How to Master New Skills & Achieve Success with Ron Friedman & Jim Kwik
In this two‑part Kwik Brain interview, Jim Kwik talks with social psychologist and author Ron Friedman about the core ideas of his new book Decoding Greatness. The conversation begins by challenging the traditional narratives of talent and 10,000‑hour practice, introducing a third, under‑appreciated path: reverse engineering. Friedman explains that greatness leaves clues and shows how professionals across photography, cooking, writing, and TED talks dissect extraordinary work to uncover hidden patterns. He details practical steps for building a personal collection of high‑quality examples, organizing them in simple tools like Google Docs, and using “spot‑the‑difference” analysis to create reusable templates without merely copying. The discussion then shifts to the book’s second half, the “scoreboard principle,” which asserts that anything you measure improves. Friedman gives concrete examples—from tracking water intake to business net‑promoter scores—and explains how metrics provide emotional feedback that fuels motivation. He expands on the broader concept of practice, distinguishing reflective practice (learning from past performance via a 5‑year journal), imagery (mental rehearsal of future actions), and cross‑training (using unrelated activities like ballet or improv to boost core skills). Finally, he offers a simple daily scorecard exercise: identify five key actions and five counter‑actions to track each day. Throughout, Friedman cites research (e.g., copying boosts originality, imagery reduces errors in surgery) and provides actionable resources: the book’s website, a free course, and his social media handles. The episode ends with calls to share, subscribe, and apply these strategies immediately.
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Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Your question for today, how do you decode greatness? How do you decode genius? And have this conversation, we're really excited to bring on award-winning social psychologist and author of the brand new book, Decoding Greatness, Ron Friedman. Welcome to the show, Ron.
Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to be here.
Hey, before we started to record, you know, you and I were kind of geeking out over the science of, uh, of learning faster, whether it's subject or skills. And in this conversation, I wanna talk about this game-changing approach to mastering new skills and really succeeding faster. You know, a lot of people, they, you know, you hear about talent, you hear about determination, you hear about the power of practice. You know, I enjoyed your book, because it was about systems. And I'm a kind of closet systems guy. Let's talk about talent in practice and how it relates in your research to this discovery of reverse engineering.
Yeah, so when I started doing the research for Decoding Greatness, what I discovered is that the stories we've been told about success are wrong. There are 2 main stories we've all heard throughout our lives. The first story is the story of talent. This is the idea that we all have certain inner strengths and that the key to finding your greatness is simply finding a field that allows those strengths to shine. The second story is the Malcolm Gladwell story, the story of 10,000 hours, practice, practice, practice. If you have the discipline and the right practice regimen, eventually you'll succeed. But in knowledge work, there's a third path. And that third path is one that has gone under the radar, yet it is the path that is stunningly common for inventors and entrepreneurs and artists. And that is reverse engineering. And reverse engineering simply means finding extraordinary examples, breaking them down, figuring out why they work, and then applying that insight to creating something completely new.
So you're going out of your way to find people. And so everyone who's listening to this, they can maybe think about something extraordinary, an extraordinary role model, if you will, or something that they want to learn. And you're saying that finding people who have done extraordinary things and then learning from them to fast-track your success.
Yeah, and it's not something that requires a conversation with this master, right? So it could be an example of a website. It could be a well-written email. It could be something more complex like a recipe. And what I talk about in Decoding Greatness is all of the ways in which reverse engineering is done. And it is remarkable how common this happens across industries. So just to give you a few examples, photographers, when they look at a photo, they don't look at an object, which is what I would do as a novice photographer. They look at the reflections in the person's eyes to identify where the light source was placed to create that photograph. They'll also look at the shadows, which provides additional clues. Chefs will often order dishes to go and then spread intricate sauces across a white plate to identify what the ingredients were.
Writers—
I don't know about you, Jim, but I do this— when I get a book, I'll go right to the endnotes section at the back of the book to figure out what were the sources that went into creating this and see if I can guess what the author is going to say in the book. And so there are all of these strategies What they, what they teach us is that by working backward and figuring out and looking for clues on how an object was created, we can elevate our skills to, to match the performance level of others by just understanding a little bit better about how they went about creating it.
