Tansel Ali is Nailing It!

This Nailing It goes to Tansel Ali, once you know his story, it’s very hard to forget.

Tansel is 3x Australian Memory Champion, represented Australia in the World Memory Championships, featured in two award-winning documentaries on the brain, completed two masters degrees (IT and an MBA), is a bestselling author of ‘The Yellow Elephant‘, and memorized two Yellow Pages phone books in only 24 days.

He now speaks internationally on the topic of memory and personal development.  And, I think he may have the “key” in this field.  Let me explain, personal change is: taking a new thought about yourself and giving it primacy and frequency so it becomes your default “operating system”.  Yet many of us struggle to hold a new thought and return to the old “operating system” having essentially forgotten the idea you want to install. 

Tansel has techniques to introduce and stick new information in his brain at large volumes.  Drawing on these techniques for personal development sounds like a winner to me.

For school kids he recently developed the world’s first School Mind Games event where students from different schools speed read a whole book in 10 minutes, mind-mapped the details out on a wall, presented it back and memorized an 11 minute TED talk word for word. They did this with only three prior training sessions.

The core skills he teaches these kids in just 3 sessions includes speed reading, memory, mind mapping and incidentally confidence in themselves. 

Tansel’s mental gymnastics are not limited to the games of memory championships, like recalling a shuffled deck of cards at great speed.  Whilst these are impressive they’re rarely useful.  Instead he is using memory techniques to break down every day borders like learning a new language. 

He has been teaching himself a new language every 30 days.  Next year he is proving anyone can do this by taking a group of people through learning a new language each month for a whole year including languages as diverse as Hebrew, Cantonese, Portuguese and Mandarin.

Tansel has overcome so much in his life – like Crone’s Disease, bullying, discrimination, his love of heavy metal and poor choice of football team (I’m only joking, Richmond aren’t that bad). 

With his wife Monique Toohey (she’s a firecracker), they’re huge contributors to Muslim Australia. Their kids are beautiful and their faith and humanity are amazing.   

Tansel is constantly opening my mind.  After speaking with Tansel I feel like I’m sitting on a winning ticket and that I just need to cash it in.

At first he opened my mind to how good he was when he spoke at TEDxDubbo, now he is opening it to how good we could all be and that’s what makes him so special. 

Thank you Tansel Ali you are Nailing It.