The Brain Coach To The World's Top Leaders & Billionaires! 10 Steps To Never Forget Anything Ever Again!: Jim Kwik
Guests: Jim
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
I've just gone through life telling myself that I just have a bad memory. We could turn this into a little master class. Go ahead. So the three keys to a better memory are Jim Quick in the house, a globally recognized leader in memory improvement. Training your brain to work better. If you want to learn faster, you want to retain that information, you are in for an absolute treat. Google, Virgin, Nike. Why are they coming to you? They're struggling with distraction, memory loss.
It's affecting their performance, their productivity. Our mind controls all the treasures of our life, yet it's not user-friendly. The reason I'm so passionate about it is because I grew up with a broken brain. I was five years old, and I had a traumatic brain injury. I didn't understand things like everybody else. I was being teased pretty bad. A teacher pointed to me and said, leave this kid alone. That's the boy with a broken brain. That was the darkest time of my life.
And in that moment, I learned my mission to build better, brighter brains. Memory retention is getting worse and worse. We live in an age where the amount of information is doubling at dizzying speed. The higher reliance on technology to store information that you would normally have to store in your brain means that not everybody is exercising those parts to keep our memory sharp. The other dip in cognitive performance, often when people retire, they mentally retire.
The body is not too far behind. There was a study done on these nuns who are living 90 and above, and because they were learning all the time, it added years to their life. It surprises a lot of people because they have this thinking that their intelligence is fixed. The truth is, there's no such thing as a good or bad memory. There's a trained memory, and there's an untrained memory. I'm going to give everybody right now the 10 keys, and this is how real transformation happens.
The boy with a broken brain. That's what his teachers called him after Jim had a tragic accident at a young age that left him with a permanent brain injury. And he believed it. He lived it. He embodied that identity. He believed he was broken. And then, because of a chance experience, which we can all choose to have right now, that limiting belief was unlocked. And he realized that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about who we are and what we're capable of achieving and what we're capable of doing are exactly that, stories.
I've spent decades telling myself that I have a bad memory, so much so that at 30 years old, it's just part of my identity. And after this conversation, I realized that I'm wrong. If a man like Jim, the boy with a broken brain, can go from that poor memory, low potential, self-doubt, to being a memory expert and becoming limitless, then that says something about who any of us can become. If you want to learn faster, if you want to become more persuasive, better in business, work, creativity, podcasting, whatever it is you do, then knowing how to retain important information, might just be the key to becoming limitless that you've been looking for.
Google, Nike, SpaceX, they all use Jim to improve their team's memory and brain power. And today, he'll be coaching you for free. Jim, before we started recording, you used a curious word. You said mission. Yeah. What is your mission? What is the mission you're on? And why is that mission important to you, but also to the world? Our team is small in people, but we're big in purpose. Our mission is to build better, brighter brains. No brain left behind.
I feel like we live in the millennium of the mind, where our mind controls so much in our lives, our relationships, our health, our careers, our schooling. And yet our mind, it doesn't come with an owner's manual, and it's not user-friendly. Yet it's our number one wealth building asset. Like nobody listening is paid. It's not like it was 100 years ago where it's your brute strength. Today it's your brain strength. It's not like it's your muscle power.
Today it's your mind power. And I do believe the faster you learn, the faster you could earn. because knowledge today is not only power, knowledge is profit. And I don't just mean financial, that's kind of obvious, but it's all the treasures of our life. And the reason I'm so passionate about it is I grew up with a traumatic brain injury when I was a child. And just things didn't work for me like everybody else. And through those struggles, I developed some strengths over the years.
I always thought it was interesting that there's no class on focus, on concentration, on recall, right? And so I put the schoolwork aside because I wasn't getting any gains there anyway. And I start really focusing on this learning how to learn. And so I put my focus in those areas, start studying a little bit about adult learning theory. I got introduced to mnemonics, which is, you know, memory techniques, speed reading, the art and science of reading for better comprehension, understanding.
And about two months into it, a light switch like flipped on and I just started to understand things in school for the first time. And it was so pronounced that I felt two emotions. I felt like, this is awesome because with my grades improving, my life improved and I started to start to affect my identity and how I saw myself and how other people saw me. But other, the other emotion I felt, if I'm honest was anger. I was so upset that I spent my entire childhood struggling every single day, unsure about myself, uh, doubting myself.