Hmm. Yeah, we have this phrase that we use in the book and our show that genius leaves clues and greatness leaves clues. How would you define reverse engineering for people who are listening?
It's all about identifying winning products or winning executions and then working backwards to figure out how they were created and more importantly, how they can be recreated. So a fascinating example I give in the book is the story of Kurt Vonnegut. And Kurt Vonnegut, famous writer, everyone's heard of him. What they don't realize is that Kurt Vonnegut, part of what made him so successful is that he would reverse engineer popular stories. And here's how he did it. He would map out on a graph the protagonist's fortunes over time. And so when he did that, I'll give you an example of how he did it, is Cinderella. So at the beginning of Cinderella, things are going pretty badly for Cinderella, so she's like low on the, on the graph. But then as the story proceeds, right, she's being abused by her stepmother, then she goes to the ball, things are looking up, she leaves the ball, midnight strikes, back to square one, back down. And then meets Prince Charming, is rescued, happily ever after, and back up. So there's— you're able to see what's happening, what's the emotional trajectory of the story by looking at what's happening to the protagonist. Now, when you do the same thing for the story of Annie, what you find is it's the same story with different characters. The beginning of the story, Annie's an orphan, and she gets rescued by Daddy Warbucks. She gets kidnapped by people claiming to be her parents and once again goes back to Daddy Warbucks. lives happily ever after. And so Vonnegut did this to uncover what was happening in stories. And what he, what he identified was that there were basically 6 common stories that were being retold again and again and again. And when you do this exercise yourself, what you realize is when you read for a book like Harry Potter, right? So Harry Potter, what's happening there? So we can't help but be transfixed by this incredible character, the amazing settings, and all of these great storylines. But when you step back and you reverse engineer it, what you notice is, wait a second, this isn't the first time I've read a story about an orphan who lives with his aunt and uncle, who's rescued, who then discovers superpowers and then fights a villain. There's another story just like it, and it's called Star Wars. And you don't realize that until you reverse engineer these stories.
I love that. And so there are these hidden patterns, you know, as you mentioned, and you— whether it happens to be cuisine, whether it happens to be photography, whether it happens to be writing, Another example used in the book was a friend of ours, Sir Ken Robinson, who endorsed our work in Limitless. And so talk about— he has the world's most popular TED Talk.
What did you do over there? And that's the incredible power of reverse engineering. When you know how to do this correctly, you can uncover what makes something work, even if you've never given a TED Talk before. And so that's what I did in looking at Sir Ken Robinson's talk. And so I analyzed it. By looking at what he was doing in terms of quantifying some of the features. So what is unique about his TED Talk compared to the average TED Talk? And what you find is that over the course of 18 minutes, he gives you a grand total of one persuasive fact. Now, that's really interesting because if I were to sit down and write a TED Talk, I would imagine I need to load them up with persuasive arguments in order to convince you of my point. That's not what he does. What does he do is he does a ton of storytelling, and he does a lot of joking around. He actually is performing like a stand-up comic. If you analyze his work, it looks like he's delivering up to 40 jokes in an 18-minute talk. So that tells you a couple of things. One is it reveals the underlying pattern by what makes it successful that you wouldn't have necessarily picked up on had you listened. But it also allows you to create a template by looking at his work, comparing it to the average TED Talk, and then identifying the patterns that make it unique, you can templatize his work by looking at the emotional trajectory that tells you, okay, I need to tell a positive story at the beginning, a negative story later on, etc. Now, I'm not suggesting that copying his formula would necessarily work for you, because in his case, he happens to have the academic cachet where he can pull off 18 minutes without only delivering one persuasive talk. But what it does tell you is that reverse engineering the right example for you and then combining it perhaps with elements from other people's talks, now that gives you a roadmap for succeeding that is far faster than if you just faced a blank page.
And that's one of the things I wanted to address, because some people who are listening or watching this right now— and I encourage people if they're just listening to it to watch it on YouTube, you know, as well— is that Sometimes some people might think that this— if they're copying somebody, their work might be somehow perceived as unoriginal. Can you address that?
