by Ted Sherman

Created on: January 15, 2009   Last Updated: February 08, 2012

There are many ways a good memory helps in career success. A Shakespearean actor would never make it without a great memory. A commercial pilot could never fly safely without memorizing hundreds of instruments and procedures aboard the aircraft. A champion quarterback needs to memorize hundreds of signals and plays to make it to the Super Bowl. However, even memory that requires less technical skills can sometimes result in an unexpectedly successful career.

There's a family member whose amazing memory was the key to a career that has taken her from student assistant at a PBS TV station to writer-producer on a major network program. I call her memory amazing because she started to store useful facts into it when she was just three years old. We didn't know at the time that those facts would later be a key to a successful career. In those days, her memory exercises involved both an old-fashioned record player and several small portable cassette tape recorders.

Rather than playing with dolls, our little girl decided to transfer some favorite records, mostly Broadway show tunes and stand-up comedy, to cassette tapes. Her perfectly logical reason was that she could carry the cassette recorder around the house, to her room and outside. Those were the days long before CDs and iPods.

When she began kindergarten the following year, she insisted on taking the tape recorder to school. She often held sessions with the other kids, singing and teaching them songs from such classic plays as "Oliver", "Cats", "My Fair Lady" and others of that era. She further astounded the teachers by doing a four-year-old version of popular stand-up comedians, including Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart and Woody Allen. It was all stored, much of it word for word, in her amazing memory bank.

When in high school, our daughter's obsession with taping music and comedy ended. After all, there were tough academic subjects to master, sports and boys to contend with. However, she did use her music and comedy memory as a disc jockey in after-school volunteer work at a local FM radio station. She went on to compete her academic degree in communications at an Ivy League university in three years, and then at age 19, went out to find a job in show business. After several weeks making the rounds, she was interviewed for a job as production assistant on an afternoon TV talk show.

When she arrived, she noted that the producer's wall was covered with old Broadway show albums. During the interview, our daughter applied

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