Boost Your Brain Power and Learning Featuring Jim Kwik - I Love Marketing #407

When you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. And the reason why you want to monitor your self talk and stand guard to that, to your, the thoughts in your mind, you know, just like you would external things, is your mind is always eavesdropping on your self talk. So you want to keep it positive. Or add three simple, you know, three simple letters at the end of something that's negative. You know, the word yet has been proven to show like, oh, I'm not good. I don't have a good memory yet. You know, I'm not good at marketing yet. I'm not out of the body yet. Right, so you add yet. So I would say forget about your current limitations because you don't know what you don't know. Neurojetic neuroplasticity. That your brain can grow older, but you could actually grow better too.

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I get to do my mission, my life's work, which is teaching people how to learn faster, read faster, remember faster. I think our biggest, you know, the most powerful resource we have is between our ears, our brain. But the other one is like our time, right? And you can always make more money, but you can't get more time back. And I feel like a lot of people waste a lot of time, especially entrepreneurs, doing things like processing information. We've discovered more about the human brain in the past 20 years than the previous 2,000 years. And what we found out is what we know is that we grossly underestimate its capabilities. And the problem is school taught us what to learn. Math, history, science, Spanish. But you know, important subjects. But there were no classes on how to learn how to think, how to solve problems, how to make good decisions, how to focus, concentrate, how to read faster. Socrates says learning is remembering, that there is no learning without remembering, you know, and I just think memory can really make money for entrepreneurs, that the faster you can learn, the faster you could earn. Because nowadays we don't live in a world of, you know, brute strength. It's brain strength, right? You're not paid for your muscle power, you're paid for your mind power. I thought school would be like college would be fresh start. And I actually did worse. And I was ready to quit, but a friend of mine said, hey, why don't you come home with me this weekend, visit my Family get some perspective before, because I didn't know how to tell my parents I was gonna quit school. Cause I was the oldest, right? The family was very, very well off, beautiful home. And the father is taking me around his property. And he asked me a very simple question before dinner. He said, jim, how's school? And I was like, that's the wrong question to ask me. I just start breaking down. I start crying. I'm like, I don't know. I tell him the whole story about learning, challenges and ready to quit school. And he asked me a very interesting question. So a question no one's ever asked me before. He said, jim, why are you in school? What do you want to be? Do, have, share? And I honestly, Joe didn't have an answer. And he made me write down, like, this bucket list. I didn't know it was a bucket list at the time. And when I was done, I thought I was done. I started folding it up to put in my pocket. And he grabs it out of my hand, and he starts looking at my dreams. And it messed with me something fierce to see another man, like, looking at my intimate fantasies and things I wanted to achieve. And when he was done, he goes like this. He's like, I have no idea what he's gonna say. He says, jim, you are this close to everything on that list. He starts going shelf by shelf and starts handing me books. And he says, jim, I want you to read one of these books a week. And I'm like, are you crazy? Have you not been hearing this? I have learning challenges. I have all this schoolwork midterms. And when I say schoolwork, he looked me right in the eyes, said, jim, don't let school get in the way of your education. And this was 25 years ago, right? And I was like, I know that was a Mark Twain quote. I