Absolutely. And, uh, this is so fascinating because one of the things I looked at in Decoding Greatness is what happens when people copy. And there's research out of the University of Tokyo that tells us that in fact copying will make you more original. Now, that's really counterintuitive.
More creative, actually. More creative.
Correct. And creative and original. So both of those things. So just to— that sounds really counterintuitive, right? So people are listening to this and like, wait a second, how to— isn't copying the opposite of being creative and original? Well, no, it's not. And here's why. So in this study, they invited amateur artists into the lab. They divided them into 2 groups. The first group was asked to create original art for 3 days in a row. The second group was asked to create original art. On the second day, they were asked to pause and then copy the work of an established artist. And then on day 3, they were asked to resume creating original art. Now, what was the dependent measure? They brought in actual artists, professional artists, and had them evaluate the work of the third day for both groups. And what they found was that the group that had paused to copy was actually more creative. And what's fascinating is they weren't just creative by mimicking the art that they had copied on day 2. They went off in completely new directions. Now, the big question here is why did copying make them more original? And it's because the practice of slowing down and then comparing your initial instincts against the decisions of a master opens your eyes to completely new opportunities that you hadn't been considering before in your own work. And so we're not suggesting, hey, let's go take Ken Robinson's talk and just recreate his talk for you. What we're saying is take a second, apply his work, See what happens and then go create your TED Talk. And what you'll find is you'll be way more creative and struggle a lot less than if you had just tried to do it yourself.
And you could take the best elements. You know, people often ask, you know, after— for me, for example, if they want a role model or reverse engineer our results, whether it's an area of reading, memory improvement, they'll ask. And on interviews, I'll say that part of it came from reading and research, you know, and others, it came through role modeling, reverse engineering, if you will. So what would you recommend? Let's say somebody's listening and they want to get started. They have some— they want to achieve a certain goal and they want to fast-track it. And maybe they could set aside this story about talent, about it just takes purely hard work. Because I always look at this as working, you know, certainly smarter. Where would they start? If they wanted to reverse engineer, let's say something I teach or something anybody—
Yeah, perfect example. So let's say you wanna reverse engineer Jim Kwik's podcast, right? So the first step to reverse engineering anything is to become a collector. Here's what I mean by that. When we think about collections, we think about physical objects, we think about stamps or wine or shoes, but that definition is far too narrow. When you talk to copywriters, they collect headlines. When you talk to designers, they collect logos. I'm a writer, I collect words. So words that move me on the page, I will circle them and they will go on a Google Doc. And I have— I'll collect openings that I think are really powerful, conclusions that really get you motivated, transitions between story and study, all those. I've got a collection of everything. I'm not ashamed of it. Every writer does this. Any good writer does this.
Do you have a—
before you go on, this is interesting to me, but how do you organize that for yourself? Do you have a system?
Yeah, so again, so I'm actually proudly anti-app on this stuff. Like, I feel like people way overcomplicate things. They waste so much time trying to find the right app, and then after a week of having learned it, they realize it's not for them. So I'm very happy with Google Docs, and I have got a spreadsheet that I hyperlink to other Google Docs. That's the key, is you want to have a central location that connects to other locations. And so for me, I will, uh, I will have one document where it's just unsorted, just a place for me to dump it and move on to the next thing. And then every once in a while, I will sort the information in the unsorted file in my document into openings, transitions, closings. In terms of how I organize words is I will do— I will create— I create a reverse dictionary. So if you think about like, or reverse the thesaurus rather. So a thesaurus is like one word finding another word. I will start off with the dumbest possible word because that's the word I'm thinking about using in my document, and then I'll find other words for this. So for example, the word very. Okay, Jim is very smart. In my reverse thesaurus, I can translate that into Jim is staggeringly smart.
Yeah.
You see how powerful that was? Staggeringly is way better than very, but I'm not gonna think of staggeringly. I'm gonna think of very. So you can do that for yourself with anything you're trying to create. So collecting is the first step. Having that collection that you can go to, that you can study by comparing what makes this extraordinary against the ordinary, right? So what's different here? And I talk in the book about using spot the difference. Remember spot the difference as kids? We look at 2 images, look at the disparity, What's different here? You want to do that with whatever it is you're trying to reverse engineer. You could do it with headlines, logos. You can do it with a presentation deck. If you work within an organization, you're probably creating memos, presentation decks all the time. Collect the ones that really stand out and then compare them to the ones that don't and say, what's different here? So now that helps. That's the second step, is differentiating between the ordinary and extraordinary. We could talk about templatizing. We could talk about evolving. Those are all the steps into coding greatness.
