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

by Jim Kwik

Consider your passion, your desired identity, and your values: How can they create the basis for your reasons? You already know that you’re much more likely to remember something when you’re motivated to remember it.

Let’s say your passion is to help people forge better relationships, you identify as a connector, and one of your values is love. Your reasons for learning to remember names could be simple to find: “I want to learn to remember names so that I can better connect with people in my community and help foster a stronger network of people I care about.”

Have a stronger (deeper) WHY behind my actions

Having reasons has helped me become crystal clear when it comes to commitments. A big part of self-love is being protective of your time and energy. Setting boundaries around your time, emotions, mental health, and space is incredibly vital at any time, but especially when you don’t sleep. When you lack any necessary fuel, such as sleep or food, your resources aren’t as abundant as they are at other times, so protecting what you have becomes very important.

When I make decisions, everything is either a heaven yes or heaven no (just trying to keep it clean here). If I don’t feel completely aligned with something, I don’t do it, because I don’t have the energy to spare. And I can honestly say that I don’t suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out).

Most of us feel tired and fatigued these days. I believe that’s because we feel like we need to say “yes” to every opportunity, invite, or request that comes our way. While it’s great to be open-minded and consider options, when you say yes to something, you need to be careful that you’re not inadvertently saying no to yourself and your own needs.

WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE? What is motivation? 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. Really feel the pain that you will have if you don’t do something about it. This is the only way for you to make a change last and to get you to follow through.

Practicing loss aversion as a way to capture motivation and beat procrastination

Pain can be your teacher, if you use it and not let it use you. Use pain to drive you to make things happen.

I want you to consider where learning fits into your passion, identity, values, and reasons. It was not until I was an adult that I found my passion and purpose. Through my struggle to learn, I developed a love of learning because it helped me become unlimited, and my purpose is teaching other people to learn so they can unlimit themselves.

I value growth and adventure. For me, learning falls under both of these, because it contributes directly to my growth and it gives me a sense of adventure, especially when I learn something novel and challenging. There’s no ambiguity here; learning directly contributes to the fulfillment of my values. Every single one of my reasons keeps me motivated so that I can help more people learn.

If you’re trying to force motivation, but you haven’t addressed these invisible, limiting identities, you won’t get very far. When you feel stuck, come back to the way your goal fits into your values, and then ask yourself what needs to be brought back into alignment.

Going back to the previous chapter’s list of the seven lies that hold you back, perhaps the eighth lie is that you have motivation —that you wake up and feel motivated every day. 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” and, if you’re like most people, you place limitations on yourself in the form of these thoughts at least some of the time.

One of the most important things you can do for the health of your brain is to keep learning.

What this means is that, as long as we keep learning, we continue to create new pathways in our brains. We keep our brains plastic and supple, capable of processing new information in relevant ways. This is especially true if we give ourselves genuine challenges in our learning.

By increasing the ways you use your brain, you increase the capabilities of your brain.

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.”

Prefrontal cortex is used less and the area of the brain focused on survival (ie limbic brain and amygdala)

The benefits of meditation are numerous (and there are many, many books out there that detail them), including everything from boosting immune function to decreasing anxiety to actually increasing your gray matter. One of those many benefits is helping with insomnia.

Few of us are capable of locking our focus on one thing for an extended period, so it’s good to know refocusing is equally valuable.

Via meditation

When you regain your attention on your breathing, Garten says, “you’re exerting an important skill—you’re learning to observe your thinking. You’re not caught up in your thoughts, but you’re in a process of observing that you’re thinking. You begin to recognize that you can have control over your thoughts and that you can choose what you are thinking.”21

Benefit of meditation

What limitations are you placing on yourself? Give yourself a few minutes with this. What are you telling yourself you can’t do?

Zeigarnik effect—that uncompleted tasks created a level of tension that keeps that task at the front of our minds until it is completed.

Missing closure

In all likelihood, you’re familiar with this tension from your experience with procrastination. When you have something you know you need to do and you keep putting it off, it weighs on you, even making it more difficult to do anything else well as long as this task goes uncompleted.

