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

by Jim Kwik

Get excited about how you will benefit from what you are about to learn and what you will do with your new knowledge. Remember, all learning is state-dependent. Consciously choose states of joy, fascination, and curiosity.

If you want to cut your learning curve dramatically, learn with the intention of teaching the information to someone else. Think about it: If you know you have to give a presentation on what you learn, you will approach how you learn the topic with the intention of mastering it well enough to explain it to someone else.

When you teach something, you get to learn it twice: once on your own, and then again through educating another person.

One of the best ways to reduce the effects of the forgetting curve is to actively recall what you learned with spaced repetition. You are better able to retain information by reviewing in multiple spread-out sessions. Going over the material at intervals increases our brain’s ability to remember it. To leverage this principle, before you begin your reading session take a moment, if only a few minutes, to actively retrieve what you learned the session before. Your brain will give greater value to the reviewed material and prime your mind for what’s to come.

Every second, your senses gather up to 11 million bits of information from the world around you. Obviously, if you tried to interpret and decipher all of them at once, you’d be immediately overwhelmed. That’s why the brain is primarily a deletion device; it’s designed to keep information out. The conscious mind typically processes only 50 bits per second.

So often the answers we want are there, but we’re not asking the right questions to shine a spotlight on them. Instead, we’re asking useless questions or worse, questions that are disempowering.

Related to the pug story -- how we are wired to ignore most of the sensory input we receive unless something is brought to attention

Thinking is a process of reasoning through something, during which we ask and answer questions.

While we have tens of thousands of thoughts a day, we have one, maybe two dominant questions we ask more than others. As you can imagine, these questions direct our focus, which directs how we feel, and how we consequently spend our lives.

During a break, Will and I discovered a few of his dominant questions, one of which is “How do I make this moment even more magical?” While we were waiting for Will’s next scene to shoot, his family and friends were huddled in tents watching the other actors work. At 3 A.M., while I’m sure everyone was cold and tired, we got to see his dominant question in action. He was bringing everyone hot cocoa, cracking jokes to make us smile, and actively playing host when he could have been resting. He was indeed making the moment even more magical. The result of this question directed his focus and his behavior, and completely changed the experience for everyone.

Questions direct your focus, so they play into everything in life—even reading comprehension. Because people typically don’t ask enough questions when they read, they compromise their focus, understanding, and retention.

To start you off, here are the three dominant questions to ask on our journey together. They will help you to take action on what you learn and turn the knowledge into power. How can I use this? Why must I use this? When will I use this?

These are your three magic questions: How can I use this? Why must I use this? When will I use this? They will help you integrate the knowledge from this book into your head, heart, and hands.

At the beginning of every chapter for the rest of the book, you will find a series of questions that are designed to prime your focus as you read. Study the questions before you read each chapter, and you’ll be better prepared to understand and remember what you learn.

All behavior is driven by belief, so before we address how to learn, we must first address the underlying beliefs we hold about what is possible.

How many of my perceived constraints are nothing more than LIEs and BS?

LIE = Limited Idea Entertained BS = Belief Sysztem

When we take responsibility for something, we are imbued with great power to make things better.

That’s what a limitless mindset is all about. Our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we must be accountable for who we become. It’s about understanding that we are responsible for our assumptions and attitudes. And when you accept that all of your potential is entirely within your control, then the power of that potential grows dramatically.

The key to making yourself limitless is unlearning false assumptions. So often, we don’t accomplish something because we’ve convinced ourselves that we can’t do it.

Limiting beliefs are often revealed in our self-talk, that inner conversation that focuses on what you’re convinced you can’t do rather than what you already excel at and what you’re going to continue to achieve today and into the future. How often do you stop yourself from attempting to do something or from pursuing a dream because that voice convinces you that it is beyond your reach? If this sounds like you, you are very far from alone, but you’re also not doing yourself any favors.

If your limiting beliefs are in control, you could find yourself mired in underachievement, either wondering why you never really get ahead or convinced that you don’t deserve it.

