Limitless: How Will Smith and the X-Men Got That Way with Jim Kwik

Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. What is unlimiting, the way you're defining it in the book? Because I think I almost wish it was the title instead of Limitless.

Although I. Well, you've seen the movie Limitless, obviously. I'm pretty well known for early use.

Of Modafinil, which you would call the limitless drug. So yeah, definitely, yeah.

So everybody knows that it was Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro and he goes from zero to hero. So I don't have the pill, but I have the. The process for Bradley Cooper is able to learn languages, be able to read faster. He had this incredible memory. He had incredible focus, determination and drive. But I figured out the processes for those things and I put them in the book. The process of unlimiting is the active removal of barriers and borders around the things that we want to accomplish. And again, Limitless is not about being perfect. It's about progressing and advancing beyond what we believe is possible. And I created a three part framework that easy to understand and very, very practical where people could see themselves in there and be able to take immediate action. And so when I talk about this, about being limitless, there's a quote I open the book with from a French philosopher that says life is the C between B and D. Life is the C between B and D. And people are thinking I'm speaking in tongues or code. B is birth, D is death, C. Life is choice. And I really do believe that our life is a series of sum total of all the choices we've made up to this point about little things like, you know, that add up to big things like what you're going to put in your body, you know, what you're going to feed your body, what you're going to feed your mind, you know, whether you're going to move today or not, where you're going to live, you know, who you're going to spend time with, who you're going to marry. Like all these choices, right? Where are we going to go to school? All those choices and I do believe that that is the ultimate superpower, is our ability to make decisions, is these difficult times that we're in right now, these difficult times can diminish us, these difficult times can define us or these difficult times can develop us. We decide Limitless is about getting our power back. And that's why we had the option of moving this book in the future, post everything that's going on in the world. And I was like, no way. This book, while it's a manual on Speed reading, learning languages, rapidly learning names and TED talks and all that stuff. It's right now. It's about managing your mind. It's about optimizing your focus and your productivity while you're working from home. It's about supporting your kids while school is being closed down. It's about learning new skills and subjects since businesses are being disrupted and whole industries are going out of business. And so the reason I wrote this book, initially, it was a book completely about methodology. It was the things you and I have talked about before on previous episodes on how to do those things. The speed reading, the language learning, and the making good decisions. All those. And yet I asked myself, before I turned it into the publisher, I asked myself this question, will 100% of the people get the results if they read this book? And my honest answer was no. Because a lot of people know what to do, but they don't do what they know. And that's the thing. I remember I was doing a talk in, in Silicon Valley, and afterwards, Bill Gates comes up to me, interesting guy. And I have this habit of asking people, if they could have any one superpower, what would it be? And he looks at me as like, the ability to read faster. And I'm like, oh, I could totally help you with that. Because leaders are readers, right? You mentioned that if someone has decades of experience like you do, and you put into a book, or many books, which I have on my shelf behind me, thank you. Somebody could download decades and into days. And that's the biggest advantage somebody could have because you don't have to waste time. You can learn from other people's experience. And we start talking about the future of education. And I talk about it from a meta learning standpoint. Meta learning is the science of learning how to learn. That's really what this book is. And he talks about it from a technology standpoint. And a whole crowd, I post this on Instagram, start gathering around us, surrounding us, and somebody asks, is there anything missing? You have the theory and you have the technology. And we both came to the same conclusion. It's human motivation. Like, a lot of people know what to do, but they're not doing those things. They're procrastinating. Because common sense is not common practice. People that listen to your show, they read your books. They know what they should be doing, but why aren't they doing it? And so I realized that there were two elements besides methodology that were missing in terms of performance. And I added them in. And I created something I called the limitless model. And it's a three part framework that I could explain to everybody right now and it will explain why you are stuck. All right, so what I would recommend everybody do is grab a piece of paper right now because we can make this interactive.

I was going to give the normal warning that says, oh, if you're commuting or driving right now, don't do that. But I don't have to because we're in the middle of a pandemic. No one's driving or commuting.

Exactly. And I want everybody a transcript if.

They need it to.

Good, good, good. So I want everyone to picture three intersecting circles. And it kind of looks like Mickey Mouse. You have two ears that are overlapping and one face. So a Venn diagram. Venn diagram. Three intersecting circles. They all overlap a little bit. And these are exactly. Yes. For people watching this on video, you have the three circles, the Venn diagram. And these are. I want you to think about an area of your life where you feel limited. I want you to think about specifically an area of your life where you're not making progress. It could be in your career, it could be in your income, it could be in your impact, your contribution. It could be in your relationships, it could be in your physical well being. What area of your life. It could be in your learning. Right? You feel like you're not making progress, you can't. Your memory's not making progress, your reading speed, your focus, it's. Something is keeping you feel like you're in a box. All right? So think about one area of your life and I'll walk you through this exercise. Now, this box is three dimensional. So there are three forces that keep you in that box. And these are the three circles because these are the same three forces that will liberate you from that box. All right? And the reason why I do this is because you can't change something that's invisible, right? If you don't, if you don't give it a name, you can't be able to. You can't influence it if you don't know if it doesn't exist. So here are the three forces. The first circle is, is your mindset. Three M's. I alliterate everything because I use acronyms for everything. I use mnemonics for everything to make it very memorable. Three M's. The first M is your mindset. Now I'm going to define mindset as your assumptions and attitudes towards something. Your assumptions and attitudes towards the world, how it works. Attitudes, assumptions about yourself, what would fall in this circle that would be very relevant are what you believe is possible. Also in this circle, what you believe you are capable of because you could believe something is possible and you could not believe that you're capable of achieving that. Right? But somebody else could. So what you believe is possible, what you believe you're capable of, and what you believe you deserve would go in there also. So that's the first M. That's your mindset. Now, the last M as a spoiler I mentioned are the methods. And this book was primarily a textbook on how to unlock the most important technology, which is your brain. Yet if I teach you, if I teach you a strategy for learning a language faster, or remembering walking into a room and meeting 20 strangers, remembering all their names, but your mindset says, I'm too old, I'm too stupid, I'm not smart enough, I have a horrible memory, then you're still going to be stuck in that box, right? Because all behavior is belief driven. Yeah. People come to me all the time at conferences. They pull me out in private and they're like, jim, I have a horrible memory. Let me tell you. And I'm like, wait, wait, stop. If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. If you fight for your limits, they're yours. And people are always doing that. And I'm telling your brain is like a supercomputer and your self talk is the program it will run. So if you tell yourself you're not good at remembering names, you will not remember the name of the next person you meet because you program your supercomputer not to. Your mind is always eavesdropping on your self talk. And so that's part of mindset, right? And that's why it's important, because you can learn the method, but you can believe it's not possible, or you might believe you're not capable of it, or you might not believe you deserve that relationship or deserve that body or deserve that income, right? And so you go through a process of unlimiting those lies. It.