That's fantastic. I want to highly recommend, and we're going to put all this in the show notes at jimkwik.com/notes, um, you know, including links to your book, links to, uh, Dr. Ken Robinson's talk also on creativity. How do people, how do people get access to your book?
Best place to go is decodinggreatnessbook.com because if you order a book, you'll get a free course on how to start reverse engineering, which comes free with the book. And you can find me online at ronfriedmanphd.com.
Perfect. Um, what about social media? Are you active there as well?
Absolutely. So @RonFriedman on Twitter, and, uh, I think it's Ron Friedman Writer on Instagram.
Fantastic. I encourage everybody to go out there and get the book.
Um, support your local bookstores if you're able to also as well. Um, and take a screenshot of this and tag Ron, tag myself so we get to see it. And Ron, what do you want them to put while they, while they post this? Maybe they could, uh, maybe share something? I believe that when, when you teach something, you get, you get to learn it twice, you get to learn it better. Is there something you want people to share publicly as they, as they share this episode?
That's a great question. So I, you know, my hope for this book is that people stop thinking that greatness is for someone else because they weren't born with the talent, or that they don't have the time for 10,000 hours. So I would say stop relying on talent, and practice, start decoding greatness.
I love that. I love that so much. So I encourage everyone to go get the book, get your copy of Decoding Greatness, Decode Greatness. And also, here's the thing, um, I want everybody to, to, to share this, to be able to post about it. And Ron, I would love to have you back to actually talk about practice, and so we can go deeper in this subject, because there are a lot of myths around this, is the act of, of of going out there and doing something repetitively. And so we're going to have Ron back on the show. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, on Spotify, on our YouTube channel also as well. And Ron, thank you again for being on our show.
My pleasure, Jim. Thank you.
All right. Amazing.
Yeah, that was great. Do you want me to change my shirt?
No, no, no. I think we're good.
Okay, cool.
So tell me about what would you think would be a good— okay, so for people For our editing team, we're gonna do a second episode right now while we have Ron. I know we don't normally do this, but I'd love for everyone to edit this one also as well and get this second one out as soon as you can. This first one, let's go for the week of the 15th, June 15th. Okay, so when most people think of practice, they think of repeating a task over and over again. Now, the second half of your book, If the first question was how do you decode greatness or genius, what do you think the second question could be that would be interesting if people are going through YouTube or they were going through iTunes? What would a title be that's question-oriented that would say, oh, I need to know that?
Okay, so give me a second because I just wrote this out as a headline and I'm going to give you— I think this is going to be perfect. What's the scientific secret to improving at anything?
Okay.
Do you like that?
Yeah, the scientific, the scientific secret to improving anything would be great.
Improving at anything. Yep, do it.
Okay.
And I'm going to talk to you about, just so you know, I'm going to talk to you about the scoreboard principle.
The scoreboard principle. Okay, that's, that's amazing.
All right.
Now, how does practice relate to this?
So here's what I'm going to say. So the, the first, I'm going to talk about scoreboard principle. Scoreboard principle is simply Anything that you measure, you will improve on. So you want to create a scoreboard for yourself. So then you're going to say, but what about practice? And then I'll go into that.
And you want this to be like, so the intro would be the scientific way of improving anything.
What's the, what's the scientific secret to improving at anything?
Okay, perfect. All right, let's do it. Let me just set this up. We're still recording. All right, ready? All right, all right, here we go.
Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Your question for today: what is the scientific secret to improving anything? If you've been a lifelong learner, if you've been listening to our show or watching our YouTube, it's all about becoming better, right? About advancing and progressing beyond what you currently believe is possible. And to talk about this subject, We have back on the show award-winning social psychologist, author of Decoding Greatness, Ron Friedman. Thanks for being on our show again.
