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. In elementary and junior high, I was the kid who “felt sick” in the morning because the idea of sitting in class felt like torture. Looking back, it was probably ADHD, anxiety, and some other things, but at the time it just looked like I was a class clown who couldn’t sit still or focus. I stared at the clock, waited for freedom, and came alive outside or out in the bush, not at a desk.

Homework basically didn’t happen. Then I’d stress about not doing it, fall further behind, and the whole thing turned into a nasty loop. I skipped a lot. I wasn’t especially popular, and school just felt like a place I didn’t fit.

There were little flashes that I could learn and focus if I actually tried. A teacher bribed me with Wendy’s if I could sit and focus for a full class. Another teacher bet me I couldn’t do 70 push‑ups; I did them in the hallway. In Grade 7 or 8, a teacher offered Wendy’s again if I memorized the entire poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” I did that too. Clearly I wasn’t incapable—I just didn’t have a system that worked for my brain.

The mission and the first Memory Box

After barely scraping through high school and drifting without a plan, I had a serious motorcycle accident. In that moment the only thought that went through my mind was, “Help me, God.” When I survived, I decided that if I had one last breath, I’d use it to serve God. That decision led to a mission call to the Thailand Bangkok Mission.

I didn’t feel like I knew the gospel well enough, so before I left I started going through missionary pamphlets and marking scriptures that matched each lesson. I highlighted them and put 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.

Around that time I found a book called Mega Memory by Kevin Trudeau. Whatever else you say about the author, the techniques helped me understand how to get things into short‑term memory: chunking, association, breaking things down. Learning Thai later drove the same point home: you don’t learn a language in one shot. You immerse yourself and show up every day.

Somewhere along the way I heard a quote‑myth from a few people, including my cousin Greg, who baptized me and was a huge influence:

“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 I didn’t have any real review system. I’d memorize, move on, and barely review. It felt big and spiritual, but without structure underneath, a lot of those verses slowly faded. A year of effort didn’t stick the way I hoped.

Discovering the 8‑stage review system

The turning point came when I trained a new elder. He had something I didn’t: a review system with a built‑in schedule—an eight‑stage pattern printed on his cards. He told me the 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 over time.

He had cards set up for about two years—one new scripture per day, wired into that review schedule. I went and had a custom stamp made with the eight‑stage pattern, so I could take regular flashcards, stamp the schedule 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 actually used the review system. I followed the schedule. It got to the point where I was reviewing 50–60 cards a 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. My cousin Greg asked, “Did you do it?” meaning the scripture‑a‑day challenge. I said yes and showed him the box with all the flashcards and their review stages: my original Memory Box.

From Memory Box to better grades

My mom tested me too. She picked cards at random and I recited each one word‑for‑word, verbatim. No, I didn’t come back with a Hollywood‑style photographic memory where I remember everything I ever see. But I got something more useful: if I put something into that review system and stuck with the schedule, I could keep it as long as I kept reviewing it.

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

Using the same review pattern, 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. The problem was never my intelligence. It was my process.

When paper became the bottleneck

The flip side was that the paper version 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 a neurodivergent brain, that’s a big deal—the system demands consistency, 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, and constantly manage the box. I even researched printers and setups to print the review pattern on one side and the content on the other. I got it working for a bit and printed a lot of cards that way.

The pattern was always the same: I’d fire the system back up, make a bunch of cards, build momentum—and then eventually burn out on the logistics. The review system itself worked beautifully; the physical overhead kept killing it.

Dreaming of a digital Memory Box

All the while, the idea kept nagging at me: there had to be a way to computerize this, to turn my Memory Box into something I could carry in my pocket. 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 hadn’t heard of Xcode. I had no idea where to begin. A friend with a computer science degree basically told me I couldn’t afford him. Larger software shops quoted me $250,000–$500,000 for a basic build. Even when I was making good money in the oil patch, that was completely out of reach.

Building MemBox with modern tools

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

It wasn’t a “build an app in 90 seconds” fairy tale. I had to learn everything from scratch: what Xcode is, how to open a project, how to read errors, and how to survive when the AI gave me instructions that didn’t match reality. Early on I struggled so much with small edits that I would sometimes just replace entire files to get things building again.

My process was simple but slow. I’d pray at night, asking for help and ideas. Right before falling asleep, I’d often see how to build the next little piece. The next day I’d sit down, open Xcode, and try to build exactly that. I’ve been doing that since around March 2023—step by step, patch by patch.

At first my goal wasn’t to build an app for the world. My goal was to build MemBox for myself: a digital Memory Box I could actually keep up with.

Raising MemBox and sharing it

Around April 2025, everything finally came together into a fully functional version of MemBox on my phone. For months I used it purely for myself. 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.

These days I use MemBox for:

The review system at the core of MemBox isn’t something I invented from scratch. It was given to me and I’ve refined and tweaked it over the years. What I did build is the app wrapped around it—the digital Memory Box that finally makes it sustainable for my life and my brain.

I’ve gone through serious mental‑health challenges, and for a long time I felt broken and dumb because nothing seemed to stick. MemBox showed me the truth: it wasn’t that I couldn’t learn. It was that I’d never had a way 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 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.”