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

by Jim Kwik

Kotler believes that finding flow is the “source code” of motivation. When you find flow, you get “maybe the most potent dose of reward chemistry” your brain can give you—which is the reason he believes flow is the most addictive state on Earth.

Once we start to feel flow in an experience, we are motivated to do what it takes to get more. But it’s a circular relationship—if you have motivation to accomplish a task but you have no flow, you will eventually burn out. Motivation and flow need to work together, and they must be coupled with a solid recovery protocol, like good sleep and nutrition.

If you’re going to become limitless, you’re going to want to get yourself into a flow state as often as possible. So how do you do this? I can offer five ways:

1. Eliminate distractions 2. Do something you love 3. Have a clear goal 4. Set aside time 5. Challenge myself a little

2. Give Yourself Enough Time Make sure you have a block of time set aside to get into flow. It’s commonly believed that, when conditions are right, it takes about 15 minutes to achieve a flow state and that you don’t really hit your peak for closer to 45 minutes. Clearing out only half an hour or so isn’t going to allow you to accomplish much. Plan to set aside at least 90 minutes, and ideally a full two hours.

4. Have Clear Goals One of the most efficient flow preventers is a lack of clarity. If you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s likely that casting around for a mission will keep flow at bay. A novelist friend of mine separates the plotting of his novels from the actual writing for precisely this reason.

Avoid doing multiple tasks at once, like the writing example. Separate out plotting from writing

5. Challenge Yourself . . . A Little When I talk to people about flow, I consistently hear that they are most likely to achieve flow when they’re doing something that is a little bit of a challenge. In other words, they’re outside of their comfort zone, but not way outside of it. The logic here is clear. If you do something that you can do with both hands tied behind your back, you’re probably going to become bored fairly quickly, and boredom and flow are incompatible.

Here are the four supervillains you need to keep at bay if your flow is going to thrive:

1. Avoid multitasking 2. Fear of failure 3. Stress 4. Lack of conviction

3. Fear of Failure “Perfectionism reduces creativity and innovation,” writes Hara Estroff Marano, editor at large and the former editor in chief of Psychology Today. “It is a steady source of negative emotions; rather than reaching toward something positive, those in its grip are focused on the very thing they most want to avoid—negative evaluation. Perfectionism, then, is an endless report card; it keeps people completely self-absorbed, engaged in perpetual self-evaluation—reaping relentless frustration and doomed to anxiety and depression.”

If you go into a task with the belief that you absolutely must perform this task perfectly and that failure will be devastating, you’re going to be so focused on not failing that you’ll never get into a state where you can truly excel.

4. Lack of Conviction Nearly as devilish a supervillain as perfectionism is a lack of belief in what you’re doing. “The brain perceives uncertainty as a threat, which sparks the release of cortisol, a stress hormone that disrupts memory, depresses the immune system, and increases the risk of high blood pressure and depression,”

By Travis Bradberry

If you don’t believe you’re going to accomplish anything of importance, you’ll guarantee that will be the outcome. If you go into a task doubting your ability to complete it, ask yourself these questions: Do I have the necessary skills to do this? Do I have all the information I need to do this? Do I have enough passion for this project to do this? If the answer to any of these is no, set the task aside until you can answer each of these questions in the affirmative.

By this point, you’ve discovered how to unleash two of the elements necessary to become limitless. You’ve learned how to approach every day with a productive mindset, and you’ve learned how to do so with an optimal level of motivation. But there’s one more M that differentiates limitless people from those who are encumbered by their limitations: method.

Methods are the procedures or processes for accomplishing something. In this context, method is the process of learning how to learn, also called meta learning.

In this section, you’re going to learn the science of accelerated learning and meta learning in five areas: focus, study, memory, speed reading, and thinking.

Focus allows us to train our brain power on a particular task to burn through that task. It’s amazing what we can accomplish when we’re focused. Conversely, when we’re less focused, we’re less likely to accomplish what we truly want to do because we’re just not as committed—both emotionally and physically—to doing it. The primary enemy to focus is distraction.

