That's ludicrous. Is your workstation covered in sticky notes and knickknacks? Are you re-using these passwords? Do you have to buy a new knickknack for every new website you visit that requires a password?
One photograph can contain several virtual knickknacks. I usually don't use sticky notes, as I also make a mnemonic to relate the character to the story. For instance, a story about the beach could use '@' as a conch shell, or '*' as a sea star, or '$' as a sand dollar, or '~' for ocean waves.
But everyone has their own tricks for remembering things.
And I certainly don't make the effort for sites that I don't consider to be important. Those as often as not just get reset via e-mail whenever I forget my password.
It's amazing the lengths people will go to to justify not using a password manager.
Use a password manager. KeepassX is free, cross-platform, works on phones, does all that work for you, secures even your least-valuable accounts, does things right, doesn't store your passwords "in the cloud" and you'll get to keep applying your scheme to your master password.
And some people run marathons when they have a perfectly serviceable automobile. Remembering many passwords is not particularly remarkable. I am far more impressed by those who [uselessly] memorize thousands of digits of pi.
Why would anyone do that, when those digits can so easily be calculated or referenced from data files? Why do anything that is not strictly necessary? Why try to bench press more weight than last time? Why try to improve your chess game? Why learn a new programming language?
Because different people like different things. I am not required to like the things you like.
And I like proving to myself that I still can remember things without a helper daemon to keep track of them for me. I like that little bit of paranoid fantasy I have that makes me think that the men in black suits would have to take the pipe wrench to my kneecaps to get at my passwords, so I don't think about how the security at all these sites requiring password is so piss-poor that it would be easier to bypass all passwords in lieu of cracking just one of mine. In the end, the problem mentioned by the article is that very few people implementing computer security measures have any idea how to truly secure their data, so they do stupid shit like block clipboard pasting into password entry fields, or allow accounts to be hijacked by a spoofed SMS 2nd factor, or try to roll their own crypto without the requisite number of CS and math PhDs.
