My Story: How MemBox Came to Be

How a kid who thought he was dumb discovered a review system, filled a plastic Memory Box with cards, and eventually turned it into an iOS app.

Growing up thinking I was dumb

For most of my life, I honestly thought I was dumb.

At Parkside School in Grande Prairie, I was the kid who always “felt sick” in the morning. Sitting in class felt like torture. I’m sure ADHD and anxiety were in the mix, but back then it just looked like I was a class clown who couldn’t sit still or focus. I’d sit there and stare at the clock, just waiting to be free so I could go outside, go in the bush, and actually feel alive.

Homework basically didn’t happen. Then I’d stress about not doing it, then fall further behind, and it turned into this nasty loop. I skipped a lot. I told my mom I didn’t feel well. I wasn’t especially popular, and the whole school environment just felt like something I didn’t fit into at all.

There were little flashes that I could learn and focus if I actually tried. In junior high at Montrose, a teacher bribed me with Wendy’s if I could focus for a full class. Another teacher bet me I couldn’t do 70 push-ups if I’d agree to do a test in exchange. I did the push-ups in the hallway so fast he didn’t believe I’d actually done them. In Grade 7 or 8, a teacher said if I memorized the whole poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” she’d take me out for Wendy’s. I did that too. So clearly, I wasn’t incapable. I just didn’t have a system or a way of learning that worked for my brain.

I barely scraped through high school. No plans afterward. No college applications. No big “this is what I’m going to be.” I walked away from chances to play football and chances at good jobs rebuilding high-performance engines—balancing and blueprinting them—because I was chasing relationships and just kind of drifting.

The accident and a promise

Then I had a serious motorcycle accident.

In that moment, the only thought that went through my mind was:

“Help me, God.”

I honestly didn’t expect to live. When I survived, I made a decision: if I had one last breath, I’d use it to serve God. That decision is what led me to decide to go on a mission.

I got called to the Thailand Bangkok Mission. I didn’t feel like I knew the gospel well enough, so before I left I started going through the missionary pamphlets and marking scriptures that matched each lesson. I highlighted them and put those little arrow tabs along the edges of my scriptures so I could quickly flip to the right spots. That was my first attempt at building any kind of “system” around information.

Discovering a different way to learn

Around that time, I found a book called Mega Memory by Kevin Trudeau. Whatever else you might say about the guy, the techniques in that book actually helped me understand how to get things into short-term memory—chunking, association, breaking things down. One of the big ideas that stuck with me was “five words at a time.” You don’t try to memorize a full sentence all at once; you break it into little pieces, five words at a time, and chain them together.

Learning Thai later taught me the same principle from a different angle: you don’t learn a language in one shot; you immerse yourself and do it every day, over and over, in smaller pieces.

I also quietly decided something big: I wanted to be a doctor someday—ideally a naturopathic-style doctor who could travel, learn different herbs and healing tools from around the world, and combine them. I wanted to study neuroscience. But I knew myself. I had a brutal time studying and doing homework. Even if my life depended on it, I struggled to sit and grind. I knew that if I ever wanted to survive med school, I needed something close to a photographic memory.

Somewhere in there, I started hearing this quote-myth from a few people, including my cousin Greg (who baptized me and was a huge influence on me):

“If you memorize a scripture every day for your whole mission, you’ll come home with a photographic memory.”

So I did it. For the first year of my mission, I memorized a new scripture every single day.

But here’s the problem: I didn’t have any real review system behind it. I’d memorize, move on, and not review properly. It felt like I was doing something big and spiritual, but without a system and schedule underneath, those verses slowly faded out of reach. After a year of daily effort, I didn’t have nearly as much to show for it as I’d hoped.

The turning point came when I trained a new elder. He’d heard the same “photographic memory” story, but he had something I didn’t:

a review system with a built-in review schedule—an eight-stage pattern printed on his cards.

He told me this review system had come down through a chain of missionaries and that someone along the way said it ultimately traced back to Thomas S. Monson. I didn’t invent it. I received it.

