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Are you ready to become Limitless? Jim Kwik teaches us how in his book, that sums up decades of experience as a brain coach.
Reading Experience of Limitless
Limitless was a great read.
It was full of valuable insights and exercises to immediately implement this knowledge without being too long.
In the book, Jim Kwik gives the reader a link to a page to further free resources that are useful as well.
And lastly, the book Limitless ends with a long list of book recommendations.
Lessons
1. You need to align your mindset with your goals
“If our mindset is not aligned with our desires or goals, we will never achieve them.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
You can’t look down on something and at the same time expect to achieve it yourself.
If you think money is the root of all evil and rich people are bad, you will most likely never do the necessary action to acquire wealth.
If you see A-student as annoying know-it-alls or teacher’s pets, you won’t care for how they study and therefore never improve your own study technique and results.
A contrary mindset will always make you self-sabotage yourself. And life is not fun if you are your own enemy, so align mind and actions.
2. Experiencing boredom is important
“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.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
There are a million and one ways to avoid being bored in our world. There is always something interesting to watch or hear at the swipe of a finger over the screen.
When was the last time you had to wait in a line or waiting room or bus station that you didn’t pull out your phone to pass the time?
Every time we do that, we are practicing being distracted. And as with every practice, the more we do it, the better we get.
Now think about the many, many hours you’ve been practicing the art of being distracted.
Are you really that surprised that you can’t focus for long periods and that you get fidgety?
Actionable Idea
This one is very easy.
The next time you have to wait somewhere without anything to do, do not pull out your phone. Simply spend time with your own thoughts and observe your environment.
It sounds easy, but your hand will always twitch towards your phone almost unconsciously if you are so used to distraction.
3. Stop externalizing your memory
“Forcing yourself to recall information instead of relying on an outside source to supply it for you is a way of creating and strengthening a permanent memory.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
“Memorization is discipline for the mind.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
Do you know the movie “Wal-E”?
Do you remember how humans got all fat and couldn’t move because their muscles were so weak after relying on their comfortable transportation chairs all their life?
What do you think will happen to your memory when you don’t use it much but instead write everything down elsewhere?
If you are still in school or college, you can count yourself lucky because you still have to train your memory fairly.
However, once you get your degree and don’t have to memorize anything for tests anymore, you have to be careful not to let your memory rot to waste.
Actionable Idea
Make the conscious effort – and yes, it does feel like an effort. That’s why so many people choose easier ways – to memorize things.
You can start with birthdates, addresses, and phone numbers.
Next, you can memorize your shopping list.
Or simply find something new to study without it having to lead to a degree. You could study the stars and planets just for fun, for example.
If you want to know how to remember best, check out the book Moonwalking with Einstein.
I’ve got it listed on my Reading List for Personal Growth.
4. You can decide to change the way your brain works today!
“As I stated earlier, the brain is capable of being molded and shaped, meaning that at any point anyone can decide to change the way their brain functions.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
This is probably one of the most uplifting lessons I’ve ever learned.
How great is it to know that you can improve your memory! That you are not stuck with whatever you have!
You can also improve your focus. All you need to do is to spend conscious effort training your mind.
Actionable Idea
Take some time each day for brain exercises.
This could be a 5-minute meditation session in the morning.
Or you could download one of the many mental exercise Apps and play the games 10-15 each day.
You could also integrate more healthy brain foods into your diet. Some of them are walnuts, salmon, blueberries, and avocado.
5. Remembering means connecting new information with what you know already
“Neuroplasticity, also referred to as brain plasticity, means that every time you learn something new, your brain makes a new synaptic connection. And each time this happens, your brain physically changes–it upgrades its hardware to reflect a new level of the mind.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
“In learning, when you fail to remember something, view it as a failure to make a connection between what you’ve learned and what you already know, and with how you will use it in life.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
“This is the key to memory and all of learning: In order to learn any new piece of information, it must be associated with something you already know.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
This lesson from Limitless has changed the way I look at learning.
Have you ever studied two subjects, and one is just so much harder for you to grasp than the other?
That is most likely because you can’t connect the information and other memories with the other subject.
That’s also why it is easier to learn new information about a subject once you have a solid basis of knowledge already memorized.
Memorization is all about connecting information with each other in a gigantic web of connections.
6. Study effectively with the rules of primacy and recency
“The effect of primacy is that you’re more likely to remember what you learn in the beginning of a learning session, a class, a presentation, or even a social interaction.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
“The effect of recency is that you’re also likely to remember the last thing you learned (more recent).”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
This is another reason why many students’ big gramming sessions are far less effective than they think.
Instead of cramming, break your study sessions apart and spread them out.
