Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life
Genres: Business & Money
Book Preface
What is your one wish? Seriously, if a genie offered to grant you one wish, but only one, what would you ask for?
Limitless wishes, of course!
Now, imagine that I’m your learning genie and I can grant you one learning wish—any one subject or skill. What one thing would you want to learn? What subject or skill would be the equivalent of asking for infinite wishes?
To learn how to learn, right?
If you really knew how to learn smarter, faster, and better, then you could apply that to everything. You could learn to master your mindset or your motivation, or use the methods to pick up Mandarin, marketing, music, martial arts, mathematics—there would be no limit! You’d be a mental superhero! Anything would be possible, because you would be limitless!
My mission with this book is to grant you this wish in the pages that follow. Let’s start by saying how much I respect and admire you. By investing in this book and now reading it, you are far ahead of most of the population who simply accept their present conditions and constraints. You are part of a small group of individuals who not only want more for their lives but also are willing to do what it takes to get results. In other words, you are the hero of this story; you’ve answered the call to adventure. I believe the ultimate adventure we are all on is to reveal and realize our fullest potential and inspire others to do the same.
I have no way of knowing how your life’s journey has taken you to this book. I’m guessing that at least part of that journey is accepting the confines put upon you, either by others or by yourself: You can’t read fast enough to keep up with everything you need to know. Your mind is not agile enough to succeed at work. You’re not motivated to get things done or you lack the energy to reach your goals. And so on.
The nature of this of the book is transcending—ending the trance: the mass hypnosis and lies that we learned from our parents, programing, media, or marketing, that suggests we are limited. That, somehow, we are not enough, not capable of being, doing, having, creating, or contributing.
Belief that you are limited might be holding you back from your biggest dreams as well—at least up until now. But I promise you that none of your beliefs truly constrain who you are. We all have vast potential inside of us, untapped levels of strength, intelligence, and focus, and the key to activating these superpowers is unlimiting yourself. For more than 25 years, I’ve worked with people of all ages, nationalities, races, socioeconomic statuses, and education levels. What I’ve discovered is that no matter where you come from, no matter what challenges you face, you have incredible potential that’s just waiting to be tapped. Every person—regardless of age, background, education, gender, or personal history—can advance beyond what they believe they deserve and is possible. And that includes you. Working together, you’ll come to think of your own limitations as an outmoded concept.
Now in this book, I refer to superheroes and superpowers. Why is that? First, I am a bit of a geek that way. Because of my childhood brain injury and learning challenges, I escaped into comic books and movies to inspire me during my struggles. I realized that my favorite ones all shared the same pattern—the Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell’s classic plot structure appears in nearly all famed adventures, including The Wizard of Oz; Star Wars; Harry Potter; Eat, Pray, Love; The Hunger Games; Rocky; The Lord of the Rings; Alice in Wonderland; The Matrix, and more.
Think of your favorite story or one of the films or books I just mentioned. Does this sound familiar? The hero (for example, Harry Potter) starts out in the ordinary world, the world they’ve always known. The hero then hears the call to adventure. They have a choice—to ignore and stay in the ordinary world, where nothing will change, or heed the call and enter the new world of the unknown. If they heed the call (as Neo did with the red pill in The Matrix), they meet their guide or mentor (such as Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid), who trains and prepares them to overcome obstacles and realize new levels of fulfillment. The hero is introduced to new powers and skills, and encouraged to utilize their current abilities like never before. They transcend perceived limitations, learn a new way of being, and eventually face their trials. When they return back to the ordinary world (like Dorothy going back to Kansas), they take with them the ultimate boon—the treasure, emotions, strength, clarity, and wisdom they discovered from their adventure. They then share their lessons and gifts with others.
The Hero’s Journey is the perfect structure to lend power and purpose to your personal story. In Limitless, you are the superhero.
One of my core beliefs is that human potential is one of the only infinite resources we have in the world. Most everything else is finite, but the human mind is the ultimate superpower—there is no limit to our creativity, imagination, determination, or ability to think, reason, or learn. Yet this resource is also among the least tapped. All of us can be the heroes of our own story, dipping into the well of our potential every single day and never having that well run dry. But so few of us approach our lives this way. That’s why I wrote this book—to help you realize that no matter where you are, or where you’ve been, you absolutely can free yourself and go from limits to liberation. That might be the only “extra” you need to transition from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world.
