In this segment Jim Kwik introduces Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats as a practical decision‑making tool. He walks through each hat—White (facts & data), Red (feelings & intuition), Black (caution & risks), Yellow (optimism & benefits), Green (creativity & alternatives), and Blue (process control & synthesis)—using a real‑world scenario of choosing where to live (London, Portugal, Dubai, etc.). Kwik provides memorable mnemonics (lab coat, heart, judge’s robe, sun, foliage, sky) to help recall each perspective. He demonstrates how switching hats shifts focus from logical analysis to emotional response, risk assessment, upside potential, and new possibilities, culminating in the Blue hat that integrates all inputs to reach a decision. Kwik also describes how teams can use the hats in workshops, assigning colors to participants to surface diverse viewpoints, and links the method to cognitive concepts like the reticular activating system (RAS) and the power of targeted questions to direct attention. The overall message is that consciously adopting multiple lenses expands conscious awareness, reduces blind spots, and leads to wiser choices.
Chapters
It's one of the things that we teach in Limitless is Six Thinking Hats. It's created by Edward de Bono, and it's this idea that if you are facing a decision or a difficulty or a dilemma in your life, one of the reasons why we can't always think our way out of something is because we see something from a set point of view. And what Six Thinking Hats does, it gives you permission to step out of yourself and try on another lens. Meaning, imagine this table here has six color hats, right?
Yep.
And I want everybody to think about who's listening or watching this right now—a decision you need to make or difficulty. Doesn't have to be like life and death, but just something that you know that where to live. I'm thinking about yes, perfect. Where to live. And then you have these hats. So the first hat is the white hat. I'm no specific order. So imagine you're reaching out and you're putting on the white hat. Okay, right. And the white hat. And I'll give you a mnemonic, because I'm the memory guy, to help you remember what each one symbolizes. The white hat, imagine a white scientist's lab coat, like a white lab coat. That's data. That's information. That's facts, right? So now you could only look at this situation or this decision tree through the eyes of logic.
OK, so I'm doing that now. So me and my partner are actually looking for somewhere to live at the moment. And we've been looking at— it was really about which area to live in in London. Or maybe we'll live in Portugal or maybe Dubai. So we're kind of trying to figure that out.
Okay.
So I've got my white hat on and my lab coat, and I can only think about logic. So price, I'm thinking about, is it a good time to buy? What's the graph saying? I'm thinking about renting versus buying.
Commute and travel and amenities that are earth— yeah, that would be all the factual. And then so you could take off the white hat and now look for the red hat. So you grab the red hat, you put it on, and the red hat symbolizes heart, is emotions. So this is where you're going more with your gut, your feeling. You're putting logic aside and just like, what feels right for you?
Her family lives in Portugal. So that's the first thing that came to mind when you said about feelings and being close to family.
Yeah, absolutely. And this is good. I hope everyone's doing this also. So you could take off the red hat. And you could put on, let's say, the black hat. And the black hat, think of a judge's robe. And the judge's robe, this is where you get a little bit— you could be judgmental. You could look at the risk or the devil's advocate. You could look at the other side in terms of what could go wrong.
You might hate living there. The places we're considering, we've never lived in before. So what if we buy a place and then we immediately don't like it? Maybe we should stay where we are and not buy anywhere. Maybe the housing market will collapse and it'll be such a bad investment that we'll regret it.
So you're shining a spotlight. So the idea here is that the information is out there, but where are we choosing to put a spotlight and acknowledge and be aware of? So you could take off the black hat, and we're doing this abbreviated, right? And then look for the yellow hat. You put on the yellow hat, and the yellow is like the sun, and that's like optimism. And this is like all the things opposite of the black hat. What could go wrong? What could go right? Like, what's the upside?
And even, you know, and even all those things I just named, we'll figure it out. Yeah, we'll figure it out. If we live there, we can always move somewhere else, and, um, we'll make it work. And Dubai's lovely. It's hot. Yeah, so it's Portugal.
Nice. And those are 4 hats. And the last 2, take off the yellow hat and find the green hat. And so you put on the green hat, and the green is possibility. It's like new growth. If you look at plants that are green, imagine new foliage, new growth. And these are like maybe thinking outside the box. Like maybe it's not, I go to this job or this job. Maybe it's I go back to school, or maybe it's something I'm not entertaining. So that's possibility.
So that would be in the context of me moving house. What is that? That's the possibility of—
So if it was like between this and this, it could be like, Choice 3 or choice 4.
A third option. So maybe we'll try America, or we'll try another place to live in the world, or, um, maybe we'll just Airbnb in all these places and we can live in all of them.
Yeah. Okay, so that would be green. And then finally, the last hat. So it could be done in any order, but the blue hat is always— you end with. So put on the blue hat. And the blue, imagine the sky overlooking everything. It's kind of like the, uh, the manager hat. It listens to all the conversations with all the other color hats, and then it helps you make a decision. Because it informs— because here's the thing. You can only make decisions based on what's in your conscious awareness. And so many people live with a certain hat on, like, 24/7. They are just that logical facts, prove it to me. And they see through a certain lens. But if they're not looking at the emotional context or other possibilities or the downside of You know, Richard Branson's very good at that, right? He's very good at looking at— everyone looks at him as very, very risky, you know, like, you know, do all these crazy things. But he's, you know, you have conversations with him. He looks at like from the black hat, look in terms of risk management, right? And mitigating the downside. And so like, but if you just looked at everything through the yellow hat, investing optimistic, you think everything's gonna— Bitcoin, everything's gonna be good. You're gonna go all in that and you're ignoring the other points of view. And so this allows you to have more information. And so hopefully with that more information, you can make a more wiser choice with something. And that's kind of—
You literally recommend people in chapter 15 of this book to buy multicolored hats.
If you wanted to be able to do that, we could do this. We do this with our team, where we'll go through with our team and say either one of two things as a team-building exercise, or like we're facing this, you initiative. We're launching a new book, or we're doing this whatever, like a social media challenge or whatever. And we'll have people, like, everyone put on the same color hat metaphorically.
Mm-hmm.
Like, literally physically go like this and put it on, as if, you know, so they get their body into it also. And we're all looking at it through the same point of view. Or we'll assign different hats for different people, and we'll have this big kind of, you know, court case and conversation. And the rule is you have to talk as if you're from that point of view, and that allows us to get outside of ourselves. It's similar to innovation, where there's a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolution. It's not a really fun read, but the essence of it is a lot of innovation and progress comes from people outside of that industry, because it takes somebody from the outside to have a different lens or hat that didn't have the same learned helplessness and taught the same limitations of how things should have been done. So maybe an Elon outside saying, well, if we're gonna make a car today with today's technology, how would we go about doing that instead of doing just incremental improvements on, you know, what they have existing, right? And I think you ask a new question and you get a new answer. And part of these, you know, 60,000 thoughts we have, a lot of 'em are in form of questions, but are those questions getting us shining a light? We have something called our reticular activating system, which we talk about a lot, that the brain primarily is a deletion device.
Deletion.
Deletion. We're trying to keep information out. Yeah. Because if we let everything in—
Overload.
Of course. And you'd be stressed. Right. And so we're primarily— but what we let in, we have part of our nervous system called the RAS that determines this is important to us. So if you're going around in the city and somebody shouts out your name, you're going to turn around, even if you know logically you don't know that person, but you're wired. Your RAS is wired. for your name, right? Because— and think about how it got there. It's probably one of the first words you learned how to be able to write and say, and how much praise, you know, how much love is associated to be able to— your identity around a name. But also, what also helps us to channel our RAS in terms of our focus are the questions we ask.