Yeah, thank you, Jim.
So in our first episode, and I encourage everyone to listen to that first, it was all about decoding greatness and genius. The link will be in our notes. You know, we talked about a game-changing approach to mastering new skills, and we talked about reverse engineering. And now here I want to talk about what is your secret? You know, the second half of the book really talked about this idea of a scoreboard.
Yeah.
So, okay.
So the first half of the book is all about how do we find hidden patterns inside the work of people we admire so that we can learn from them and understand why they work and evolve their formulas to make it our own. The second half of the book is about something I call the vision ability gap. This is actually Ira Glass's term, the famous NPR host. And what he talked about was that when you identify what your vision is, you're not going to necessarily be able to execute that vision right out of the gate. You're going to require a long period of time where you improve your skills. So the question is, how do you shrink that gap between your vision and your current ability? And the first step to improving at anything is to craft a scoreboard. Now, I call this in the book the scoreboard principle, and the scoreboard principle simply means that anything you measure, you will improve on. So measurement begets improvement. So measurement is the first step. So the key is to figure out what are the steps that you need to take in order to be successful, and then start measuring them, start tracking them. So just to make this concrete, you want to increase your water consumption. The first thing you need to do is track how much, how many ounces of water you're drinking every day. You want to lose weight? Keep a food diary. You want to increase your focus? Keep track of how many interrupted minutes you have over the course of the workday. We have a lot of data showing that we are instinctively attracted to numbers, and there are evolutionary reasons for this. If you did not pay attention to numbers back in the savanna, chances are you were not here. It's because It told you what was a bigger source of food than a smaller size source, right? So that you devoted resources to chasing down the right food source. It also alerted you to when you were in danger. If you were surrounded by a lot of folks you didn't know, that raised your anxiety level. But if you weren't able to detect small sizes from large sizes, you didn't care. So there's a real opportunity here to improving at anything and You know, the business world knows this. They track metrics all the time. Great example of this is the Ritz-Carlton. I talk in the book about how the Ritz-Carlton became so good at customer service is because they realized that if they wanted to drive their business to be successful, they needed to keep track of net promoter scores, which is the number of people who are endorsing their hotel after they leave. And that insight completely transformed the hotel. It could do the same thing for you. The key is to take a moment, figure out what are the attributes that I need to hit on every day in order to be successful in my life. And most of us don't do that. We shift from objective to objective. And I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about how this applies to making money. So many of us go from one objective to another. One day, we're optimizing for long-term wealth. Then we go on Instagram, we see a friend bought a car, and now we're optimizing for status. Then a friend invites us to go to a fancy restaurant and now we're optimizing for fun in that moment. And it's because of that aspirational whiplash where we don't know what we're optimizing for, that's where misery comes from because you don't know what you're optimizing for. So take a moment, figure out what am I optimizing for, and then start tracking those metrics.
You know, a lot of our listeners are graduates of our flagship programs.
We have a speed reading program and a memory enhancement program. you know, 21, 30-day program. On day 1 of both of those programs, we do measurements. In the reading program, the first day we measure their current base rate in terms of their current reading speed and comprehension.
And because how are you going to know if you're making progress, right?
If you keep— how are you going to be able to manage it if you're not measuring it?
Yeah.
In our memory program, we give people lists of words and random names and faces, and we create a baseline in terms of how well people are able to retain numbers. Right in the first couple of days. So then when we teach the actual methodology and the techniques and systems, they can see that and be able to appreciate the growth. So, so the scoreboard principle, how does that relate to things like we talked about in the previous episode, the myth around practice?
Yeah, yeah, exactly right. So the first step to improving anything is to measure it. And just to flesh this out. The reason that this is so powerful is because you get an emotional jolt when you see your scores rise. And that emotional jolt translates into motivation. If you don't have motivation, you're not going to do the work, but you give yourself that emotional jolt or the shame of not seeing your score go up. And that is also motivating. So you want to harness that. It also illuminates anything that doesn't contribute to your score. When anything that you— so an example of this was with entrepreneurs is when they leave the business world, they become entrepreneurs. Now they can't stand going to meetings.
Why?