This book is going to provide you with that extra. What you’ll get within these pages is a series of tools that will help you cast off your perceived restrictions. You’re going to learn how to unlimit your brain. You’re going to learn how to unlimit your drive. You’re going to learn how to unlimit your memory, your focus, and your habits. If I am your mentor in your hero’s journey, then this book is your map to master your mind, motivation, and methods to learn how to learn. And once you’ve done that, you will be limitless.
Here’s the door; you know what’s waiting on the other side. Walk through it.
Our most precious gift is our brain.
It is what allows us to learn, love, think, create, and even to experience joy. It is the gateway to our emotions, to our capacity for deeply experiencing life, to our ability to have lasting intimacy. It allows us to innovate, grow, and accomplish.
Yet few of us realize that, by applying a handful of practical methods, we can enhance our brain and supercharge our ability to learn. Most of us know that we can improve our cardiovascular health through exercise and diet, but most of us do not realize that we can also greatly improve our brains, and in doing so, our life.
Unfortunately, our world doesn’t foster a healthy environment for our brain. Before Jim Kwik provides a road map to become limitless, he indicts the four growing villains that are challenging our capacity to think, focus, learn, grow, and be fully human.
The first is digital deluge—the unending flood of information in a world of finite time and unfair expectations that leads to overwhelm, anxiety, and sleeplessness. Drowning in data and rapid change, we long for strategies and tools to regain some semblance of productivity, performance, and peace of mind.
The second villain is digital distraction. The fleeting ping of digital dopamine pleasure replaces our ability to sustain the attention necessary for deep relationship, deep learning, or deep work. I recently sat next to a friend at a lecture and noticed her picking up her phone multiple times within a few minutes. I asked for her phone and pulled up the screen time app. She had picked up her phone more than one thousand times and had one thousand notifications in one day. Texts, social media notifications, e-mails, and news alerts, while important in context, can derail our concentration and train us to be distracted from what matters most in the moment.
The next villain is digital dementia. Memory is a muscle that we have allowed to atrophy. While there are benefits to having a supercomputer in your pocket, think of it like an electric bicycle. It’s fun and easy but doesn’t get you in shape. Research on dementia proves that the greater our capacity to learn—the more mental “brainercise” we perform—the lower our risk of dementia. In many cases, we have outsourced our memory to our detriment.
The last brain-damaging villain is digital deduction. In a world where information is abundantly accessible, we’ve perhaps gone too far in how we use that information, even getting to the point where we are letting technology do much of our critical thinking and reasoning for us. Online, there are so many conclusions being drawn by others that we have begun to surrender our own ability to draw conclusions. We would never let another person do our thinking for us, but we’ve gotten far too comfortable with letting devices have that very power.
The cumulative effects of these four digital villains robs us of our focus, attention, learning, and, most importantly, our ability to truly think. It robs us of our mental clarity and results in brain fatigue, distraction, inability to easily learn, and unhappiness. While the technological advances of our time have the potential to both help and harm, the way we use them in our society can lead to an epidemic of overload, memory loss, distraction, and dependency. And it’s only going to get worse.
The message of this book couldn’t be more timely. You were born with the ultimate technology, and there is nothing more important than the health and fitness of our brain—it controls everything in life. Learning how to filter all the data, to develop new methods and skills for thriving in a distracted world drowning in a flood of information, is what is needed to thrive in the 21st century. Learning and the ability to learn faster and more easily makes everything else in life possible, which means that it’s never been a better time to train your brain the way you do your body. Just like you want a healthy body, you want a flexible, strong, energized, and fit brain. That’s what Jim does for a living—he is the personal trainer for the mind.
The four supervillains are just an example of the limits you’ll learn how to overcome in this book. The key to living an exceptional life, as Jim states, is a process of unlimiting ourselves. And he has cracked the code for personal transformation with his Limitless Model. If you are struggling to reach a goal in any area, you must first ask: Where is the limit? Most likely, you’re experiencing a limit in your mindset, motivation, or methods—which means that it’s not a personal shortcoming or failure pointing to any perceived lack of ability. And contrary to what we tend to believe, our barriers are not set. We’re in full control and can overcome them at any time.