Your concentration is like a muscle. You can train to become stronger with practice.

“Concentration is at the crux of all human success and endeavor,” Hindu priest, entrepreneur, and former monk Dandapani told me during one of my podcasts. “If you can’t concentrate, you can’t manifest.”

What Dandapani is saying is that concentration is a critical component of anything you want to accomplish. But, like so many other things we’ve discussed already, we’ve never really been taught how to concentrate.

Dandapani points out that concentration is like a muscle that gets stronger the more you exercise it. “Concentration is something you can learn and something you can practice to get better at,” he said.

However, what most of us practice instead is distraction. We allow our minds to jump from thought to thought, often using technology to help us practice distraction until we’re experts at it—and we should be, because we often get a dozen or more hours of practice a day. Just imagine what it would be like if we practiced concentration for even a fraction of that time.

Instead of practicing concentration, most of us practice distraction

“I define concentration as my ability to keep my awareness on one thing for an extended period of time. Every time my concentration drifts, I use my will power to bring my awareness back.”3

What is concentration?

Most of us think of lack of concentration as a function of our mind bouncing from place to place. Dandapani has a different—and more helpful—metaphor. To him, it isn’t your mind that’s moving; it’s your awareness. He sees awareness as a glowing ball of light that moves to different parts of your mind. In order to excel at concentration, you need to make yourself keep that ball of light trained on one spot in your mind for an extended period.

You can work on this during nearly any pursuit. If you’re having a conversation with someone, make a concerted effort to pay attention to nothing other than that conversation. If you notice your awareness drifting away from the conversation, refocus your glowing ball of light.

Instances to practice focus and concentration exist anywhere

By doing one thing at a time, your concentration “muscle” will become incredibly strong, and your focus will reach limitless levels.

Multi-tasking does not help improve concentration levels

Another key to boosting your concentration is de-cluttering your environment. A Princeton University study found that, “Multiple stimuli present in the visual field at the same time compete for neural representation by mutually suppressing their evoked activity throughout the visual cortex, providing a neural correlate for the limited processing capacity of the visual system.”4 In layperson’s terms, what this means is that physical clutter in your surroundings competes for your attention, which results in decreased performance and increased anxiety and stress levels.

Manage a minimal working space — whether digital or physically

So, if you want to become a master at concentration, divest yourself of the potential for distraction whenever concentration is critical.

“Anxious thoughts can overwhelm you, making it difficult to make decisions and take action to deal with whatever issue bothers you” writes psychologist Melanie Greenberg, Ph.D., author of The Stress-Proof Brain.

“Anxiety can also lead to overthinking, which makes you more anxious, which leads to more overthinking, and so on. How can you get out of this vicious cycle? Repressing anxious thoughts won’t work; they will just pop up again, sometimes with more intensity.”

that allows everything else to catch fire.” What both Greenberg and Funt are identifying is the need for all of us to have more time when our minds aren’t cluttered. It’s obvious how doing this will positively affect our mental health. But what’s less obvious is how it will also dramatically improve our focus and our productivity.

Addressing one of your concerns head-on, as we just discussed, is one way to deal with this, but there are going to be situations where that’s simply not possible. Instead, what if you set aside a specific time in your schedule to move these worries and obligations to the forefront of your mind? Simply saying, “I’ll worry about that later” isn’t likely to keep that worry from creeping back 20 minutes from now. But saying, “I’ll worry about that at 4:15” very well might.

Block out windows to stress or worry about something latet

I knew I could do this, because with competence comes confidence. I’m not saying this to to impress you; I’m saying it to express to you what’s possible. To illustrate to you how any sense of constraint fades when you’ve learned how to absorb a subject in a sitting, remember what you’ve learned, have the ability to highlight the most essential points, and have an understanding of how people learn—

I never would have been able to deliver that particular keynote if I hadn’t been a quick study. And just like the other skills we’ve been addressing here, this isn’t an ability you either do or don’t have. Instead, it’s an ability you’ve either cultivated or haven’t. You can learn how to unlimit your studies. And when you do, it’ll be a superpower you’ll employ the rest of your life.