was like, that makes sense. But still, I can't promise to read a book a week because I have too much work to do. And very smart man, he reaches into his back pocket and he takes out my bucket list, which he still has. And he starts reading it line for line out loud. And something about having, you know, meeting this complete stranger is obviously very happy and successful and can say out loud, like, your dreams into the world, the same level of thinking that's created your problem won't solve your problem. And a new question, right? So questions are the answer. I thought, what's my problem? I'm like, I'm a really slow learner. I have a very slow brain. I was like, how do I think differently about it. Maybe I could learn how to learn. And I started studying neuros, like brain science. I wanted to solve this mystery of how my brain works so I could work my brain. And I started to study speed, reading, memory, focus. 60 days into it, light switch went on and I started just to understand things and get better grades. And I've been, I've been fanatical, just wanting. After having that revelation, I was like, why isn't this taught back in school? If you know this is like the information age, there are four keys to learn any subject or skill faster. So if you're listening to this as you're listening to it, think about a subject or a skill that you'd like to really get into. Like whether it's Mandarin or martial arts, music, whatever it happens to be four elements to learn it faster. I think Honestly, if there's one skill to master in the 21st century besides marketing, which is your superpower, many superpowers, it's the ability to learn faster. Because as we talked about, the world is evolving and is changing so fast and that's our competitive advantage. How do you out learn and how do you out think everybody else? Because today knowledge is not only power, it's profit. And I don't mean just financial profit, that's obvious. But I mean all the treasures of our life, right? And so, so here's, here's, here's four things to learn faster. Just remember fast. F A S T. F A S T and, and so the F in fast to learn any subject faster is the first. The F stands for forget and it sounds counterintuitive, like Jim, you know, you're a memory expert, why start with forgetting? And I'll say it like this, I'll say that a lot of people don't learn things faster because they feel like they already know the subject. And you must see this all the time with marketing. Like you're on stage or you know, you're 25, 25K group and such. And people could be sitting there thinking, I've been in marketing for 40 years, what's this guy going to teach me? And when people feel like they know everything, they don't learn anything new. So what I would suggest to learn something faster. The F stands for forget. Forget what you already know. Temporarily forget what you already know. Set aside what you already know about a subject because it's cliche. But just like all cliches, there's a truth to it. That your mind, it's like a parachute, right? It only works when it's opened. And a lot of people don't learn faster because they feel like they know sales, they know marketing, they know health. What are you going to teach me? And so it's just like the old adage with the wise man and the apprentice pouring. The master is pouring the tea into the cup, and it starts to overflow and overflow. And eventually the apprentice says, master, master, master, you got to stop because it's overflowing. And he's like, oh, apprentice, I'm glad you see that you have to pour some out or be able to put some more in and so empty your cup. The second thing I would say to forget that's very important, that I think limits our ability to learn faster is situational things. So what will happen is some people will not learn faster because they're not present. Meaning that we, you know, multitasking has been debunked. All the research is saying you cannot do two or more cognitive, you know, intensive skills or activities at once. Right. Because they're switching costs. Whenever you switch over 5, 20 minutes, get back into flow and in that zone.

