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

by Jim Kwik

Alternatively, if you space out your reviews of the material, focusing more heavily on information that you haven’t retained in the past, you’re using your brain to the best of its abilities.

“Spaced repetition is simple

but highly effective because it deliberately hacks the way...

By spacing the intervals out, you’re further exercising these connections each time. It produces long-term, durable retention of knowledge and, in my experience, once people start using it, they swear by it.”

The more positive and resourceful your state, the greater the results you’ll produce. Studying is no different.

Sit as if you’re about to learn the most crucial life-changing information. Did you just have to move? If you did, then notice how you feel more focused after you’ve changed your posture.

Now sit up straight and smile. How much better do you feel?

If you’re studying for a big test, put a bit of a particular essential oil on your wrist while you’re studying and then make sure you do the same thing before you take the test. If you do the same thing in preparing for a big meeting, the results should be similar.

“Music stabilizes mental, physical and emotional rhythms to attain a state of deep concentration and focus in which large amounts of content information can be processed and learned,”

“Baroque music, such as that composed by Bach, Handel or Telemann that is 50 to 80 beats per minute creates an atmosphere of focus that leads students into deep concentration in the alpha brain wave state. Learning vocabulary, memorizing facts, or reading to this music is highly effective.”

I’ve devised a tool that will help you listen with your whole brain. Just remember the acronym HEAR:

While you’re taking notes, use a method that I call “capture and create.” On the left side of the paper, you’re capturing, you’re taking notes; on the right side, you’re creating, you’re making notes. You’re writing your impression of what you’re capturing. How can I use this? Why must I use this? When will I use this?

After your note-taking session is over, review your notes immediately. This will help you retain the information much more effectively than if you don’t read your notes for days. As an added benefit, you’ll be able to supplement your notes with anything you might have missed while taking them, because the information will still be fresh in your mind.

“It is impossible to think creatively into the future without a sense of what is known,”

five reasons why improving memory is essential:

Memorization is discipline for the mind.

No, you can’t always “Google it.”

Memorization creates the repertoire of what we think about.

We think with the ideas held in working memory, which can only be accessed at high speed from the brain’s stored memory.Understanding

The exercise of the memory develops learning and memory schema that promote improved ability to learn.

Remember that there’s no such thing as a good memory or a bad memory, only a trained memory or an untrained memory.

Learning passively is weak; active learning is strong.

In order to learn any new piece of information, it must be associated with something you already know.

Albert Einstein posits, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

You put on a white hat when you’re in information-gathering mode. At this point, your focus is on collecting details and getting all the facts you’ll need to address whatever issue you’re trying to address. To help you remember this, think of a white lab coat. You switch to a yellow hat to bring optimism to your thinking. Here, you’re trying to identify the positives in any problem or challenge you’re facing, highlighting the value inherently in place. As your memory tip here, think of the yellow sun. Next, you’ll wear a black hat to pivot from looking at the good side of the challenge to facing its difficulties and pitfalls. This is where you’ll come face to face with the consequences of failing to successfully address a problem. Memory tip: Think about a judge’s robe. Once you’ve done that, don your red hat to allow emotion to come into play. This is the point where

you can let your feelings about the problem come to the surface, and maybe even express fears. This is also where you can allow speculation and intuition to enter into the conversation. To remember this, think about a red heart. Now it’s time for the green hat. When you’re wearing this hat, you’re in creativity mode. You’ve looked at the problem analytically and you’ve looked at it emotionally. Now ask yourself, what new ideas can you bring to what you already know about the problem? How can you come at it in a way you haven’t considered before? Memory tip: Think about green grass. Finally, wear the blue hat to be in management mode, and make sure you’ve addressed your agenda productively and gone through the process in a way that benefits from all the other hats you’ve worn. Often, organizations will start with the blue hat to set goals for a meeting and then put it on again at the end. Even if you’re using the six hats by yourself, this is something you might want to consider. To remember this, think about blue skies.

His rule is to never make a decision with less than 40 percent of the information you are likely to get, and to gather no more than 70 percent of the information available.

waiting for an e-mail from someone else, or you’re waiting for a colleague to finish their portion of a project.

You can also ask if anyone but you will notice whether the task is left undone.

don’t benefit from additional attention.

lists given to us by other people, such as getting some background research on a project or making follow-up calls. These are tasks that might be necessary to do but perhaps don’t need to be done by you.

it should read like an anti-menu, a list of items that aren’t available for your time. You will then be able to easily identify what will actually move you forward and do those activities instead.

Problem-Solving: Study Your Errors

gleaned

This model is simple and yet not always easy. To use second-order thinking when considering future actions: Always ask yourself, “And then what?” Think in increments of time. What do the consequences look like in five days? Five months? Five years? Draw out the possible courses of action you might take using columns to organize consequences.11 First-order thinking is easy, but it’s second-order thinking that allows us to go deeper through time and consequences. Best of all, it allows us to see what others can’t see.