Top 5 Jim Kwik's Healthy Habits For Your Brain

When's the last time you're in that state? We're talking about genius states and superhero states. When's the last time you're in that state of bewilderment? I mean, so who's in control of your state, by the way? Who's in control of how you feel? When we're defining a state? How would you define a state? What does it mean? It's like your mood. What else? This is where the active part comes in. Here it's your emotions. Like a snapshot of your mind and your body, how you feel. Here's the key. Do this. Information. Do this. Put your hands out. Information combined with emotion becomes a long term memory. Long term memory. How many people know this? How many people? You hear a song and it'll take you back to when you're a child. Raise your hand, how many people? It's not a song, but maybe it's a fragrance or a food that will take you back decades. Because information combined with emotion became a long term memory. Right, because we're not logical. We're what? We don't do things logically all the time. We do things what, emotionally? Right, because we're not logical, we're biological.

Biggest myth and lie about speed reading, and I think it's spread around by slow readers, is that if you read faster, your comprehension would what you feel like it would go down. But it's not true. The truth is the faster readers tend to have better comprehension because they have better read focus. Reading slow is kind of like riding a bicycle. Slow. You wobble and then you fall.

But here's the secret.

If you want better comprehension while you read, read faster. Because it's like driving a car. If you're driving a car going slow through traffic, you're not really focused on driving. You're doing five different things. You're drinking your coffee. You're texting, even though you know you shouldn't. You're putting on makeup. I saw someone the other day shaving. You're doing five different things. But if you're racing cars and you're taking hairpin turns as f as you go, do you have more or less focus? The answer is obvious. You're focused on what? On the act of driving and on what's in front of you. That's exactly what it's like for reading. When you're reading faster, you focus on the act of reading and what's in front of you.

Leaders are readers. The challenge is the average person reads about two books a year, but the average CEO reads About four to six books a month. So how do you get to this point where you're getting to one book a week? One of the reasons why I'm so excited about reading is because if somebody has decades of experience and they put it into a book and you can sit down in a day or two and read that book, you could download decades of knowledge in days. So you have such a huge advantage. So how do you read one book a week without speed reading? Well, here's the secret. Look at the numbers. Right? When I went onto Amazon, I found out that the medium number of words per book is about 64,000 words. And the average person, like we teach speed reading all around the world, in 150 different countries online, the average person reads about 200 words per minute. So now when you divide 64,000 words per book by 200 words a minute comes out to be about 320 minutes. Three hundred and twenty minutes to get through a book of 64,000 words. But how many words is that a day? Divide by seven. You get about 45 minutes a day. 45 minutes of reading a day and you get through one book a week. Now that's much more manageable. But here's the secret is you have to schedule it. You must schedule this time because if you say, oh, I'm going to read here or there, it never really happens because it's more of a dream or it's an interest. But when you schedule it, it's in your appointment book, it's in your calendar. This is time for you. It's like time you would have with your boss or an investor or somebody, a family member, something that's so important that you would never cancel on that because you reading is a form of self care. And I believe that self love and self care is not self selfish. So you want to be a lifelong learner, schedule 45 minutes a day. Now, if you happen to be a faster reader, you could do it in maybe 30 minutes or maybe 15 minutes. It doesn't take as much as you think.

Some of the big misconceptions that I hear about when it comes to what I do with the brain and memory is people think that it's preset like because they're a certain age or because this is genetically in their family or something, or maybe their IQ that it can't be improved. And what we found is it's absolutely a lie that the truth is that we have great abilities inside of us. The recent science is saying with neurogenesis, neuroplasticity that we could grow older, but we could actually grow better. We could create new brain cells, new connections, and do things that are absolutely extraordinary. We just aren't taught how. If anything, we were taught a lie that somehow these things are limited and fixed.

So I have a question for you.

If you could learn anything in the world, what would it be? And it's kind of like me being a genie. And you have one wish. What would you wish for? And of course, the answer is more wishes. Well, in this scenario, if there's one thing you would do, you would learn how to learn, learn faster.

You could apply that towards everything.

Energy is so key because when I look at motivation, motivation is about energy management. You know, time management is one thing, but really life should be about priority management. All right? So it's because we all. The one thing that's equal in this room, it's not everyone's, you know, your income, it's not your connections and network, it's not your education levels. Everybody has different. Right. External. But the one thing that is constant is we all have, what, 24 hours in a day. And so if you had, imagine every single morning, your bank account, you all automatically, every morning when you wake up, there's a, there's extra $86,400 in there. Raise your hand if that would be awesome. If you woke up that every single morning. And here's the thing, at midnight, whatever you didn't invest and use is gone. And that's how I look at time, right? We have 86,400 seconds in a day. And whatever you're not investing in it into something for your happiness, for your health, for something that's going to outlast you, then we lose it every single day. So priority management, the way I think about it, is the most important thing is to keep the most important thing, the most important thing.