“Iceberg beliefs are deeply rooted and powerful, and they fuel our emotions,” they say in the book. “The more entrenched an iceberg is, the more havoc it wreaks on your life. . . creating your schedule chaos, getting in the way of successfully sticking to a diet, or holding you back from seizing opportunities.” And, perhaps most significantly, they say, “If we get a handle on our icebergs, we gain an enormous amount of control over our feelings and our lives. Melt an iceberg and all the downstream events it causes get washed away as well.”2

“The inner critic isn’t harmless. It inhibits you, limits you, and stops you from pursuing the life you truly want to live. It robs you of peace of mind and emotional well-being and, if left unchecked long enough, it can even lead to serious mental health problems like depression or anxiety.”

There are multiple forms of genius. Various experts differ on the number, but it is commonly agreed that genius expresses itself in one of four manners.

There are clear connections between positive thinking and physical health. In a Johns Hopkins study, Dr. Lisa Yanek found that “positive people from the general population were 13 percent less likely than their negative counterparts to have a heart attack or other coronary event.”

I tell them that the difference between limiting beliefs and a limitless mindset is like the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. A thermometer has only one function: to react to the environment. It reads the temperature and nothing more. This is similar to how people commonly react to limiting beliefs. They read their sense of restriction, react in a constrained way to that, and conduct their lives in a limited way. On the other hand, a thermostat gauges the environment and makes the environment react to it. If a thermostat notices that a room is too cold or too hot, it changes the environment to fit the ideal for which it is set. Similarly, if you encounter external or internal attempts to put constraints on you, you can act like a thermostat to reject those limiting beliefs and create an environment that aligns with your most ambitious goals.

So, listen carefully every time you find yourself using phrases like “I can’t,” “I’m not,” or “I don’t.” You’re sending messages to yourself that are affecting how you think about your life in general, even if what you’re beating yourself up over is something specific and seemingly not important to how you define yourself. At the same time, try also to identify the origin of this sort of self-talk. Limiting beliefs often start in childhood.

How to identify limiting beliefs

Being aware of how you’re holding yourself back with your self-talk and spending some time to get to the source of these beliefs is extremely liberating, because once you’re aware, you can begin to realize that these aren’t facts about you, but rather opinions. And there’s a very good chance that those opinions are wrong. Once you identify the voices in your head that are focusing on what you can’t do, start talking back to them. When you find yourself thinking, “I always screw up this sort of thing,” counter with, “Just because I haven’t always been good at this in the past doesn’t mean that I can’t be great at it now. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

One of the most pernicious things about limiting beliefs is that they play so heavily on our emotions. When you come up against a limiting belief, you’re likely to find those beliefs warring—and usually winning—against your rational self. But how much of this self-talk has a basis in reality?

How much of my perceived poor performance was because my self-talk just wouldn’t leave me alone? This is a real issue for many people. They’ll be in the middle of doing something in which they lack confidence, and the inner critic will become so distracting that they can’t focus on what they are doing . . . and therefore don’t do it very well. This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to learn to face down and quiet your limiting beliefs. The better you are at this, the better you’ll be at keeping down distractions during your biggest growth challenges.

So, now it’s time to create a new belief. In this case, your new belief would be that no one triumphs at the most critical juncture 100 percent of the time, but that you should be proud of yourself for how many times you’ve performed at your best when the pressure was highest.

as long as you believe that your inner critic is the voice of the true you, the wisest you, it’s always going to guide you.

But if you can create a separate persona for your inner critic—one that is different from the true you—you’ll be considerably more successful at quieting it. This can be enormously helpful and you can have fun with it at the same time. Give your inner critic a preposterous name and outrageous physical attributes. Make it cartoonish and unworthy of even a B-grade movie. Mock it for its rigid dedication to negativity. Roll your eyes when it pops into your head. The better you become at distinguishing this voice from the real you, the better you’ll be at preventing limiting beliefs from getting in your way.

“Researchers have long known that negative emotions program your brain to do a specific action,” he noted. “When that tiger crosses your path, for example, you run. The rest of the world doesn’t matter. You are focused entirely on the tiger, the fear it creates, and how you can get away from it.”6 The point that Clear is making is that negative emotions drive us to narrow the range of what we are capable of doing. It’s all about getting away from the (metaphorical) tiger, and nothing else matters. If we let negative emotions (such as limiting beliefs) control us, we’re regularly operating in survival mode and therefore confined to a reduced range of possibilities.