Any of you found that to be true?

And you're my experience. Yeah. Even. Even with my level of training, I can't be doing. I mean, you could do two, you know, one thoughtless thing or three thoughtless things and something that's, like, solved through math questions, stuff like that. But not because every time you switch, you lose. You lose your. Your momentum, and to regain your focus could be 20 minutes. So those people are multitasking, are actually losing ground. But my thing is, like, you can only pay attention to so many things, and a lot of people don't learn faster because they're paying attention to other things that don't matter in the present. So, for example, if you use the metaphor, you know, George Miller from Princeton, Harvard, said seven plus or minus two bits of information that if you, for example, met 20 people at a networking event and left, you probably remember seven plus or minus two. Seven minus two is five, seven plus two is nine. You probably remember five to nine of them. Or if I give you a list of 30 things you probably tested, you probably remember five to nine of those list things on a list. And so what you can be aware of now, the recent research is saying maybe four things at tops. But so if you're here trying to listen to this podcast, for example, or you're at Genius Network, if you're thinking, part of your attention is thinking about the kids, and part of your attention is thinking about your clients. And part of it is thinking about some kind of marketing issue that only leaves you, let's say 25% to be fully present. And so you're not going to learn faster because you're only using 25% of your resources. And so I would say forget about situational things that are not urgent and important. The third thing I would say to forget about, and I'm not going to go deep in this, but is forget about your limitations. And what I mean by that is a lot of people don't learn something faster because they have a belief system or identity that says they can't. And I'm not saying it's easy to change beliefs and there's plenty of tools, self hypnosis and NLP and you know, tapping and all these things. But I'm saying that people come to me all the time and say, oh, I have a horrible memory, I'm just too old, or I don't have the education that. The thing with beliefs is all behavior is belief driven. All behaviors believe your that if you want to create a, you know, a result in marketing or business or in your body, right, you have to do a behavior. But in order to do that behavior, you need a belief that enables that behavior. I remember that years ago I was preparing to run a marathon and I read one chapter of a book and it was the psychology. And that's what I was really interested because I was kind of a trained runner. But this, this was on the psychology of running it. And it said this verbatim because I'm a, you know, the memory expert. It said 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. And a lot of people do that like they fight for their limitations. I'm too old. I'm da da. Alzheimer's runs in my family, whatever it is. But here's the thing. When you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. When you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. And the reason why you want to monitor your self talk and stand guard to the thoughts in your mind, you know, just like you would external things, is your mind is always eavesdropping on your self talk. Your mind is always eavesdropping on your self talk. So you want to keep it positive or add three simple, you know, three simple letters at the end of something that's negative. You know, the word yet has been proven to show, like, oh, I'm not. I don't have a good memory yet. You know, I'm not good at marketing yet. I'm not the body yet. Right, so you add yet. So I would say forget about your current limitations because you don't know what you don't know. Because the recent science, I mean, science is telling us, like, you know, you know, this is the research, neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, that your brain can grow older, but you could actually grow better too. You know, neurogenesis is saying genesis is like birth, neuro like brain. You could create new brain cells the day you die. If you do things correctly. You could actually. Neuroplasticity is saying your brain is like plastic and it's malleable in a very good way. That Einstein's brain wasn't necessarily bigger than everybody else's. In fact, it was smaller. It weighed actually less. But he had more connections in certain areas of his brain because he would do these thought experiments all the time. He's the one that said imagination is more powerful than knowledge. And he was a consummate entrepreneur in that he could take the invisible and make it visible. He would imagine himself sitting in a chair and looking at a clock and riding a beam of light. And what would that look like from that point of view? And luckily, he had a left brain science and equations that he could put that to. But these thought experiments actually, every time you. In order to create neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, you need two things to grow a better brain even as you grow older. You need novelty and you need nutrition. You need novelty just like your body, right? You need novelty, you need stimulus. But then you got to feed those muscles with nutrition also as well. And so those are really important. So my point of bringing this up is a lot of your brain is like. It's like a muscle. It grows stronger with use, but it's use it or lose it. The two biggest dips people have in cognitive performance and is upon graduation of school. Because some people associate learning just to their education. And then they just, oh, I'm done learning. You know, I got it all. I got a degree or whatever. And the other big cognitive decline is when people retire. Because when people retire, often they retire. Their minds and their bodies aren't far, you know, far off from that. So that was the f. Forget. Forget what you know about the subject temporarily forget about anything that's urgent, important in your situational awareness, and then forget about Temporarily your limitations. Because the truth is you don't know what you're capable