And there were simple things that I could have learned that would have made my life a lot easier. And I realized that in school, that it's not how smart you are, it's how are you smart. It's not how smart you are, how smart your significant other is, your kids are, your teammates, it's how are they smart. And I do believe that we have this, if knowledge is power, then learning is our superpower. And it's a superpower we all have. And so from there, I couldn't help but help other people.
And I'm kind of agnostic how it happens, whether it's our books or podcasts or YouTube or courses, but I want to have a positive impact on people's brains. As it relates to memory, I think I've just gone through life telling myself that I just have a bad memory. You know, I'm the type of person that forgets names instantaneously. And I've just come to believe that that's just me. Right. And I've almost resigned to that. So I'll be honest, I don't think I really try that hard anymore.
Because I just think my type of brain is the type of brain that can't retain most information, especially if I don't consider it to be important information. Am I bullshitting myself? You are. It's complete BS. Belief systems, if you want to give it a label. BS, belief systems. I believe our brains are this incredible supercomputer, and our self-talk, our thoughts, our beliefs are the program that will run. So if you tell yourself, I'm not good at remembering people's name, you will not remember the name of the next person you meet because you programmed your supercomputer not to.
And it's more than anecdotal. I really do believe people at events will see me do these demonstrations. They're surprised to hear that I grew up with learning difficulties and put in special education. But before I go on stage, people invariably in the lobby pull me aside and they'll whisper to me when no one's listening, Jim, I'm so glad you're here. I have a horrible memory. I'm getting way too old. I'm not smart enough. And I always say, stop.
If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. If you fight for your limits, they're yours. If people truly understood how powerful their mind is, they wouldn't say or think something they didn't want to be true. And that's not to say you have one negative thought and it ruins your life anymore than eating that one donut will ruin your life. But if you eat those donuts every single day, consistency will compound, you know, and it'll change the direction or the destination.
I have to zoom in there. So four years old. Were you four years old when you had a brain injury? Yeah, I was five years old in public school, elementary school, I was kindergarten here in the States. Had an accident where I lost my balance and I went head first into the radiator, separating the window and me. There's a lot of blood and I was rushed to the hospital. Where it really showed up, though, was my parents said, where I was very, as a child, very energized, like most kids, very playful, very curious, very excited.
I became very shut down. I had processing issues, they said. I didn't understand things like everybody else. Teachers would repeat themselves over and over again. And later on, when I was nine years old, I remember I was being teased pretty bad for slowing down the class. And a teacher came to my defense, but she pointed to me in front of the whole class and said, leave this kid alone. That's the boy with the broken brain. And that really became my identity.
She was sincere, like she was trying to help, but that's all I remembered was like, oh, I didn't know I had the broken brain. And so that became my explanatory schema for everything. Every single time I did badly in school, which was daily, I did badly on a test or report, or I would say, I had the broken brain. Or if I wasn't picked for sports, which was all the time, I was just this little kid, I would say, oh, because I have the broken brain.
And that label became my limit. You know, it's, you know, I do believe that we have to be solely responsible, you know, for our lives, you know, so I don't want to say that was a victim. But, you know, we are shaped by our environment, by our experiences, by our external. And that was something that I really struggled with. You started the quick learning in 2001 when you were 28 years old. And if you think about the clients you have there, I mean, I read about a lot of them, Google, Virgin, Nike, etc.
They're clients of yours. At the very heart of it, the core of it, why? Why are they coming to you? What is the benefit, the why, as you call it, that people are seeking? I think people tend to come to us because they're struggling with distraction, with memory loss, with overload, right? And anxiety from information anxiety. They're drowning information. I think people who come to me realize that their ability to learn and translate that learning into action is, is an incredible competitive advantage in a world where there's lots of distraction, there's lots of overload, there's lots of technology that will make our life easier, but it also, in some ways, while it's convenient, could also cripple us in a way that we're not using our mental faculties as much as, just like, my shirt here says use it, right?
It's like use it or lose it. It's like our body, if I put my arm in a sling for a year, it wouldn't grow stronger. It wouldn't even stay the same, it would atrophy. And the high reliance on technology, like using your phone as an external memory storage, they call it digital dementia. It's a new term in healthcare. Digital dementia is the high reliance on technology to store information that you would normally have to store in your brain, but now that you don't have to do it, not everybody is exercising those parts of our brain to keep our memory sharp.
