Every technique in this course fails the same handful of ways, and every failure traces back to one of the five steps from Day 1. Knowing which step broke tells you exactly what to fix.
- Blank when you try to recall: usually a Focus failure, you moved too fast to actually notice the item in the first place.
- You recall the wrong item at a stop: usually a Location failure, two loci or pegs were too similar and images bled together.
- You recall “something was there” but not what: usually a Code failure, the image was too vague, generic, or literal instead of specific and strange.
- The whole thing fades within a day: a Review failure, nothing wrong with the encoding, it just never got revisited on schedule (Day 23).
When something doesn’t stick, don’t just repeat the same weak image harder, diagnose which step failed and rebuild that piece specifically.