of. Most people are, are fighting with limitations that they adopted when they're 5 years old from learned helplessness. Like we all know the story about the elephant, like in the, in the circus, you're like, why doesn't it just escape? It's only tied down by that small rope and with a stake in the ground. And the reason why is because it's been stuck with that rope in that stake since it was born. And in the first couple of days, in the first week, it would try to get sovereignty. It's like an entrepreneur what's its freedom? Right, right. But after a few days it learned that it's helpless. Then even months later, when it's big and strong, you can pull down the whole circus tent. It doesn't, because in its mind it's still imprisoned. And that's a learned helplessness. People say, what's that have to do with speed reading or memory? Because I'm not an elephant. Well, you know, like what did we learn as a kid when we couldn't read, when we could not when we were told we weren't good enough, or whatever we picked up from our parents or such like that. So that's, that's the F and forget. So the A in fast actually stands for active. And what I mean by that is if you're listening to this and you feel overloaded, overwhelmed, too much to learn, too little time, all of that, it's not your fault. Because you were trained since you've been a child to be passive, passive learners. Because 20th century education prepared us just to follow orders, which is the opposite of what entrepreneur is. Right. And so that's why I love talking to entrepreneurs because they take responsibility. They realize that for their business to grow, that they need to grow and they invest in it also, you know, through your programs and such. So I would say is the A is you have to be opposite of passive. You have to be active. And that's not what's trained in traditional school systems. And what I mean by that is this. We don't learn by being lectured to, we just don't. We don't learn by consuming information. The brain learns best through creation, not consumption. The brain learns best not by consuming and pushing information. In being lectured to, the brain learns best by co creation with other, especially socially, you know, that we're learning. Doesn't have to be so solo. It could be social. I was talking to a friend of our mutual friend of ours, Dr. Mark Hyman, right? And you know, he's written 10 New York Times best selling books. And he was saying that, Jim, part of people's habits, it has not. It's not their biological networks or even their neurological networks, it's their social networks. Like whether or not somebody smokes has nothing, has little to do with their biological networks or neurological networks. But everything has to do with whether their friends. Friends smoke is going to have a greater impact on them. So I would say that to be able to learn faster, you need to be active. And so how can you be more active in learning something as opposed to just hope, sitting there and hoping something like registers. I mean, you could, for example, you could ask questions, right? You could post questions, you could post on social media stuff, you could take notes, right? You could think about asking questions like, how am I going to use and apply this? There's all kinds of ways to be more active in your learning. Because here's the thing you have to be responsible for. One of the reasons why people are such slow learners is because they never take responsibility just like much for their finances or their business, because they're at the effect. And again, one of the reasons why I love your community is because entrepreneurs, first and foremost, because they value their freedom, take responsibility for where they are. There's the difference between. The fundamental difference in my mind is this. I use the framework of like the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. A thermometer, if you look at the wall, a thermometer, what does it do? Its functionality is, it reflects what the environment is giving it. It literally mirrors what the environment is giving it for a hot or cold, right? But the functionality of a thermostat is totally different. A thermostat sets a standard, it sets a goal, it sets a vision, right? And what happens to the environment, the environment raises to meet that standard. And that's what I find entrepreneurs are. And that same kind of trait is I find it's also genius learners, right? Genius learners or these fast learners, independent of what vertical that they're in, they take responsibility for how they feel. They take responsibility for learning. It's their responsibility. Not some lecturer or somebody on a podcast or someone on a stage that they know they have to do their part. Because here's the thing with active, what I tell people is this. Learning is not a spectator sport. Learning is not a spectator sport. And so you need to be able to be active, roll up your sleeves and actually do it. And finally, the S and the T in fast, the S in FAST stands for state. State. And what I mean by that, and you know, with your friends with Tony Robbins and all these amazing personal development trainers is that all learning is state dependent. If you want to know what the key to memory is this the key to long term memory for those of people who are listening, want to remember names and remember speech without notes, remember whatever they need to remember, pin numbers, passcodes, you name it, languages, is that information combined with emotion becomes a long term memory. Information combined with emotion becomes a long term memory. And you know this because if you're listening to this, you know that there's a food or a song or a fragrance that brings you back decades, right? As if you just experienced it. That's the emotion tied to the information that made it a long term memory. That part of your middle brain, actually the hippocampus, we're talking about processing emotions and long term memories. So if that's the case, what's the emotion? Here's what blows my mind. What's the emotion? If information combined with emotion becomes a long term memory, what's the emotion level that most people feel in school on a scale of 0 to 10? Like boredom. Boredom? Yeah, dull bored. And so 0, right?