One of the most significant reasons that people fail to act is that we feel overwhelmed by what we need to do. A project or a chore might seem so big and time-consuming that you can’t imagine how you’re ever going to get it done. We look at the project in its entirety and immediately feel that the task at hand is too big, so we shut down or put it off.

“Incomplete tasks and procrastinating often lead to frequent and unhelpful thought patterns,” says psychologist Hadassah Lipszyc. “These thoughts can impact on sleep, trigger anxiety symptoms, and further impact on a person’s mental and emotional resources.”1

We already know that unfinished tasks create tension in your brain. If you layer guilt and shame on top of this, you’re making it even harder to get a task done, and you’re making yourself miserable.

One of the only things that is likely to change your behavior is to make incremental progress.

What you’ll notice in all of these scenarios is two things. One is that they present you with something achievable—a win on the way to reaching the championship of getting this job done. The other is that they all put you in a situation where you’re likely to get even more accomplished.

By breaking a task that you’re procrastinating about into smaller pieces, the path to getting it done becomes clear.

The best way to deal with the tension between what you want and what you’ve done so far to achieve it is to remember what the Zeigarnik effect teaches us. You’re not going to be able to ease your mind about this task until you complete it, so get yourself moving toward completion. Start somewhere. Anywhere. Even if you don’t have the energy or the motivation to get the entire thing done, get started on getting it done.

Various studies have shown that somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of what we do every day is the product of a habit. That means that half of our lives is governed by what scientists term automaticity.

“Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life,” writes Charles Duhigg in his best-selling book, The Power of Habit.

Creating habits to automate essential parts of our lives is a fundamental streamlining technique that we do largely unconsciously, often to our benefit. Of course, we also automate all kinds of things that we’d probably be much better off not turning into habits.

“For the majority of participants,” they wrote, “automaticity increased steadily over the days of the study, supporting the assumption that repeating a behavior in a consistent setting increases automaticity.” By the end of the study, they’d found that it took an average of 66 days for the new behavior to become a habit, though it took individual participants as little as 18 days and as many

is also widely assumed that breaking a bad habit isn’t about ending that habit, but rather about replacing it with a different, more constructive, habit.

“It’s much easier to start doing something new than to stop doing something habitual without a replacement behavior. That’s one reason why smoking cessation aids such as nicotine gum or inhalers tend to be more effective than the nicotine patch.”

“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.”

In other words, you need three things in place in order to 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

Fogg identifies three key motivators:

For habit change: 1) Pleasure / pain 2) Social acceptance / rejection 3) Hope / fear

Fogg equates ability with simplicity, noting that when something is simple for us, we are considerably more likely to do it. He defines six categories of simplicity:

1) Time 2) Money 3) Physical effort 4) Brain cycle 5) Social norms 6) Non routin

Brain cycles: Simple things don’t tax our thinking, and we shy away from things that require us to think too hard.

AKA higher the cognitive load, the longer it takes for habit formation

But how do you make something a habit? Just remember WIN:

Want Innate Now

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. If the habit you’re trying to adopt is something that you’re good at or you know you can be good at, you’re well on your way.

Xiang’s story shows that by changing just one or two small habits in your day, incredible progress can follow. Something as simple as brushing your teeth with the opposite hand can be the start to an entirely new way of life.

Why is your morning routine so important? I strongly believe that if you jump-start your day by jump-starting your brain with a series of simple activities, you have a huge advantage.

In addition, if you set up winning routines early in the day, you can benefit from what Tony Robbins calls “the science of momentum”: the notion that once you set accomplishment in motion, you can keep it in motion with much less effort than if you were trying to accomplish something from a standing start.

Then I do a three-minute workout. This is not my full workout, but I want to get my heart rate up first thing in the morning, as it helps with sleep and weight management, and with oxygenation to the brain.

Try to incorporate a quick 5 minute workout in moring routine

My goal in any given day is to accomplish three things for work and three things personally, and I set this agenda now.

In his groundbreaking book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes 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.” To Csikszentmihalyi, flow is an expression of “optimal experience.”

Dr. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as having eight characteristics:2 Absolute concentration Total focus on goals The sense that time is either speeding up or slowing down A feeling of reward from the experience A sense of effortlessness The experience is challenging, but not overly so Your actions almost seem to be happening on their own You feel comfort with what you are doing