Is there science that shows we have to exercise our brain? You know, the two biggest, two dips, cognitively, in terms of cognitive performance in people's life cycle, usually happens when people graduate school, because somehow they associate education along with learning. They think their traditional education is over, so they're done learning, right? And that can be an unconscious belief. But the other dip in cognitive performance is usually when people retire.
Often when people retire out of their career, their job, sometimes they mentally retire. And it's interesting that once the mind kind of retires, the body is not too far behind. There was a study done on these nuns. It was a longevity study called Aging with Grace. Great title. They were living 80, 90, and above. And they wanted to find out what was the cause of their longevity. And they said half of it was their emotional faith, their gratitude.
The other half, they were lifelong learners. And because they were learning all the time on the daily, it added years to their life, but also life to their years. But I do really do believe that we have to keep our minds active as much as we have to keep our bodies active. There's a lot of talk and there is a narrative that says when people retire, they die. There's like a long held thing where there seems to be a startling correlation between when someone retires and then them passing away soon after.
There's also quite an interesting correlation between elderly couples and when one of them passes away, the other one often passes away suspiciously soon after. Yeah. Do you think that's linked to what you're saying? That cognitive sort of stimulation is central to our physiological longevity? Yeah. I mean, this study, aging with grace, you know, would be evidence that you want to keep your mind active, you know, till the day you die at every age or stage, right?
that you could actually stave off brain aging challenges, much like an atrophy of the mind, if you will, just like you would keep your body active. I mean, I think most people would have the same understanding if they stop moving their body over at the retirement years, then it would lead to probably unfavorable results. the evolutionary reason for that you know could you take could you have a hypothesis as to why from an evolutionary perspective yeah the body would decide to you know the um everyone we talk about a mind body connection we hear we hear that a lot you know so the primary reason you have a brain is to control your movement that's the number one reason mammals have brains is to control movement And it's not just a one-way connection that it's, that as, yes, your brain controls your movement, but actually moving actually stimulates different parts of your brain.
I know that very well. Before I do this podcast, I do exercise. Yes, very much so. And even in development, I had a, we had our first born recently a few months ago, you know, so crawling, you know, as you look at the study of brain development, that cross lateral is very important. Even we do that in our events, when we do our brain conferences and such, we get everybody standing up and doing these, this area of science called educational kinesiology.
popularized by brain gym, where you take one knee as you're standing and lift it and touch it with the opposite hand, and you go back and forth. Things that are crossing the midline forces left and right brain communication. So you have a left brain and your right brain, and separated by that is a bridging station called the corpus callosum. And by doing these exercises, it increases communication between left and right brain. And this is an oversimplification.
Left brain is, if someone's left brain, they're said to be more logical, right? How do we know if someone's left brain? Left brain or right brain? Yeah, how do we know? We have a couple of assessments in Limitless, but you can find it online, free assessments for brain dominance, left and right brain. In there, we have multiple intelligence theory. A study, research out of Harvard University by Howard Gardner says that there's not in the US, in a lot of westernized societies, they tend to emphasize two kinds of intelligences.
verbal linguistic and mathematical. Here in the States, we have the SATs, right? It's just verbal, reading comprehension and mathematical. Howard Gardner says they're actually not limited to two intelligences, and so there are more, and each one can be developed. And so, for example, kinesthetic intelligence, you know, your great choreographers, your great dancers, athletes, interpersonal intelligence, people who have this innate talent that could relate to people and connect.
visual spatial intelligence, people who are incredible graphic artists, architects, right? Musical intelligence, it just goes on. So there are these other assessments. And I really, the reason why we put so many of this in Limitless and in our podcast, and we created our own assessment recently this year, we haven't talked about it. we're just launching it now, called Cognitive Types. And these are, I use animals as a metaphor, because I think so much of us, for happiness for me, has always been having the curiosity to know yourself.
Right, that's why you go to therapy, or you journal, or you meditate, or you read about that interpersonal intelligence, self to self, as opposed to interpersonal, self to others. But once you have the curiosity to know yourself, having the courage to be yourself is a different game too. Because so many people mitigate their expression of who they are because of looking bad or how people would perceive them and so on. But this cognitive type, and I'll go back to the answer to your question, we found and delineated, I pulled from Myers-Briggs and multiple intelligence theory, introvert, extrovert, ambivert, lateral thinking styles, to realize there are about four buckets of cognitive types.