As soon as I saw it, I recognized how powerful it was. This wasn’t just “work harder” or “try to remember.” It was a structure: when you see the card, how often you repeat it, and how it gradually gets spaced out.

He had cards set up for about two years—one new scripture per day, combined with a schedule to review older ones. I went and had a custom stamp made with that eight-stage pattern, so I could take regular flashcards, stamp the review system on one side, and write the verse or content on the other. That way I could generate as many cards as I wanted, all wired into the same system.

Then I started over.

I re-memorized all the scriptures from that first year of my mission—this time in English and in Thai—and I actually used the review system. I followed the schedule. It got to the point where I was reviewing 50–60 cards a day, every day: about an hour in the morning and half an hour at night.

By the time I came home, I had thousands of scriptures and principles memorized in both languages.

One of the first things my cousin Greg said to me when I got back was, “Did you do it?” He meant that mission-long scripture-a-day challenge. I said, “Yeah, I did,” and I showed him the box with all the flashcards and the review system. That felt pretty awesome.

My mom tested me too. I told her to pick any card. She picked several, and I recited each one word-for-word, verbatim. It was real.

Did I end up with a Hollywood-style photographic memory where I remember everything I ever see? No. But I did get something more useful: if I put something into that review system and stuck with the schedule, I could keep it for as long as I continued reviewing it. That was close enough for me.

Putting the system to the test

With that system under my belt, I went back and upgraded my academics:

Using the same review system, I started getting A’s and A+’s—98s, 99s, even 100%. That completely flipped the story I’d been carrying around my whole life. I wasn’t dumb. I just hadn’t known how to get things into short-term memory properly, or how to review them in the right way and at the right times so they’d move into long-term memory and stay there.

The problem was never my intelligence. It was my process.

But the paper version of the system had serious downsides.

The cards lived in a physical box in my room. They didn’t go everywhere with me. If I wasn’t at home, I wasn’t reviewing. For someone with a neurodivergent brain, that’s a big deal. The system demands consistency—review at certain intervals—but my brain doesn’t naturally love “same time, same place, every day.”

On top of that, the whole thing was extremely labour-intensive. I had to write or print every card, stamp the review system, sort them, move them between stages, constantly manage the physical box. I even did a ton of research trying to find a printer and setup that could print the review system on one side and the verse or content on the other side automatically. I got that working for a bit and printed a lot of cards that way.

But the pattern was always the same: I’d start up the program again, hand-write or print a bunch of cards, build up momentum… and then burn out on the logistics. It just took too much time to create and manage the cards, especially when life and mental health challenges hit. I kept starting and stopping, over and over. The review system itself worked beautifully; the physical overhead kept killing it.

From plastic box to digital Memory Box

All the while, the idea kept nagging at me:

There has to be a way to computerize this. There has to be a way to turn my Memory Box into something I can carry in my pocket.

I called that original plastic card box my Memory Box because that’s exactly what it was: a box filled with the memories I’d chosen to keep. That’s where the name MemBox comes from—Memory Box → MemBox.

When the iPhone came out, I remember thinking how amazing it would be to have my Memory Box in app form. But I had zero software background. I’d never heard of Xcode. I had no idea where to even begin.

I talked to a friend with a computer science degree. I asked if he could build it. He basically said, “You can’t afford me.” I asked why, and he said, “Because I start at $40,000.” Later I read in his bio that he gets lots of people coming to him with app ideas, but he won’t touch anything he doesn’t think will be profitable or worth it. That stuck with me.

Later on, I talked to bigger software shops in the States. The quotes came back at around $250,000 to $500,000 for a basic version of what I was describing. Even when I was making good money in the oil patch, that was completely out of reach. So the idea stayed in the background. I kept trying to keep the physical system alive and kept running into the same walls.

