The orator who commits his speech to memory is in a sorry plight if he forgets a sentence.
If you are to speak at a dinner, lay out your plan, divide your topic into several parts. Jot down the catch lines, and just before you speak look over the ticket. Charge your brain with the points or ideas and build the words around them.
Don't remember things with verbatim correctness. Remember the skeleton thought, the idea.
When you quote a price or figure, jot it down. Confirm the verbal statement by a written memorandum.
Memory is a bad servant sometimes. You remember a thing one way and the other fellow remembers it another way. You are both honest, but one of you is wrong. If you had made a memorandum in duplicate or jotted down the figures, what trouble it would have saved you.
Where dollars are concerned it is good sense to trust to a written memo., and not to any mental memo.
No use to cram your brain with transient things, when lead pencils and paper are so cheap and so easily obtainable.
The employe who trusts to his memory hurts the business, and after he quits a lot of misunderstandings will come up.
Insist on your employes making memorandums of things and prices, for when the employe goes he takes his memory with him. If he has a memorandum you know the facts.