And I used animals as a metaphor to represent them. So there's four cognitive types. And what's the acronym? Sorry. CODE. C-O-D-E. C-O-D-E. So what does the C stand for? So very briefly, the C, and as you're listening to this, you could see which one kind of hand raised for yourself. You can take a snapshot of this and post which one you think you are. We have an assessment online also as well that's free. The C is cheetah. And these are your intuitives.
And you might know, you might have someone on your team or a family member that are cheetahs. They're fast acting. They're just always moving. They thrive in fast-paced environments, right? Sophie, I reckon that's my assistant, Sophie. Maybe me as well, Jack. What do you think? Do you think I'm a cheetah? Fast acting, thriving, fast-paced environments. Does that sound like me? You think so? OK. And the O is the owl. And you might know people, the owl is often linked to logic, critical thinking.
They love data, facts, formulas, figures, right? They lean into that information. Sounds like Grace Miller on our team. Charles, we have a data scientist on our team as well. Very nice. Yeah. Michael as well, yeah. OK, lean into information. So that's the owl. The D are your dolphins, and your dolphins are your creative visionaries. These people love problem solving. They love to be creative expression. Great at pattern recognition. Right, they see patterns that maybe other people don't see as easily or naturally.
Dolphin, so they're the creatives amongst us. Yes, and I think a lot of the future belongs to the creatives, you know, the creators, if you will. You're thinking about AI, aren't you? Yeah, that's an interesting conversation also as well. And finally, the E. are your elephants. And your elephants, I chose them because I use them as a representative symbol for like empathy. They love collaboration, tribes, right? Working team environment. So we created these models because you know yourself, right?
Even in the matrix when he's going to see the oracle and the sign right above in the kitchen was, you know, know thyself. And then we could be ourselves. But the more you know about yourself and then you have a way of filtering the world and then not being judgmental of yourself or even others. It's just how people are organized. You know, some people are just right handed or they're left handed. Right. They have certain preferences. And so these are it could help you inform you based on like yourself.
If you know you thrive in certain environments, and then we give, in the report, careers that you would excel in. And this is kind of obvious, right? If somebody's creative, certain career paths. What if you're a couple of these things? Yeah. So we have, when you go through it, there's a primary and there's a secondary. And so these are usually very, very few people because we have all the backend stats. We have, you know, is completely even 25% and so on.
But we usually have a place where if I ask everybody to write their name on a piece of paper, you could do that. But if I ask you to switch hands and below it, write your first and last name below that, That second time is going to feel, it's going to take longer. It's going to feel awkward. And the quality is probably not going to be as good as the first one. And have you ever been in a situation where you're learning something, and it's a subject you're interested in, but for some reason, you're just not getting it because you're just not connecting with the instructor.
It's kind of like the way that they prefer to teach is different than the way you prefer to learn. And it's like you're two ships in the night and you're passing each other, and there's no connection that's there. And so it feels like you're learning with the opposite hand. So what happens, it takes longer. The quality is not as good and it feels a little weird and uncomfortable. So I feel like when you know what your strengths are, you can lean into it and then further refine it.
And we give people suggestions if they want to improve areas that they're not as strong in to be able to boost that. But this is weighted, right? Because you named a couple of those there. And I thought, I'm probably a cheater. I've got a little bit of an elephant in me as well, no pun intended. And I like to think I can be a dolphin once in a while. So I can't swim. And they can express each other in different contexts also as well. And it's nice to have.
a level of cognitive flexibility, you know, and because that increases your learning agility. It's one of the things that we teach in Limitless is a 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? Yeah. And I want everybody to think about who's listening or watching this right now, a decision you need to make or difficulty. It doesn't have to be like life and death, but it's just something that, you know, that... Where to live, I'm thinking about that. Yes, perfect. Where to live. And then you have these hats. So the first hat is the white hat. No specific order. So imagine you're reaching out and you're putting on the white hat.
OK. 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. So now you can only look at the 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.