Building MemBox with zero software background

Then, a few years ago, a friend asked me if I’d heard of ChatGPT. My dad asked me to use it to write him a safety manual. I downloaded it, started playing with it, and tested what it could and couldn’t do. Eventually I asked it, “Could you help me build my Memory Box as an app?” And it said yes.

That was the start. But it wasn’t some “build a full app in 90 seconds” fairy tale.

I had no software background. I had to learn everything from scratch—what Xcode is, how to open a project, how to read errors, all of it. Even with ChatGPT, a lot of instructions were confusing or flat-out wrong. It would tell me to click things that didn’t exist or use APIs that had changed. I had a really hard time dealing with small code patches at first, so I’d end up copying and pasting full files just to get things to build.

It was brutal. It took a lot of perseverance, patience, and stubbornness.

The way I moved forward was pretty simple but slow:

I’ve been doing this since around March 2023, so roughly two years and eight months as I’m writing this. Almost three years. Step by step, tiny patch by tiny patch.

First, build MemBox for myself

At first, my goal wasn’t “build an app for the world.” My goal was very simple:

Build MemBox for myself.

I just wanted my Memory Box in digital form so I could finally use this review system in a way that fit my life and my brain. That was it. No grand plan. Just: I want this for me.

Around April of this year, everything finally came together. I had a fully functional version of MemBox on my phone. It felt like I’d given birth to this digital version of something I’d carried around in my head and in that box for about twenty years.

For the next six months or so, I used it purely for myself. No one else. I’ve been using it every day, raising it like you’d raise a child: teaching it, refining it, polishing it, and adding features that I personally wanted and needed. I’ve tuned it to my brain, my habits, my struggles, and the way I actually live.

Only recently have I had a change of heart and a desire to bring it to the world—to let other people have access to the same review system, and to the experience of remembering things properly, maybe for life, instead of watching them evaporate.

I’ve downloaded and tested pretty much every flashcard and spaced-repetition app I could find. There are some good tools out there, but I couldn’t find a single one that really matched this combination of:

Most tools are built around short-term goals: pass the exam, then forget. MemBox is built around a different principle:

You really remember what you do often. You keep what you come back to.

That’s why French immersion works: you’re surrounded by the language every day. Your brain eventually goes, “Okay, this is important, we’re keeping this.” MemBox basically mimics that principle in a more focused, structured way. You show up, you see the right cards on the right days, and by doing them enough times at the right spacing, your brain finally flags them as important and holds onto them.

From everything I’ve lived, tested, read, and even asked AI about, a system like this—spaced, repeated, and consistent—is one of the most effective and efficient ways to make memories stick. At first, you review more often. Over time, as the system spaces things out, you might only see some cards once a year, and they’re still there.

The difference now is that the system lives on my phone, not in a plastic box. Instead of spending a huge chunk of my time writing, stamping, printing, and sorting cards, I’d say that now about 98% of my time goes into actually memorizing and reviewing, and maybe 2% goes into making cards. If I’m out somewhere and see I’ve got a few Due cards, I can open my phone and review them on the spot. I always have my phone. I almost never had my card box with me.

What I use MemBox for today

These days I use MemBox for:

The review system at the heart of MemBox isn’t mine in the sense of “I invented it from scratch.” It was given to me on my mission and I’ve refined and tweaked it a bit over the years. What I did build is the app wrapped around it—the digital Memory Box that finally makes it usable and sustainable for me.

I’ve gone through serious mental health challenges, and for a long time I felt broken and dumb because no matter how hard I tried to remember things, nothing seemed to stick. MemBox showed me the truth: it wasn’t that I couldn’t learn. It was that I never learned how to review properly.

This app is one of the biggest accomplishments of my life, right up there with serving my mission, learning Thai, and being a husband and a father. I built it first for me. Now I’m finally ready to share it with anyone who wants a practical way to remember what matters—long-term.

MemBox is short for Memory Box. It started as a literal box of cards in my room. Now it’s an app in your pocket, built around a review system that tells your brain, “Hey, this matters. Let’s keep it.”