But careful! Once we exit a focused state, it takes us quite a while to get back into it.
So don’t make your study sessions too short and the breaks too long.
Actionable Idea
Use a Pomodoro timer for studying.
Take care to not get distracted in your breaks!
7. Knowledge can stand in the way of learning
“When learning something new, we tend to assume we understand more than we do about that subject. What we think we know about the topic can stand in the way of our ability to absorb new information. One of the reasons children learn rapidly is because they are empty vessels; they know they don’t know.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
Humility is important for learning.
We learn best when we an eager to get rid of our lack of knowledge.
If you think you already know the most important things, you won’t put much effort into learning new information.
That’s a dangerous state of mind to be in!
The less you know how much there is to know, the more you are prone to overestimating your knowledge.
Actionable Idea
Be careful to keep your humility.
Every time you think something along the lines of ‘I know that already,’ alarm bells should go off in your head and make you think twice.
8. Learning is state-dependent
“Remember, all learning is state-dependent. Consciously choose states of joy, fascination, and curiosity.”
– Jim Kwik (Limitless)
Remember that one episode from that one series you were obsessed with as a child?
How come you can still remember mundane things that you never tried to memorize years later, but you have no idea what your teacher was talking about last week?
One big reason for this is the state you were in when you were confronted with the information.
While watching your favorite series, you were probably excited and couldn’t wait to see what happens next.
In class, you might have been bored and stared at the clock waiting for the lesson to end.
We learn much easier when we are in an upbeat state.
Actionable Idea
Don’t wait for motivation to strike you! Take action and create it.
The reasoning you won’t be able to study effectively because you lack motivation is a lousy excuse.
Motivation is not something you have but something you do.
You are, to a large extent, a master of your emotions. You can decide to stop wallowing in self-pity and instead raise your vibe and get stuff done.
How you get motivated is very individual to you. My go-to advice is listening to happy music, watching motivational videos, and pinning inspirational Pinterest pins.
9. Learning effectively is less about quantity and more about the intensity
Most students learn by repeating the same information over and over and over and over again until it is punched deeply enough into your brain that it sticks.
Unsurprisingly, this time-consuming study technique creates problems once you have greater amounts of information that you need to get into your head.
Don’t understand me wrong; repeating information in certain intervals that work against the forgetting curve is important.
However, ideally, you only use this repetition for information that you’ve already got memorized.
The memorization itself should be based on intensive studying.
You can read the same information again and again without it sticking.
Effective memorization feels more effortful than listening or reading. That’s why we often avoid doing it.
It’s much easier to turn your flashcard around and read the answer instead of searching your brain for the things you remember first.
Study in a way that feels intense and exhausting. If you feel too comfortable doing it and you can sing along to songs simultaneously, you’re wasting your time.
It’s just like your workout that won’t be as effective when lifting 1kg weights 100 times as lifting 10kg weights 10 times.
Read also: 11 Tips to Study Effectively | How I Study for Law Exams
10. Speed reading is a superpower
In a world where mountains of new information get released each day, the person that can quickly absorb information has a great advantage.
Therefore speed reading can be a superpower in our informational age.
You are not stuck with your current reading speed. With practice, many people manage to more than double their pace without losing comprehension of the material.
Can you imagine what it would be like to breeze through books, textbooks, and articles in half the time?
How much more productive would you be?
Learning how to speed read is definitely an investment of your time that will pay off tenfold!
Read also: How I Read One Book A Week – 11 Tips To Read More
11. Don’t just think outside the box; ignore the box altogether
You often hear the advice to think outside the box to solve a problem. But what can be even more effective is to ignore the box and all its preconceived notions altogether.
Let’s say you want to get better grades, but no matter how much effort you make, you can’t seem to do better.
Thinking inside the box could be you searching for more opportunities to study and putting in more effort.
Thinking outside the box could be that you change your study strategy in addition to studying hard.
Now, if you ignore all your beliefs about studying up to date, you could ask yourself, ‘what if I didn’t need to study hard at all? what if I could actually study less AND get better grades?’
Do you see how these three different ways of looking at the problem could bring other solutions?
Limitless encourages us to think in outlandish ways and to break out of the virtual barriers we’ve set ourselves.
Many of our world’s best inventions are the result of such outlandish thinking.
That’s it for the Limitless lessons. Of course, the book contains many more, but I’ve narrowed it down to these eleven.
If you like this book, you should most definitely check out Jim Kwikset Podcast. He has a whole mountain of great bite-sized episodes full of valuable insights.
Very often, he interviews experts, who got me interested in a few great books and courses.
It’s honestly one of my favorite Podcasts.
Until next time!
Sophie