We've been looking at really about which area to live in, in London, or maybe we live in Portugal or maybe Dubai. So we're trying to figure that out. OK. 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 her thought. 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 is similar, 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 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, you know, in terms of what could go wrong. I 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 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 is portugal Nice. And those are four hats. And the last two 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 a plants that are green, imagine new, new foliage, new, new growth. And these are like maybe thinking outside the box. Like maybe it's not, I go to, you know, 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 yeah the possibility of so if it was like between this and this it could be like choice three or choice four 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 and 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 can 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. 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. Right. 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, Branson's very good at that, right? He's very good at looking at, everyone looks at him as very risky, like 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 going to Bitcoin, everything's going to be good, and you go on that, and you're ignoring the other points of view. And so this allows you to have more information. So hopefully with that more information, you can make a more, a wiser choice with something. And that's kind of, you know, You literally recommend people in chapter 15 of this book to buy multicolored hats.
If you want 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 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, like literally physically physically. go like this and put it in a less if, you know, so they get their body into it also.
And we are 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 now 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 going to make a car today with today's technology, how would we go about doing that instead of doing just incremental improvements on technology? what they have existing. And I think you ask a new question, and you get a new answer, and part of these 60,000 thoughts we have, a lot of them are informal questions, but all 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. Yeah, of course, that would be, that would end you 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?
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, 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. So a part of the book, I talk about a dominant question that I believe that everybody knows. has a question that they ask more than any other question.
And that question can determine a lot of your focus. And because your focus determines how you feel, what you do, and what you're experiencing in life, and the results. So for example, a friend of mine, you know, we talked about this dominant question. We found out her dominant question, the ones he's thinking about consciously or even unconsciously throughout the day, is how do I get people to like me? And now you don't know her career, what she looks like, you know, but you don't know anything about her, but you probably could guess a lot of things about her.
§02Transcript — part 2
If somebody was obsessed with answering the question, how do I get people to like me? What would you say her personality is like? Insecure. Very. She's a martyr. A lot of people take advantage of her. Some people call it a sycophant or a people pleaser. Maybe her personality, and I've seen this dynamic, changes depending on who she's spending time with. you know, because she likes whatever they like and does whatever they do. So you don't know anything about her, but you know a lot about her and you only know one question she asked herself.
You know, I, I'd use this story with Will Smith in the book. Um, I help a lot of actors to, you know, um, remember their lines or, um, be focused on set or speed read their scripts or whatever. We're in Toronto and they're shooting. We were training during the day, doing some brain training. And at night, they're shooting 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. And it's very cold. It's February, winter, Toronto at night. And a lot of people think it's very glamorous, Hollywood.
But a lot of it, as you know, is very hurry up and just wait. right and just waiting all the time and it's an outdoor shoot and his family happens to be visiting and they're all just watching the monitors and there's a big break and during that they he brings them he makes out chocolate and brings it to him to all of us right even though there's a crew that would do that he's there um cracking jokes and and telling stories because we realized that his dominant question earlier that day is how do i make this moment even more He asked that unconsciously, wherever it came from, how do I make this moment magical?
And I realized that he was living that question, his dominant question, which determines his dominant thoughts and actions. For me, I grew up with a broken brain, so I was like, I didn't have answers, so I was like, how do I be invisible? And for years I would just like shrink down and get sick psychologically before I had to take a test, so I get to go to the nurse instead of having to perform. But later I switched it to like, how do I fix this?
And then my dominant question ended up being, how do I make this better? And I'm obsessed, you and I were talking before we started recording, this idea of being the best version of yourself. And at some level, you must have thoughts or a defining question that says, how do I make this better? I think it's probably, how do I convince the world that I'm enough? Ooh. I think that's probably, that's definitely what the dominant question started with in my life.
Now, it's not that as much. And I look at my behavior as evidence. So I don't look at my words because I think my words and my thoughts have often deceived me going back. But I look at my behavior and the choices I make, and they seem to be more intrinsically motivated than extrinsically motivated. So they seem to be more about, doing things for me, not for the approval of someone outside of me. Is there something that's more recent? Or was there some inciting, something that kind of put you on that, where you went for, how do I prove to people that enough?
To the world that I'm enough. I did the things that I thought would prove it. Oh yeah. You know, it's interesting because I've never really talked about this before, but I know a lot of people close to me that grew up with that feeling of like, they didn't feel like they were enough. And so they committed the next sort of decade of their life to proving that they were in some way, whether it's business, sports, athletics, often to their parents, whatever.
