Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

by Jim Kwik

Write them down.

While it’s great to be open-minded and consider options, when you say yes to something, you need to be careful that you’re not inadvertently saying no to yourself and your own needs.

“I will have to settle for a job I hate, make very little money, have no free time for myself or anyone else, and I will have to put up with it for the rest of my life, bored and frustrated.” This will get you to do something about it! Do this now.

Write down all of the benefits and advantages you will receive from learning the skills and techniques in this book. Make a list of things that will really get you excited and motivated. For instance: “I’ll be able to ace my tests, have more time to be with family, start that business, and learn new languages to travel the world.” Or, “I will have more free time to exercise and get healthy, to go away for spring break, and to spend more time with my boy/girlfriend!” Or maybe something simple like, “I will finally have some free time to just get caught up and relax!”

Again, make sure your reasons are compelling enough to be backed with real emotion. You must really get yourself to see and feel the benefits...

I had to change the way I saw myself and give up the

identity that kept me locked into being unable to learn. Instead of saying “I am broken,” I had to say, “I am a learner.”

Ultimately, motivation is a set of habits and routines, guided by your values and your identity, that you carry out every day.

Write down a list of your most common “I am” statements. How do you feel about the ways in which these statements define you?

Create a list of the things you value the most. Now prioritize that list and think about how this aligns with your definition of yourself. Get into the habit of asking the question “why” before you do anything.

“Like an expensive car,” she writes, “your brain functions best when it gets only premium fuel.

THE TOP 10 BRAIN FOODS Avocados: They provide monounsaturated fat, which helps to maintain healthy blood flow. Blueberries: They protect your brain from oxidative stress and reduce the effects of brain aging. There have also been studies that show they can help with memory. Broccoli: A great source of vitamin K, which is known to improve cognitive function and memory. Dark chocolate: This helps your focus and your concentration and stimulates endorphins. Chocolate also has flavonoids, which have been shown to improve cognitive function. The darker here the better, as the darkest chocolate has the least sugar, and we’ve already talked about how sugar is something to eat sparingly. Eggs: They provide memory-improving and brain-boosting choline. Green leafy vegetables: These are good sources of vitamin E, which reduces the effects of brain aging, and folate, which has been shown to improve memory. Salmon, Sardines, Caviar: They’re rich in omega-3 essential fatty acids, which help reduce the effects of brain aging. Turmeric: It helps reduce inflammation and boost antioxidant levels while also improving your brain’s oxygen intake. There’s also some indication that turmeric helps reduce cognitive decay. Walnuts: These nuts provide high levels of antioxidants and vitamin E that protect your neurons and protect against brain aging. They also contain high levels of zinc and magnesium, which are really good for your mood. Water: Your brain is about 80 percent water. Dehydration can ...

show that well-hydrated people score better on brainpower tests.

If you were given only one car to use for the rest of your life, how well would you treat that car?

By increasing the ways you use your brain, you increase the capabilities of your brain.

What is your favorite thing to do to cope with stress? When was the last time you did it?

getting enough sleep—and getting enough quality sleep—is essential if you’re going to make the most of your brain.

“My Lord, genius is made, not born. My skill is the result of discipline and practice. These talents have been learned and honed over time with determination and discipline.”

James Clear, author of the best-selling book Atomic Habits, says, “The habits you repeat (or don’t repeat) every day largely determine your health, wealth, and happiness. Knowing how to change your habits means knowing how to confidently own and manage your days, focus on the behaviors that have the highest impact, and reverse-engineer the life you want.”6

Clear identifies the habit loop as having four components: a cue, a craving, a response, and a reward.

By the end of the study, they’d found that it took an average of 66 days for the new behavior to become a habit, though it took individual participants as little as 18 days and as many as 254.9

“It’s much easier to start doing something new than to stop doing something habitual without a replacement behavior. That’s one reason why smoking cessation aids such as nicotine gum or inhalers tend to be more effective than the nicotine patch.”10

My goal in any given day is to accomplish three things for work and three things personally, and I set this agenda now.

Here are the keys: Check in on your dreams before you get out of bed. There’s so much gold to mine here, so I strongly recommend that you not skip this step. Get yourself hydrated and oxygenated. Nourish yourself with some of the brain foods mentioned in this chapter. Set a plan for the day.

