my opinion this is the greatest PAO (person-action-object) list I’ve ever seen. First of all, if you don’t know what PAO is it is basically a memory method where you create a Person for every number, an action that goes with that person and an object that goes with that person. For example, my person for the number 36 is Michael Jackson.
The action is moonwalking and the object is stage. So for me
36 = Michael Jackson moonwalking on stage
25 = Neil Armstrong floating in space
50 = Lucy (from Charlie Brown comic) holding a football
Then once you have a person-action-object for each number you can memorize numbers 6 digits (or in the case below 9 digits) at a time
For example, the number 36 25 50 would = Michael jackson floating on a football. For the 1st pair you take the person, the second paid you take the verb for that number and the 3rd pair you take the object for that pair. It is a genius way to memorize numbers (and playing cards too).
Now, I mentioned that the list below is the greatest I have ever seen and it is for 3 reasons in my opinion:
- Because it is all the way up to 1000. This is a massive undertaking and took years for Florian to create. My PAO is only 00-99 (100) and it took at least a month to create. The sheer volume of this list is impressive
- The way he presents it is very organized, clean and visually appealing
- He is SHARING it. You can tell a lot about a person’s intentions when they put in years of work on something and then simply give it away as open source material to benefit a community. That’s what Florian did here. He spent years creating it and now just gives it to anyone who is interested. My guess is years and maybe decades from now memory champions will be referencing this list and benefiting from Florian’s work.
I am very impressed with Florian for many reasons and this list. Take some time to check it out
http://www.memory-sports.com/millennium-pao/
I do encourage you if you are interested in memorizing numbers to build a PAO list even if it is just 00-99 (which might be enough as you can do 6 digits at a time). This list will give you a major head start and could shave off months if not years to your memory goals.