So I was like trying to think, do they hate it or is it just boredom?

Exactly. So there's totally checked out, right? And there's apathy and there's indifference. But information combined with zero boredom equals anytime. Zero is what? Zero. So you wonder why we don't remember anything from school. If I were to quiz about, you know, these presidents or capitals of states or periodic table, whatever it happens to be, no one's going to do well on that test because the emotional state the S in fast was zero. So zero times anything is zero. And that's the big challenge. Now here's the magic question for everyone listening is who's in control of your state? Right? Who controls our state on a day to day basis? And I would say that it's us, right, it's us. We determine what it is that even if we feel like on a scale of 0 to 10, it's a 4, we have control, autonomy over our feelings. And we can say, well if we wanted to be a five or six or seven, what would I need to do? Right? And so you could externally incentivize yourself, you know, or you can change your perception too to give yourself meaning and reasons. And you know, because I always think that that's important also as well is having motivation. Because here's the reason why I always ask Myself Why? Remember like this, this, this young lady read 30 books in 30 days and I wanted to find out her why it was like motivation. Because motivation is, is important. It just is. Because that's the. I, I think there's a success formula, I call it H cubed H3AHS that goes from your head to your heart to your hands, meaning that you could visualize things in your head, affirm things that goals in your head, right? Visual LDL stuff. But if you're not acting with your hands, right, you're procrastinating or whatever and you have approach avoidance, self sa sabotage. Usually what's missing is the second age, which is the heart. The heart, metaphorically, it's the emotion, the energy of motions, the fuel for the car that's going to get you to do what you need to do. But so many people are detached from this, right? We're doing smart goals, right, that are specific and measurable, you know, attainable and realistic and time bound. But what about the heart goals? Like I'll do the whole process but like how do you make them like healthy and enduring and alluring, right? And relevant. Like a lot of stuff we didn't learn in school, we didn't, we didn't learn because it was really well or retained because there was no application. Like, why are we learning? Sine cosine tangent of like, where was that relevant in our life, right? And then finally the T and hard is truth. I went through it really fast, but it's just like it's the difference between goal setting and goal getting right? And so going back to this state, you are in control of your state because you're a thermostat, not a thermometer. And what I say when I'm talking about responsibility, this is the thing that I struggled with growing up being an entrepreneur is that I always thought growing up that, oh, I don't want to do this because I value my freedom and discipline. It was like a thing like I don't want to be disciplined. But I realized that actually discipline gives me freedom. Because if you can't get yourself to do the things you need to do on a regular basis, then that, then you don't have freedom, right? Then you're in prison all the time. So I think discipline is very important. But responsibility, when we're coming back to it, I got to introduce two of my super. I always talk about superheroes and the reason why I talk about superheroes, they're so meaningful to me is I mentioned that I couldn't read growing up as a kid, it took me three, four years. I taught myself to read by reading comic books late at night when my parents thought I was sleeping. And something about seeing the images of good versus evil and hope and one person can make a difference. It brought the words to life. And I learned how to read. So I love superheroes, right? I got to introduce two superheroes together, you know, both Richard Branson and Stan Lee, right? Stan Lee, the creator. Co creator of Fantastic Four and X Men Avengers. And I pick up Stan and I ask him like, oh, you know, like I was like, you created all these superheroes? Amazing. Who's your favorite? And he says, iron Man. I'm like, that's cool. He's like, who's your favorite gem? I said, spider Man. And without a pause he goes, with great power comes great responsibility, right? And everybody knows it. Everyone listening to this knows it. But you don't even remember where you heard it, but it's in our DNA. And I was like, stan, that's true. With great power comes great. When you have great power, you have great responsibility. And the opposite is also true. With great responsibility comes great power. That when we take responsibility, we have great power to make things better. And I think the most important thing to take responsibility for, besides our focus and our vision, is how we feel on a day to day basis. That we don't just wake up up expecting to feel great or seeing what happens, that we set the thermostat up and that's what it is. So my point in bringing up state is a lot of people are slow learners when we're talking about learning faster. A lot of people are slow learners for subject or skill because they're not putting themselves in the right state. A lot of people also feel like they're in a state of boredom or they're in a state of whatever it is. Easy ways to change your state, your physiology, your breathing, what you're saying to yourself, all could put you in a better state. Finally, The T&FAST stands for teach, teach. So if you want to learn any subject or skill faster, learn with the intention to teach somebody else. And what I would say to that is this is like if you had to, like we could go through the ten keys. And I like to teach people how to memorize those 10 keys forwards and back to unlock your quick brain. But let's say you had to teach it Monday morning to a group of people. Teach it. Would you pay attention differently? Would you focus differently? Would you ask different questions? Would you take notes differently? Each of course, because one of the best ways to learn something is by teaching it to somebody else, right? Because it gives you an intention point and you have to really make that information your own. Even when you teach it, you're not necessarily using the same words, you're using your own words because you own it. And I always tell people that when you teach something, you get to learn it twice.

There's a lot to be said about the Most people have heard it. If you want to be a world class expert in anything, study an hour a day for a year. To be an expert for three years, you'll be one of the top in the world, if not the top in the world. If you were to spend an hour a day on a particular subject or category.

And don't you find that's a common trade with all your genius like your your everyone in your group like that? They subscribe to lifelong learning. They're always they invest in themselves. They pay so they can pay attention. They're always dedicating to learn because they they know that's the difference that's going to make the difference.

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