And... This might be wrong, but my observation is they had to do that and then have the evidence let them down. Or they had to do that in order to kind of... change the question. So it's funny, because you'd hate to say to someone, listen, the only way you're gonna believe that you are actually enough is if you go and become really, really successful. And then you can stop buying all that stuff you don't actually like and stop showing off or whatever.
That's the only way you're gonna be able to do it. But that seems to be the case for a lot of my friends. I've got one friend that's the son of a billionaire. he went and built a billion dollar business himself. And until he did, he was one of the most insecure, materialistic, superficial people I've ever met. And then once he had built that tremendous business and established his own identity, kind of got on out of his father's shadow, then he sold all the shit.
He sold everything. He sold the nine sports cars. He sold the house. Just wears all black now. Doesn't seem to give a fuck anymore. And I can kind of relate. Without making a billion, I can kind of relate to what he's saying or that experience. I think my question changed to what is my potential? That seems to be my dominant question. Yeah, and I would invite everybody. Everybody has a question, and not only for yourself, because sometimes we're silent or we're under stress.
We realize that those questions come out of us. We start asking questions, especially if we're faced difficulty, and we go, mine is, like, how do I fix this or how do I make it better? Because some people ask questions like, you know, why can't I do this or why can't I ever have this, whatever it is, and they're getting answers that aren't very supportive. It's this equivalent of when people read and they want to understand more of what they read.
A lot of people read a page in a book, get to the end, and just forget what they just read, or not even understand it because they didn't have any questions to begin with. And so I think that a lot of times we get used to just listening to a podcast, or watching a YouTube, or reading a book, And then we feel like our lives are different because of just that process. And I just want to remind everybody for every hour you spend listening to a podcast, I would challenge everybody to spend an equal hour putting that into play.
And one of the ways you could do that as you're listening to something is ask yourself three dominant questions for me is, how can I use this? So I'm obsessed with this question, how can I use this? Because then I start saying, there's an answer, there's an answer, there's an answer. Second question, why must I use this? Because common sense is not common practice. Your listeners have probably forgotten more about life-changing transformation, health, wellness, business than most people in their lives come across.
That's just the truth. Right. They're probably like, why are you always watching, you know, these podcasts and videos and all this stuff, you know, because sometimes family and friends don't want to lose you and they want to kind of keep you in a certain place. And and but if you ask yourself, why must I use this? And you get into head, heart and then hands, then you have this incredible purpose and drive. And then another question I ask besides how can I use this, why must I use this, is when will I use this?
I think one of the most important productivity performance tools we have is our calendar. But you'll see people will schedule investor meetings, they'll schedule team calls, sales meetings, whatever, doctor's appointments. But they're not always scheduling their execution of things that they read from that business book or something that they watched. it's better well done than well said, you know, and, and the practice, what we post and the way we do it is I think the life we live are the lessons we teach others, the life we live are the lessons we teach, because you're absolutely right that people could say something, but that does, it's better to show it.
You know, it's not one thing to promise it. It's another to prove it. Right. You know, especially in the, in the world that we are today. I've been thinking a lot about this in the book that I've been writing coming out soon called The Diary of A CEO, 33 Laws for Business and Life. And in chapter one, which is law one of the book, I was playing around with this idea of knowledge and skills and all of these things. the relationship they have between them.
And really was trying to find advice for young people that want to get to a point where they have reputation and a big network and lots of resources, right? And I was trying to figure out the order. So I almost visualized it like five buckets. And the first bucket I wrote down is knowledge. That's the first one, right? And these are sequential buckets. So they go from, you know, this is bucket one. And then once you fill that bucket, When you apply knowledge, it turns into a skill.
And then once you have knowledge and applied knowledge, which I call skill, then you'll get these other things. Then you'll get resources, you'll get a network, and you'll get a reputation. But it's those first two buckets. have skills without knowledge, really. And knowledge is certainly the first one, but just having knowledge alone without that applied skill, without that applied knowledge, which we call a skill, you'll never get the reputation, the resources, and the network.
And the only two buckets that no one ever can take from you, the only two buckets that anyone can never unfill is the knowledge bucket, and also the skill bucket. People can take away your reputation, they can take away your resources, they can take away your network, but they can never unfill these two buckets. And these two buckets are the first two buckets which go on to fill the other three. And that's why I think more recently in my life I've become obsessed with learning.