“In other words,” Clear noted, “when you are experiencing positive emotions like joy, contentment, and love, you will see more possibilities in your life.”7

Related to an experiment where people tracked the volume of responses based on different categories of inputs: joyful, fearful, anger inducing, control, etc Positive experiences

Fredrickson refers to this as the “broaden and build” theory because positive emotions broaden your sense of possibilities and open your mind, which in turn allows you to build new skills and resources that can provide value in other areas of your life.

Abundance mindset

The theory, together with the research reviewed here, suggests that positive emotions: (i) broaden people’s attention and thinking; (ii) undo lingering negative emotional arousal; (iii) fuel psychological resilience; (iv) build consequential personal resources; (v) trigger upward spirals towards greater well-being in the future; and (vi) seed human flourishing. The theory also carries an important prescriptive message. People should cultivate positive emotions in their own lives and in the lives of those around them, not just because doing so makes them feel good in the moment, but also because doing so transforms people for the better and sets them on paths toward flourishing and healthy longevity.

Fascinating that it fuels psychological resilience. Top reason why I’d want to give it a try.

The new mindset that comes from silencing your inner critic presents you with a world of possibility. When you’re surging with positive emotions, you’re seeing—and seizing on—opportunities you might never have noticed before. And with a high sense of motivation (and, really, how could you not be motivated by this?) and the right methods, you’re well on the road to becoming virtually limitless.

After all, people can’t learn to read faster if they believe it isn’t possible. They can’t learn to memorize things more efficiently if they keep telling themselves they have a bad memory. Everything else falls into place once you snap out of the trance of these so-called “limitations.” By tackling these lies, you’ll be tackling the core blocks that keep you from being limitless.

These beliefs are incredibly subtle. Few of us consciously think about our restrictions or the restrictions we believe others have. But it leaks out in places that deeply affect our happiness—in our work, in our home life, and with our children. If we believe that it’s not possible to improve, then in reality it won’t be possible to improve. It’s extremely difficult to accomplish something when you don’t believe it can be done in the first place.

In a fixed mindset, students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset, students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.

From Carol Dweck / Mindset book

With the fixed mindset, things are the way they are—we are powerless to change them. With the growth mindset, we have the ability to improve anything.

The IQ test actually measures current academic capabilities, not innate intelligence.5 To this day, IQ tests still don’t measure creativity or practical intelligence (which you can think of as “street smarts”), and they certainly don’t measure emotional intelligence6—all three of which are increasingly more important in the workplace and in life. The important distinction here is to remember the difference between test scores and your ability to learn.

David Shenk furthers this idea in his book, The Genius in All of Us. He writes that everyone has the potential for genius, or at the very least, greatness. But the reason we prefer to believe that we’re either a genius or we’re not, or that we’re either talented or not, is because it relieves us from the responsibility of taking control of our own life.

“A belief in inborn gifts and limits is much gentler on the psyche: The reason you aren’t a great opera singer is because you can’t be one. That’s simply the way you were wired. Thinking of talent as innate makes our world more manageable, more comfortable. It relieves a person of the burden of expectation.”

From David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us

Your intelligence is not only malleable but dependent on your ability to cultivate a growth mindset.

Start looking at your attitude. Listen to the way you talk; a fixed mindset usually shows up in your language. Maybe you say to yourself, “I’m not good at reading.” This kind of statement implies that you believe this is a fixed situation and that your skills can’t be improved. Instead, try saying something like “This is something I’m ...

While we use all of our brain, some people use their brain better than others. Just as most people use 100 percent of their body, there are some bodies that are faster, stronger, more flexible, and more energized than others. The key is to learn how to use your brain as efficiently and effectively as you possibly can—

He is famously quoted as having said, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” What’s more, no one remembers him for his mistakes—we only remember him for his contributions.

Re: Einstein

Unfortunately, mistakes are not often used as a tool for learning; they are used as a way of measuring one’s capabilities. Make too many mistakes and you fail your test or your class. We need to change that. Too many of us don’t come close to our capacities because we are too afraid of making a mistake. Instead of looking at mistakes as proof of failure, take them as proof that you are trying.

Mistakes don’t mean failure. Mistakes are a sign that you are trying something new. You might think you have to be perfect, but life is not about comparing yourself to anyone else; it’s about measuring yourself compared to who you were yesterday. When you learn from your mistakes, they have the power to turn you into something better than you were before.