Because they're keenly aware of how meetings do not contribute to their bottom line. But most employees don't have metrics that measure their performance. And just imagine if people had metrics that showed them, okay, this is what you need to do in order to be successful at attaining your next promotion. Then it would be very clear that meetings are not serving that goal. So metrics are key. Now you asked about practice and how do we shrink the gap between our vision and ability. And most people's definition of practice, I talk about this in Decoding Greatness, most people's definition of practice is surprisingly narrow. So when we think about practice, we think about practicing in the present, but you know how athletes improve? They don't just practice in the present. They practice in the past and they practice in the future. And here's what I mean by that. Practicing in the past, in the research, is identified as reflective practice. Now we've all heard of deliberate practice. That's the idea of doing something that's just slightly outside your ability and then utilizing the feedback to improve in the future. Reflective practice is taking a moment to think back on your past performance and identify gaps between your expectations and experience. That's how wisdom happens, is when you think about what did I expect and what actually happened. And I talk in the book about ways we can automate reflective practice into our day. And one of the best tips I can offer you is to go buy yourself a 5-year journal. You can get these on Amazon or anywhere. Basically, the way it works is that there are 365 pages, one for each day of the year, within these journals, and each day is divided up into 5 slots. And the reason there are 5 slots is because you're going to put down what you did today, and you're going to do this every day for a year. It's only 3 lines, so it's not intimidating. And then a year from now, you get to write down what you did today, but you also get to see what did you do on this day last year. And that process of continuously comparing what you did last year versus today, by the end of the book, you got 5 years' worth of data. That leads you to— obviously, it strengthens your memory clearly because now you're reminded of all these past events. But also, that comparison of my expectations and my experience leads you to get wiser and smarter. You learn things about yourself. I can tell you, in my experience of using a 5-year journal, what I've discovered is I don't like social events, but when I go to social events, I have a really good time. And that has led me to make better decisions about my time commitment in the future, because I've learned that through my, through my experience of journaling. Now, practicing the future, that's imagery. It is the process of closing your eyes and thinking about what is going to happen. For example, if I deliver a speech, when I head up on stage, feeling the clicker in my hand, feeling the lights beam down on me, and all of that, using your senses to essentially Imagine that you're there. And it, you know, it's not through like visualizing success. There's research in the book showing that that actually does not work. A lot of people don't like to hear that, but there's no evidence suggesting that visualizing success works. But what does work is imagery. And the reason that imagery works is because you are front-loading decisions before you take action. So now when I go up on stage, I don't have to react to getting the clicker or like, wow, those hot lights are hot. I've anticipated that. I've front-loaded that experience. So now I can be more present and actually execute more effectively. And there's research showing that physicians make fewer mistakes during surgery when they use imagery. Public speakers are more persuasive when they use imagery. You can actually learn how to play a song on the piano more quickly if you use imagery in advance of starting. So it's an incredibly powerful tool. It's one that is criminally underutilized outside of sports.
And this is something where you're not actually doing the actual physical rehearsal. You're not actually speaking, you're doing it just inside, inside your mind.
Yeah, exactly. And there's research looking at athletes, people who use imagery versus those who don't. And what they found is that the ones who do use imagery, they're actually able to cut down on their physical practice because the imagery is so powerful. They're caught up to their, to their competitors without having to do the work. So that allows them to avoid burnout. And allows them to accelerate success. Because if you're doing both things at once, that's really powerful.
And I think this is not— and this is great that you're broadening, you know, the definition of practice, because when most people think of practice, they're thinking of just repeating a task over and over and over again until you get a desired result.
Yeah. And that, that also is problematic. And the reason for that is because your brain tunes out the more practice you do. So this— our brain is working against us when it comes to getting better. And it's because we automate behaviors that we do repetitively. So if you think about yourself driving and how much attention you pay to the road versus how much attention you paid when you first started driving, it's a massive difference. And the same is true if you're practicing your basketball shot or whatever the case may be, whatever it is you're practicing, you're likely not paying as close attention as you did when you first started, which is why if you really want to get better through practice, you need to level up the degree of difficulty consistently.
Yeah.
