So what’s the deal with the student who supposedly invented phase-6?

Yep, it’s actually true! At the time (in 2002, so you do the math ;) Daniel Gorin was a 19-year-old motivated freshman in college. From what he’s told me, he was writing important information that he wanted to really lock into his memory on paper flashcards/index cards and was trying to follow a proven pattern of spaced repetition to make his studying endeavors as efficient as possible (Daniel and efficiency are two words I’ve come to closely associate over the last few years).

Now you can probably imagine how frustrated he got when the driver of a bus he was taking stepped on the gas, causing him to drop the stack of flashcards on the muddy floor. That really got him thinking something along the lines of: “There’s got to be a better system! One where I would never lose a card or lose track of when I studied it last – one that would automatically organize them and just let me know when they’re due for practice - a system that would ensure that I firmly lock relevant information into my long-term memory. ” So he went online and searched the internet for a software that would do exactly that and was very surprised that he could not find one at the time.

This is probably where most of us fellow humans, including myself, would give up or decide to wait until someone else does something about the problem. But for those of you who know him, that is NOT Daniel. Instead, he just went ahead and programmed a software himself that would help him study effectively.

And this is where the story could have ended, had not some of his former high school teachers in Germany heard about it and asked him to burn it to a CD, so their students could use the software to study English as a foreign language vocabulary. Needless to say, not only these teachers and their students at this particular high school liked the software. Parents started spreading the word as well. Not surprisingly, the first “sales reps” were actually moms who were so thrilled about the fact that their kids were improving their grades and were self-motivated to study with phase-6, that they wanted to make sure other parents knew about the program as well.

And that was just the beginning of what is now phase-6. Today, Daniel is no longer running the company on the side and by himself but we’re still a pretty small, young team (we like to think of it as “dynamic” ;). Yet, in Germany alone, there are now several thousand high schools that recommend the use of phase-6 and nearly half a million licenses have been sold as of May 2009. Even companies have come on board as customers because - as we all know - it’s an illusion to think that we’re through with learning once we’ve graduated with a degree and are out in the working world, right?

And who said we all had to be or stay in Germany?? Our “global” headquarters (and most of my colleagues) are currently in Basel, Switzerland and the blog you’re reading is part of our endeavor to explore North America and the English speaking world in general, aka you :).