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

by Jim Kwik

Read for only 20 to 25 minutes at a time.

if your eyes ever get tired or feel strained, take a break. Close your eyes and let them rest.

Make reading ...

Unlimiting your reading and learning will offer you an unparalleled level of freedom.

www.jimkwik.com/reading.

Accomplishing something big often requires new approaches to thinking.

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

Dr. Edward de Bono devised the concept of the “six thinking hats”

The core notion is to separate thinking into six distinctly defined functions by progressively donning a series of metaphorical hats:

You put on a white hat when you’re in information-gathering mode.

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,

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.

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.

green hat. When you’re wearing this hat, you’re in creativity mode.

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?

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 bene...

Why is it important for us to have tools to help us think in different ways? Because people usually have a dominant way of using their intelligence.

Dr. Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has studied intelligence extensively and has identified eight distinct forms of intelligence:2

Spatial : This is someone who usually thinks from the perspective of ...

Bodily-Kinesthetic: Someone with a dominance of this form of intelligence uses their body as a form of expression or problem-solving.

Musical : This is a person with a strong “sensitivity to rhythm, pitch, meter, tone, melody and timbre.”

Linguistic: Someone with a dominance in linguistic intelligence is particularly attuned to all the implications of words,

Logical-Mathematical: This is a strength in seeing the “logical relations among actions or symbols.”

Interpersonal : Someone with a dominance in interpersonal intelligence has a deep innate ability to connect with other people and a rich understanding of how others might be feeling at any given moment.

Intrapersonal : If you have dominance in intrapersonal intelligence, you have a particularly refined sense of what is going on inside of you.

Naturalistic: This kind of intelligence expresses itself in an ability to see the world of nature in all its complexities.

all of these forms of intelligence identify successful ways of operating in the world, and any one of them might come into play when you’re facing a particular task or problem. Awareness of all eight, and considering each while wearing your six thinking hats, is a remarkably effective way to unlimit your thinking.

Just as types of intelligence vary from person to person, the way one learns varies. The VAK learning styles model has been in use since the 1920s and is useful in showing you how you prefer to learn new things:

V is for Visual,

A is for Auditory,

K is for Kinesthetic,

Mental models are constructs for thinking that help us make sense of the world around us.

Think of them as shortcuts.

Mental models train your mind to think; after all, you don’t rise to the level of your expectations, you fall to the level of your training.

Models can act as shortcuts that save you valuable energy and time when you’re evaluating an idea, making a decision, or problem-solving.

One of the greatest barriers to quick decision-making is the ever-present feeling that we don’t have enough information to make the “right” decision.

Colin Powell, former secretary of state, addresses this with his 40/70 rule.6 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.

anything less than 40 percent and you’re just guessing. Anything more than 70 percent and you’re stal...

My own experience is that you get as much information as you can and then you pay attention to your intuition, to your informed instinct.

Productivity: Create a Not-to-Do List

sometimes it’s just as important to know what not to do as what to do. This tactic is used best for directing your attention to the essentials and avoiding what doesn’t matter in the moment.

First, write down tasks that might be important but can’t be done because of outside circumstances.

Next, include tasks that you think need to be done but that don’t add value to your life;

Then include current and ongoing tasks that don’t benefit from additional attention.

These are tasks that might be necessary to do but perhaps don’t need to be done by you.

Problem-Solving: Study Your Errors

When we take the time to study the mistakes we make, especially those that have a lasting effect on our lives, we turn every mistake into a learning opportunity.

First, get clear on what did or didn’t happen.

Next, ask yourself why those mistakes happened.

Then ask how you can best avoid the same mistakes in the future.