Dr. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as having eight characteristics:2 Absolute concentration Total focus on goals The sense that time is either speeding up or slowing down A feeling of reward from the experience A sense of effortlessness The experience is challenging, but not overly so Your actions almost seem to be happening on their own You feel comfort with what you are doing

FINDING FLOW

1. Eliminate Distractions Earlier, we talked about the importance of keeping distractions to a minimum. If you’re going to find yourself in a flow state, eliminating distractions is absolutely essential. It can take you up to 20 minutes to reconnect with what you’re doing after you’ve been distracted from doing it. How are you ever going to get into the flow if you’re constantly rebooting because a text drew away your attention, or because you just wanted to make a quick check of social media before you got back to work? So, put everything else aside and concentrate completely on what you’re doing. 2. Give Yourself Enough Time Make sure you have a block of time set aside to get into flow. It’s commonly believed that, when conditions are right, it takes about 15 minutes to achieve a flow state and that you don’t really hit your peak for closer to 45 minutes. Clearing out only half an hour or so isn’t going to allow you to accomplish much. Plan to set aside at least 90 minutes, and ideally a full two hours. 3. Do Something You Love When we think of flow, we tend to think of people achieving at extremely high levels: the athlete perfecting her game, the musician crafting the ideal guitar solo, the writer quickly putting words down on the page as though taking dictation rather than creating. What’s common among all of these people is that they are doing something that matters to them a great deal. They wouldn’t be satisfied with only being moderately competent, as they aren’t ...

5. Challenge Yourself . . . A Little When I talk to people about flow, I consistently hear that they are most likely to achieve flow when they’re doing something that is a little bit of a challenge. In other words, they’re outside of their comfort zone, but not way outside of it. The logic here is clear. If you do something that you can do with both hands tied behind your back, you’re probably going to become bored fairly quickly, and boredom and flow are incompatible. On the other hand, if you do something that you find extremely difficult, you’re likely to become frustrated, and that frustration is going to keep flow from happening. But if you do something that you love that also has a moderate level of challenge to it—trying to hit a baseball to just one part of the field, trying a new form of tuning on your guitar, or writing from the perspective of a new character, for example—this level of challenge is likely to keep the task exciting for you and therefore engage you deeply.

Training yourself to achieve flow regularly and even in multiple sessions in the same day will have you performing like a superhero.

“Perfectionism reduces creativity and innovation,” writes Hara Estroff Marano,

“The brain perceives uncertainty as a threat, which sparks the release of cortisol, a stress hormone that disrupts memory, depresses the immune system, and increases the risk of high blood pressure and depression,”

If you go into a task doubting your ability to complete it, ask yourself these questions: Do I have the necessary skills to do this? Do I have all the information I need to do this? Do I have enough passion for this project to do this?

“Concentration is at the crux of all human success and endeavor,” Hindu priest, entrepreneur, and former monk Dandapani

“If you can’t concentrate, you can’t manifest.”

“Concentration is something you can learn and something you can practice to get better at,”

“I define concentration as my ability to keep my awareness on one thing for an extended period of time. Every time my concentration drifts, I use my will power to bring my awareness back.”

Dandapani has a different—and more helpful—metaphor. To him, it isn’t your mind that’s moving; it’s your awareness. He sees awareness as a glowing ball of light that moves to different parts of your mind. In order to excel at concentration, you need to make yourself keep that ball of light trained on one spot in your mind for an extended period. This won’t be easy at first, but a conscious effort to exercise your will power in this way is likely to lead to impressive results.

“Anxious thoughts can overwhelm you, making it difficult to make decisions and take action to deal with whatever issue bothers you”

“We found about 82 percent of all interrupted work is resumed on the same day. But here’s the bad news—it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.”8 That’s more than 20 minutes every time you’re distracted—and how often are you distracted every day?

“I’ll worry about that later”

“I’ll worry about that at 4:15”

“unconscious incompetence,”

“conscious incompetence,”

“conscious competence.”

Practice makes progress.

“but an adequate amount of sleep is also critical for academic success. These results are consistent with emerging research suggesting that sleep deprivation impedes learning.”

Habit 1: Employ Active Recall

“Most students do not realize how important it is to force themselves to recall,”

To employ active recall, do this: Review the material you are studying. Then close the book, turn off the video or lecture, and write down or recite everything you remember from what you just reviewed. Now, look at the material again. How much did you remember?

“optimal learning occurred when an initial learning session included repeated study and forced-recall testing of all items at least four times in a row.”