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

by Jim Kwik

HEART:

H is for Healthy: How can you make sure your goals support your greater well-being? Your goals should contribute to your mental, physical, and emotional health.

E is for Enduring: Your goals should inspire and sustain you during the difficult tim...

A is for Alluring: You shouldn’t always have to push yourself to work on your goals. They should be so exciting, enticing, and eng...

R is for Relevant: Don’t set a goal without knowing why you’re setting it. Ideally, your goals should relate to a challenge you’re having, yo...

T is for Truth: Don’t set a goal just because your neighbor is doing it or your parents expect it of you. Make sure your goal is something you w...

Finding your passion is like finding true love, in that you have to go out on many dates to get to the perfect match. Once you find that special person, it doesn’t just magically “work,” because it takes effort to build a relationship. Finding your passion is no different—it takes experimentation

To sum it up, passion is what lights you up inside.

Purpose, however, is about how you relate to other people. Purpose is what you’re here to share with the world. It’s how you use your passion.

When you consciously decide to identify with the habit or goal you want to create or achieve, or consciously un-identify with a habit you no longer want, you will experience enormous power.

The highest drive we have is to act consistently with how we perceive ourselves—it is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

you might tell me family is one of your core values. I would then ask what family does for you. For me, it provides love. For you, it might provide belonging. The important distinction here is that family is a means value—a means to an end. The end value is actually love or belonging.

Motivation is a set of emotions (painful and pleasurable) that act as the fuel for our actions. Where does it come from? Motivation comes from purpose, fully feeling and associating with the consequences of our actions (or inactions).

The key is to make sure you feel the emotions. Don’t make this an intellectual thing. We make decisions based on how we feel.

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

ANTs are “automatic negative thoughts”

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn says that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

“Scientists have learned that animals that experience prolonged stress have less activity in the parts of their brain that handle higher-order tasks—for example, the prefrontal cortex—and more activity in the primitive parts of their brain that are focused on survival, such as the amygdala.

This is what appears to happen in the brain when it is under continuous stress: it essentially builds up the part of the brain designed to handle threats, and the part of the brain tasked with more complex thought takes a back seat.”9

She came to the conclusion—subsequently known as the Zeigarnik effect—that uncompleted tasks created a level of tension that keeps that task at the front of our minds until it is completed.

only three things can change a person’s behavior long term. One is to have an epiphany, which very few people can summon on demand. Another is to change your environment, which is possible for nearly everyone, but not necessarily feasible at any given time. The third is to, as Dr. Fogg puts it, “take baby steps.”3

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

“For a target behavior to happen,” he notes, “a person must have sufficient motivation, sufficient ability, and an effective prompt. All three factors must be present at the same instant for the behavior to occur.”

develop a habit: You need the desire to do it, since it is exceedingly difficult to make habitual anything you really don’t want to do; you need the skills to do it, since it’s nearly impossible to make a habit out of anything you don’t have the capacity to accomplish; and you need something to get the habit loop started (what James Clear and others refer to as “the cue”).

Fogg identifies three key motivators:

Pleasure/pain: This is the most immediate motivator. In this case, the behavior has a nearly immediate payoff, positive or negative.

Hope/fear: Unlike the immediacy of the previous motivator, this one is all about anticipation. When you’re hopeful, you’re anticipating something good happening; when you’re fearful, you’re anticipating the opposite.

Social acceptance/rejection: Humans have always desired to be accepted by their peers, dating back to the time when being ostracized could mean a death sentence, and this remains an extremely strong motivator.

Fogg equates ability with simplicity, noting that when something is simple for us, we are considerably more likely to do it.

six categories of simplicity:

Time: We only perceive something to be simple if we have the time available t...

Money: Similarly, if something stretches our financial resources, we do n...

Physical effort: We consider things that are physically easy ...

Brain cycles: Simple things don’t tax our thinking, and we shy away from things that req...

Social deviance: This goes back to the acceptance motivation. A simple act fi...

Nonroutine: How far something is out of one’s normal routine will define i...

three types of prompts:

Spark: A spark is a type of prompt that immediately leads to a form of motivation.

Facilitator: This type of prompt works when motivation is high, but ability is low.

Signal : In some cases, you’ll have both high motivation and high ability. The only other thing you need to make a behavior a habit is some kind of reminder or signal.

WIN:

W is for Want: Make sure you really want it. It’s nearly impossible to turn something into a habit if you don’t want to do that thing.

I is for Innate: Does the new habit you’re trying to adopt align well with your innate abilities? Remember that you’re unlikely to make something a habit when it is consistently difficult for you to perform.

N is for Now: Create a prompt for yourself that encourages you to perform the new habit now.

flow as “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

Stage 1: Struggle This is when you’re digging deep to access whatever it is that you need to reach the flow state.

Stage 2: Relaxation This is the break you take before fully diving into flow.

Stage 3: Flow This is the stage that Kotler describes as “the superman experience.”

Stage 4: Consolidation In this final stage you pull together everything you accomplished during the flow stage.

Schedule your next distraction time.