And you can do that through novelty. You can do that by interweaving different, different tasks within the practice. And you can also do it by doing some cross-training. So I talk about this in the book. Cross-training is something athletes do. So I have stories of NFL players who actually play— who practice ballet in the offseason because of a lot of overlapping skills that don't require the same muscle groups and allow them to get better without burning out. The same is true for all of us at work. So you just, it's all a matter of figuring out what hobbies that are fun would make me better at my job. And a great example of this is improv comedy. You see leaders now in organizations signing up for improv comedy by, in droves. And it's not because they suddenly want to be funny. It's because they realize that if I'm an executive, I got to be really good at mindful presence and deep listening. And those are skills I learned while Yeah, it's wonderful.
This is a way of stacking those skills. In our reading program, it's not only do we encourage everyone to have a variety of reading, whether reading magazines or books or online emails and so on, but we'll do other skills like juggling that we've found that over the years has been very supportive of this actual practice. This is fascinating, Ron. Um, where can— and I, again, I encourage everyone who haven't already to listen to our first episode with Ron, uh, where he went through really decoding a genius, and you'll get a lot of these reference points. This is fascinating. So what would you recommend people do right now in terms of a scoreboard, in terms of, of their practice?
Find 5, uh, specific things that you need to execute to have a successful day. Just sit down, think about if tomorrow was successful, what 5 things would I have done well? And you can interweave some of those items with things you want to avoid doing. So what would I have not done well? And give yourself a place to score that as well. And so in this, in the book, in Decoding Greatness, I talk about all of the different ways in which we can leverage a scoreboard effectively. And one of the, one of the key factors is both things you want to achieve and things you don't want to achieve and keeping track of those 2 scores will invariably help you succeed at what you're trying to, to be successful at. So for, in my case, for example, if I'm a writer, one thing I don't wanna do is spend a lot of time on email, right?
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, how many minutes did you spend on email? And, and it's almost like an inverse of what you're trying to achieve, but have monitoring that score is going to help you achieve that outcome that you're looking for. And it's such a simple exercise. And yet how many people do it? Almost no one. And I'm telling you, if you start doing this today, you're going to have a far more successful day than you would have.
Yeah. And this is really what Kwik Brain is all about. You know, these bite-sized, these brain, these bite-sized ideas and insights that you can use immediately. Everyone could take something and begin to measure it and look at success and then come back and reverse engineer it and discover like, what, how, when are you going to celebrate these moments? And then also gives you an incredible amount of feedback. Everybody here could start doing some reflective looking back, you know, and doing some practice and evaluating how well behind the expectations the actual experience— everyone could forward go and rehearse and use imagery to be able to get a desired result in less time. I recommend everybody here who's listening, who's interested in the subject, to get Ron's book Decoding Greatness. Where, where do they go to get that, Ron?
You can get it at all bookstores, and the best place to get it is decodinggreatnessbook.com, where you can get a free course on a lot of these principles and how you can start applying them. It's completely free once you get the book, and you can find me online at ronfriedmanphd.com.
Fantastic. And also on, on socials, um, I recommend everybody, as you— if you enjoyed this episode and you want to be able to share it with somebody, take a screenshot of this Tag Ron, tag myself so we get to see it. I'll repost some of them also as well. And if you can link to our YouTube, and if you, if you aren't subscribed to our YouTube, please do that because that's where we put the unedited longer version also as well. If you're listening to this on iTunes or Spotify or somewhere else, Ron, congratulations on the brand new book and all the, on all the great success. Thank you.
Thanks so much, Jim. I appreciate it.
Hi, Kwik Brain. It's your brain coach. I want to thank you so much for watching this video. 3 things to do. Number 1, make sure you share this, because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well. Number 2, make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a thing, because if you miss a video, you miss a lot. And finally, make sure you hit that bell so you're notified And you find out when we put out the latest and the greatest. One extra thing, if you want really close attention, then text me. Here is my phone number: 310-299-9362. Did you remember that number? 310-299-9362.
Shoot me a text.
And we'll stay in touch. Ask me your burning question. And I wish your days be full of lots of life, lots of love, lots of laughter, and always lots of learning. I'll see you in our next video.
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