The way you remember is you take your recall context, extract all the recall cues, and associate out from those concepts until you hit the target memory. Obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but it's basically a graph breadth first search. To make things easy to remember, you have to link them to as many other nodes as possible, and you have to link them to nodes that are strongly linked to the rest of your semantic network.
So, the best cards you can make are cards that refer to concepts, internal to you, that are highly associated. What I try to do is encapsulate the statement that originally made me understand the idea, which is usually a metaphor or analogy for another concept I've deeply overlearned. Then I make a few other cards that elaborate on the concept to get away from the metaphorical link and into the specifics.
Thank you for sharing this before. I had seen it before but rather ironically forgotten what it was called and where to find it! :) This time I remembered to bookmark it.
I'm also going to lend my opinion: I agree entirely. If you don't find your own flashcards better than other people's flashcards, you aren't making the right connections or you aren't using mnemonics to aid learning. Personal ones work better a supermajority of the time (unless someone has a particularly clever mnemonic that resonates well with you)
