I am not especially in to football, but I am in to the lessons we can all learn from football and I was fascinated by an article in The Guardian that covered the announcement of the retirement of footballer Frank Lampard. Critical to this I noted that the article revealed:

“When Frank was a youngster, I can remember a lot of people saying: ‘What’s all the fuss? He’s a good player but he isn’t that good,” says Tony Carr, the former West Ham academy director, under whom Lampard developed.

Yet now Lampard is considered to be one of the all time greats. So how do you go from good to properly great? The answer seems to be practice.

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain. This is a popular memory aid for remembering the colours of the rainbow based upon the first letter of each word. Changing it back to colours it becomes: Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet. Such a learning device is called a mnemonic, which is defined as:

a system such as a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations which assists in remembering something.

So far, so good, but if that seems a little simple, childish even, could such a device, a mnemonic, help me remember the famous never ending number 'pi' to 20 decimal places, that is 3.14159265358979323846?

​And could you too remember that... in 3 minutes?