If our mindset is not aligned with our desires or goals, we will never achieve them. It’s critical to identify your limiting beliefs, stories, and deeply held beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions about yourself and what’s possible. Examining, excavating, and expunging those beliefs is the first step to having a limitless mindset. I was told I could do anything by my mother, that I was smart, capable, and could be the best at anything I tried. That deeply held belief allowed me to succeed beyond my wildest dreams. But I also had the belief that relationships were hard and filled with pain and drama from witnessing my parents’ divorce and marriages. It took me nearly 50 years to erase that belief and find real happiness in my marriage.
The second secret to a limitless life is your motivation. Jim outlines three key elements to motivation. First, your purpose. The reason why matters. I want to age well and am committed to lifting weights and getting stronger even though it is not my favorite thing to do. The purpose supersedes the discomfort.
The second key is the ability to do what you want. This requires energy, and energy requires something called energy management. The science of human performance is critical to achieving your purpose—eating whole unprocessed food, exercise, stress management, quality sleep, and skills at communication and building healthy relationships (and eliminating toxic ones). And lastly the tasks must be bite-size, small steps that lead to success. Floss one tooth, read one page of a book, do one push-up, meditate for one minute, all of which will lead to confidence, and ultimately bigger successes.
The last key to being limitless is using the right method. We have been taught 19th- and 20th-century tools for functioning in the 21st century. Limitless teaches us the five key methods to achieve whatever we want: Focus, Study, Memory Enhancement, Speed Reading, and Critical Thinking. Using these upgraded learning technologies allows us to harness our mindset and motivation to more easily and effectively reach our dreams.
Jim is no stranger to limits. After a head injury as a child impaired his focus, concentration, and ability to learn, an insensitive teacher pointed to him and said, “There’s the boy with a broken brain.” Jim has spent his life learning how to overcome and heal from this injury and turn his challenges into a superpower of learning. We all suffer to some degree or another from broken brains. Limitless is the prescription for healing our brains, reframing limiting beliefs, and upgrading our life. Learning how to learn is the ultimate superpower, the one that makes every other skill and ability possible, and teaching this to you is this book’s goal.
In Limitless, Jim Kwik provides a road map for doing exactly this. Most of us are not raised with the tools we need, but Jim is generously sharing everything he’s learned in this book. Jim has spent three decades working in the trenches with people from all walks of life—students, teachers, celebrities, construction workers, politicians, entrepreneurs, scientists. He has worked with some of the most advanced educational systems around the world, training educators, superintendents, and students in his methods. His teachings truly work and can benefit us all.
There is no pill for genius, but there is a process to get there, and you’ll find it within these pages. Limitless is a blueprint for upgrading your brain, for not only learning how to learn faster, better, and more effectively, but also for healing your physical brain through nutrition, supplements, exercise, meditation, sleep, and more to increase the creation of new brain cells and the connections between them.
Jim delivers three books in one. If your current mindset, motivation, and methods are limiting your ability to achieve your dreams, then Limitless is the owner’s manual to a better, brighter, brilliant brain and future. Your learning and life will never be the same.
—MARK HYMAN, M.D.
Head of Strategy and Innovation
Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine
Author of 12 New York Times best-selling books
December 2019
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Part I FREE YOUR MIND
Chapter 1: Becoming Limitless
Chapter 2: Why This Matters Now
Chapter 3: Your Limitless Brain
Chapter 4: How to Read and Remember This (and Any) Book
Part II LIMITLESS MINDSET: The What
Chapter 5: The Spell of Belief Systems
Chapter 6: The 7 Lies of Learning
Part III LIMITLESS MOTIVATION: The Why
Chapter 7: Purpose
Chapter 8: Energy
Chapter 9: Small Simple Steps
Chapter 10: Flow
Part IV LIMITLESS METHODS: The How
Chapter 11: Focus
Chapter 12: Study
Chapter 13: Memory
Chapter 14: Speed Reading
Chapter 15: Thinking
Afterword
10-Day Kwik Start Plan
Suggested Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Endnotes
Index
eBook Supplemental Material
| Download Ebook | Read Now | File Type | Upload Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Download here
|
Read Now | EPub | October 19, 2020 |
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