Limitless Steps: Exponential Gains for the Win (Areté +1 #197)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another arete plus one degree. We've got another micro chapter from our new book activate your heroic potential451 of my all time favorite ideas. Here's one of them. Limitless steps Exponential gains for the win. Remember our chat about Team sky and the power of marginal gains? As you may recall, when we aggregate and compound a ton of tiny little gains, we over an extended period of time, we get huge gains. And what do you think would happen if we could tap into the power of not just marginal gains but super high leverage gains? Answer. We'd experience the power of exponential growth. Let's invite Jim Quick to the party to help unpack this idea. Jim wrote a great book called Limitless. He's one of the world's leading experts on memory improvement, brain optimization and accelerated learning. The best part of Jim's story, after suffering a brain injury in kindergarten, he was described by a teacher as the kid with a broken brain. He struggled with learning for most of his life. Then he went antifragile on it and studied and applied the science of how we learn. Fast forward a couple decades and he's now the brain coach to a who's who of Hollywood's elite professional athletes, political leaders and business magnates. Heroic Antifragility for the win Jim tells us, and I quote, moving forward incrementally is a significant sign of progress. Every step you can take in the process of becoming limitless is a step in the right direction. But what if you could move your genius forward exponentially? After all, if we take 30 normal steps forward, we'll wind up somewhere down the street. But if we took 30 exponential steps, we'd circle the Earth more than two dozen times. Isn't that fascinating? Let's think about that for a moment longer. If we take 30 normal steps, we'll get about 90ft down the street. That's great. We're making progress. Go us. But if we can figure out how to take 30 exponential steps, we'll be able to zip around the earth two dozen times. That's crazy. Great. Now we're making exponential progress. Go us. Note. Google calculator tells us that there are 5,280ft in a mile. The Earth is about 24,901 miles around the equator. If my math is correct, that's about 131,477,280ft. Or assuming three feet per step, 43,825,760 steps for one trip around our beautiful planet. Two dozen trips around the Earth comes out to roughly 1,051,818,000 trips. Two hundred and forty steps. Which is just slightly more than the 90ft from 30 normal steps. Huh? And all that begs yet another practical question. How do we take 30 metaphorically exponential steps? Simple. We want to figure out what we think might be the highest leverage optimizations we can make and then consistently execute those behavioral changes while aggregating and compounding the gains over an extended period of time. Enter Earth revolving magic. And you know what? I don't think those highest leverage optimizations are necessarily the big fancy things reserved for the blessed few. I think they're the crazy, mundane, simple actions we can all take. Stuff like turning off our electronics at night via a digital sunset so we can get a great, great night of sleep. Seriously. That one change can literally change your life overnight. Then what if you reduced slash eliminated sugar and ultra processed food from your diet? That one change can literally change your life. Then what if you resisted the urge to get online right when you woke up and started meditating for one minute and built that up to 11 minutes and you did it every day? That one change can literally change your life. Then if you were really feeling inspired, what if you took that amazing energy you cultivated and focused it like a laser beam on the most important task for your day during an AM1 deep work time block. And you did that every day. That one change can literally change your life. Then what if you decided to keep your phone out of sight and out of touch when you were with your family so you could bless them with the power of your presence? That one change can literally change your life. Then what if you had fun adding a series of 25 additional exponentially powerful optimizing steps? Answer. You'd radically change your life. And you might just zip around the earth a couple dozen times. So, my dear heroic friend, what's the number one next most exponentially powerful step you can take? As we consider that, let's keep Krishnamurti's wisdom in mind. He told us to go far, you must begin near. And the nearest step is the most important one. Let's take that next step today. I hope you enjoyed that. Arete plus one degree from my new book Arete, Activate your heroic potential. The book will be shipped on November 14, right before Black Friday in time to make it the perfect holiday gift perhaps. I wanted to let you know that we have some special giveaways if you think you might like to pre order the book. And even more goodies if you think you might want to give the book away this holiday season. Here's the deal. Pre order one copy and get a free advanced reader copy of the ebook today. Pre order three copies and get a free advanced copy of the ebook and the audiobook and a limited edition Arete Coin that we'll send to you. Pre order 10 copies of the book. Bless you and get all of that plus an autographed advanced hardcover reader copy sent to you immediately inside the fancy Arete VIP box, which is packed with other goodies including this Arete T shirt, a Heroic t shirt and 10 free annual heroic memberships for your gift recipients. You'd be able to give them a book and a year's worth of Heroic for free. If you pre order 25 copies, you'll get all that plus a free ticket to our launch event party in Austin November 10th through 12th and you'll get a personal voice memo. Thank you and a high five from me if you're feeling inspired to order over 50 copies of the book. We've been blessed to have a lot of CEOs and corporations do that. We'll give you a huge discount. Just let us know all of this you can learn more about at Heroic U.S. book Heroic U.S. book of course you can order the book on Amazon. Barnes and Noble Independent bookstores will be everywhere you can buy a book, Hudson's Airport stores, et cetera. And let us know of course when you've done that and purchased a copy or three or ten or more if you feel inspired to do so at Heroic Us Book. I appreciate you and I hope you love the book. I'm super excited about it, super proud of it, and I hope it helps you and your families transform your lives.