Am I a great learner? No, I don't think I am. Because I sit here, you know, I sit here with the greatest minds in the world and I remember very little of it. And it's funny as you're saying, I was like, I've been thinking this over the last couple of weeks, I've never really shared this with anybody, but I thought, gosh, you're in such a privileged position to get to meet all these incredible people. I should be like a human encyclopedia of information and wisdom.
And I don't think I am, you know? I meet people that are, I sit here with them. I think you're one of them. I go, this guy knows everything and he's remembered everything and he knows the names of studies and he can recall names. I can barely recall names of people. So I'm like, where? Where do I start? Because I'm in a privileged position meeting all these wonderful people and our listeners are too. If anyone's, you know, loyal to this podcast, you're like me.
I actually wrote something down as you're speaking. I was thinking what we need to do here at the Diary of a CEO after the episode ends is we need to set the audience some homework. Yeah. And what I mean by that is say, okay, Jim said these three core ideas. After the episode, I want you to go and implement them. And then I want you to like tag me on social media of you implementing them. The action after the episode and share it with me. And that's what I think we should all do.
Because then not only are we going to listen, we're going to learn. And those are two very different things. Yeah, and I feel also when we teach something, we get to learn it twice. Meaning you share that with your friends, your family, your followers, your fans. It takes advantage of something called the explanation effect. The explanation effect says that when you learn something with the intention of explaining it to somebody else, you're gonna learn it much better.
And that's kind of obvious, right? If you, you know, if we talked about speed reading or the best brain foods or changing your habits, optimizing your sleep, the kind of things that we specialize in, and somebody listening had to give a TEDx talk about it the following week, would they focus better? They would have a better concentration. Would they take more notes? Would they ask more, post more questions online? They would own that information.
And so I think that learning with the intention of teaching helps you to be able to certainly learn it better. I mean, that's even how you could even use... You could explain it to somebody. I mean, the whole Richard Feynman method was, you know, take this difficult subject, neuroscience, quantum, whatever it happens to be, like social media marketing, AI. and explain it to me as if I am a six-year-old, right? And I can open up a whole thing with this conversation in terms of artificial intelligence and creatives.
But I really feel like all these tools are there to augment creativity. I don't even think it's artificial intelligence. For me, it's obviously machine learning, but it's augmented intelligence. And I'm thinking, how do I use this tool? I would use a book or a computer or the internet or whatever to AI to enhance HI, like human intelligence. I'm very interested in that. I think, me and you know the Freiman technique well, but when I came across it, it really was a game changer for me because it explained why I have good comprehension on a certain subject matter and then I'm quite loose on others.
Could you explain it in a simple way? I know you speak to a version of it in the book, but for anybody that isn't aware of that technique... So the idea here is anyone can make things more complex. But the idea is when you really understand something, you could simplify it in a way that makes it usable for the end result, right? And not only the end result, but the process of learning it. So meaning, I love reading the neuroscience papers and having deep conversations.
And I think where if we have had any level of success is translating that in a way to people where it's conversational, where they see the relevance in their daily lives, in the application, and as results, oriented. And how does that impact our ability to learn the subject, this Freiman technique? Because stage one is of the Freiman technique, from what I remember is you learn something. And then stage two is, I believe you simplify it and then you share it.
And then if you can't share it to the six-year-old, you go back to learning it. Right. And that's a great synopsis of it. And I would say that so how... how it builds, so every single time you have a new, there's a Oliver Wendell Holmes quote that says, a person's mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions. And so when we have, so neuroplasticity happens when we experience novelty. So we learn a new idea or something happens in our environment, it's neuroplasticity allows learning, it allows adaptation, it even allows recovery from Traumatic brain injury, right?
It like, I had these deficiencies, if we call them that, and I was able to compensate by creating workarounds, like somebody would do in some kind of program. You know, and then you start building paths. Another way of neuroplasticity, it's kind of like, if I walked through a field and there are lots of bushes, you know, I walked through it once, and I didn't know, not much changes, but if you take that path and you reinforce it through repetition or space repetition interval training, then all of a sudden it becomes more of a path and eventually becomes a road and it becomes a highway.
And we've made that connection. So I like pulling on things that are natural as metaphors. But we learn through metaphors because all of learning is taking something you don't know and connecting it to something you do know. People say learning is repetition. They just say it loads. Does that work? It does. But when we're looking at methodology, repetition, the problem with repetition, and certainly it leads, it gets a result, it's rote learning.