Think about a topic or subject you’d like to learn this month. How would you go about studying this topic? What’s your current approach or process?

THE FOUR LEVELS OF COMPETENCE Since the sixties, psychologists have noted that there are four levels of competence or learning.

Since the sixties, psychologists have noted that there are four levels of competence or learning. The first, known as “unconscious incompetence,” is when you don’t know what you don’t know.

1) Unconscious incompetence: Don’t know what you don’t know 2) Conscious incompetence: Know what you don’t know 3) Conscious competence: Exert concentration to perform the skill 4) Unconscious competence: Skill comes naturally (automated) Key factor in all of these themes: the absence or presence of deliberate attention

The first, known as “unconscious incompetence,” is when you don’t kno...

In the next level, known as “conscious incompetence,” you’re aware of what you don’t know.

The third level is “conscious competence.” What this means is that you’re aware of a skill and have the capacity to perform that skill, but only when you actively put your mind to it.

The fourth level—the one any lifelong learner is seeking—is “unconscious competence.” In this case, you know how to perform a skill, and it’s second nature to you.

Now the key to get from conscious competence to unconscious competence is obvious. It’s practice. Practice makes progress.

Why are most of us restrained in our ability to study? Most people do not know how to study effectively, because they were never taught. Many people naturally assume they already know how to learn. The challenge is that most of the techniques you use now are old and ineffective. Many of them date back hundreds of years.

We now live in a highly competitive information age where information is everywhere. Yet we are still using the same methods to absorb and process it all. Today, our requirements for learning are much different. But most of us were taught that studying was all about reviewing material over and over and over so we could spit it back out during a test.

The most successful people in the world are lifelong students. That means they’re continuously learning new skills, keeping up with the latest in their chosen fields, and staying apprised of what other fields might be able to offer to them. As we discussed earlier in this book, there are enormous benefits to spending a lifetime learning, so if you’re going to approach your goal of being a limitless learner, you’re going to want to make study a part of your entire life.

“In reality, cramming is associated with emotional, mental and physical impairments that reduce the body’s ability to cope with its environment,” wrote journalist Ralph Heibutzki in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He cited a Harvard Medical School study that indicates that cramming leads to many unwanted side-effects, including impaired mental function.

results. “No one is suggesting that students shouldn’t study,” he said, “but an adequate amount of sleep is also critical for academic success. These results are consistent with emerging research suggesting that sleep deprivation impedes learning.”

I have learned that cramming is rarely as useful as we would like it to be. Concentrating on one subject for many, many hours makes it less likely that you’re going to retain the information.

Whether you’re a high school junior taking five AP classes with the goal of gaining acceptance to a top college or a corporate head faced with the need to stay on top of your rapidly changing industry, you’re likely facing two challenges simultaneously: a mountain of information to scale, and little time in which to scale it. If this is you, you’re going to want to make sure you’re studying as efficiently as you can.

Habit 1: Employ Active Recall Active recall is a process through which you review material and then immediately check to determine how much of it you’ve remembered. This allows you to draw the distinction between simple recognition (familiarity with the words on the page) and recollection (making the material an active part of your memory).

“Most students do not realize how important it is to force themselves to recall,” writes neurologist Dr. William Klemm of Texas A&M University. “In part, this is because they are conditioned by multiple-choice tests to recall passively, that is recognize when a correct answer is presented, as opposed to generating the correct answer in the first place.

To employ active recall, do this: Review the material you are studying. Then close the book, turn off the video or lecture, and write down or recite everything you remember from what you just reviewed. Now, look at the material again. How much did you remember?