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

by Jim Kwik

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.

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

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 four villains: 1. Digital deluge (information overload) 2. Digital distraction (dopamine and notifications) 3. Digital dementia (ie: eBike does not make you fitter) 4. Digital deduction (tech impact on critical thinking)

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...

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 t...

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...

You were born with the ultimate technology, and there is nothing more important than the health and fitness of our bra...

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...

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. ...

The key to living an exceptional life, as Jim states, is a process of unlimiting ourselves.

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 exp...

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 allowe...

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.

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.

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.

To learn how to learn, right? If you really knew how to learn smarter, faster, and better, then you could apply that to everything.

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.

Noticed that Khe and Tiago use this same line. It kind of feels cringey now but I wonder if it’s because I’ve heard it repeatedly

I believe the ultimate adventure we are all on is to reveal and realize our fullest potential and inspire others to do the same.

You’re not motivated to get things done or you lack the energy to reach your goals.

Yep yep.

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.

Often when you put a label on someone or something, you create a limit—the label becomes the limitation. Adults have to be very careful with their external words because these quickly become a child’s internal words.

“Jim, why are you in school?” he said. “What do you want to be? What do you want to do? What do you want to have? What do you want to share?”

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” That’s when it dawned on me: Maybe I was asking the wrong question. I started to wonder, what was my real problem?

It was in that moment that I realized that if knowledge is power, then learning is our superpower. And our capacity to learn is limitless; we simply need to be shown how to access it.

to teach the mindset, motivation, and methods to upgrade your brain and learn anything faster so you can unlock your exceptional life.

What’s one of your dreams? One that is ever present, like a splinter in your brain? Imagine it in vivid detail. Visualize it. Feel it. Believe it. And work daily for it.

unlimiting un·lim·it·ing (noun) The act or process of casting aside inaccurate and restrictive perceptions of one’s potential and embracing the reality that, with the right mindset, motivation, and methods, there are no limitations.

Empowerment

For so much of my life, I allowed myself to be defined by my perceived restrictions.

Becoming limitless is not just about accelerated learning, speed-reading, and having an incredible memory. Yes, you will learn how to do all of that and more. But being limitless is not about being perfect. It’s about progressing beyond what you currently believe is possible.

What I have come to find over my years of working with people is that most everyone limits and shrinks their dreams to fit their current reality.

We convince ourselves that the circumstances we are in, the beliefs we’ve accepted, and the path we are on is who we are and who we will always be. But there is another choice. You can learn to unlimit and expand your mindset, your motivation, and your methods to create a limitless life.

When you do what others won’t, you can live h...

A limit in your Mindset—you entertain a low belief in yourself, your capabilities, what you deserve, or what is possible.

A limit in your Motivation—you lack the drive, purpose, or energy to take action.

A limit in your Methods—you were taught and are acting on a process that is not effective to cr...

Mindset (the WHAT): deeply held beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions we create about who we are, how the world works, what we are capable of and deserve, and what is possible. Motivation (the WHY): the purpose one has for taking action. The energy required for someone to behave in a particular way. Method (the HOW): a specific process for accomplishing something, especially an orderly, logical, or systematic way of instruction.

they come to us to upgrade their brains to find relief from these “four horsemen” of our age: digital deluge, digital distraction, digital dementia, and digital deduction.

It’s important to note that overload, distraction, forgetfulness, and default thinking have been around for ages. While technology doesn’t cause these conditions, it has great potential to amplify them.

Do you have too much to process but not enough time? We’re privileged to live in a world with so much unfettered access to information. In this age of connectivity, ignorance is a choice.

“I think science is beginning to embrace the idea that some technology is Twinkies and some technology is Brussels sprouts. If we consume too much technology, just like if we consume too much food, it can have ill effects.”

In a University of California, San Francisco, study on the effect of downtime, researchers gave rats a new experience and measured their brain waves during and after the activity. Under most circumstances, a new experience will express new neural activity and new neurons in the brain—that is, if the rat is allowed to have downtime. With downtime, the neurons made their way from the gateway of memory to the rest of the brain, where long-term memory is stored. The rats were able to record memories of their experiences, which is the basis for learning.

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that if we never let our mind wander or be bored for a moment, we pay a price—poor memory, mental fog, and fatigue.

As far back as the mid-1990s (when digital deluge was a fraction of the concern it is now), research was beginning to show that there were real health risks involved with navigating through an always-on world.