It's like when the churches started universities and how people would teach would be the teacher or professor would say a fact. and to the class and the class would repeat it. And then the teacher would say it again and the class would repeat it. And so I'm making on video, if you're watching this, a circular motion. Like rotary, like a rotary club, their symbol is a wheel. The first half of the wheel is the teacher saying the fact The second half of the wheel is the class repeating the fact.
And you do that 50 times, and then you build that pathway, and you have, quote-unquote, learning. The problem with that is it takes so much time. And now we live in an age where the amount of information, it's like doubling at dizzying speed, right? There's more information today in the newspaper than somebody in the 17th century ever came across in their whole life, right? When you think about also blogs and social media and podcasts, it's just like it's overwhelming.
So we can't be learning the same ways. Okay, so I've got a book coming out, as I said, and there's 33 laws. And I've been saying to myself, listen, you're going to at some point start really promoting this book. So you need to memorize all 33 laws. Yeah. Like I actually don't need to. Do it. I mean, so I need to. Fucking hell, what am I doing with my life? 30, these 33 laws. I need to remember basically what the law is and then the gist of it. Yeah.
How would you help me do that? I could do that in a heartbeat. All right, so let's turn this into coaching. And we could use just content that everyone could relate to because I don't know how much of the laws you want to share or how much you have on tap. Okay, so the method I'm going to share with you, I call it PIE, P-I-E. That three ingredients for a better memory, P stands for place. We remember things based on where we put it. Like you put your keys in a certain spot each time you enter.
You're always going to find it because it's organized, right? You forget someone's name. You ask yourself, where do I know the person? Sometimes the context gives you the content. So that's a place is a place to store the information. The I is imagine. We remember things better that we could see and imagine. Meaning... I bet as difficult as names are to remember, you remember faces. Yeah, really well. So many people remember faces because more of your brain is dedicated towards your visual cortex.
It takes up more real estate. So we tend to remember things we see better than what we hear. So you see the face and you go to someone, I remember your face, but I forgot your name. That's me every day of my life. You never go to somebody to say the opposite. You never go say, I remember your name, but I forgot your face. I roll up to people and say, hi, nice to see you. And then I realized I didn't remember their name. We're willing to help you with that.
Okay, so here we go. So the I is imagined. We tend to remember what we see. There's a proverb that says, what you hear, you forget. What you see, you remember. What you do, you understand. What you hear, you forget. You heard the name, you forgot it. What you see, you remember. You saw the face, you remember the face. So what you could see, and we think in pictures, When you get on an airplane, it doesn't say, no longer does it say, no smoking, fasten your seatbelts.
There's just pictures. And we think in pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words. So you want to imagine those pictures. And the E in pi, entwine. Entwine is where you're connecting. Entwine means to associate or to connect. And what are you connecting? The P in the I, the place in the image. So let me give you an example. Five buckets. Law number one. Right. Yeah, yeah. The five buckets. And we could do the five buckets also. I was going to teach people quickly 10 things that they could do to upgrade their brain.
Let's do your 10 things. But certainly we could apply this towards buckets too. All right. So we're blessed that the book was heavily endorsed by the Cleveland Clinic Center for Brain Health, the founding director there. one of the top Alzheimer's researchers out of Harvard, Dr. Rudy Tanzi. And when I speak at these organizations, we know that about one-third of your brain performance, your memory, is predetermined by genetics. Two-thirds is in your control.
They say the metaphor is that, for example, Alzheimer's, and we donated a lot of the proceeds to Alzheimer's research for our book, is in memory of my grandmother. They say that your genetics will load the gun, but your lifestyle will fire it, right? Kind of makes sense. And it's not like all metaphors, they're not absolutes, but there's an idea to connect something you don't know to something you know. So going to this, two thirds, I'm gonna give everybody right now the 10 keys, as you know it in the book, but I'm gonna show you how to memorize them.
But what I liked it to do, whether or not people memorize them or not, and I find that people will be able to do it pretty easily and effortlessly, is at least rate yourself zero to 10. How much energy and effort and attention are you putting towards this area? Because everyone wants to know the one thing they could do for an incredible memory. There's just not. There's not a magic pill, but there is a process, right? So we'll go through them fast.
Number one, good brain diet. So everyone on a scale of zero to 10, 10 being the best, how much energy, attention, time are you putting towards a good brain diet? So there's certain foods that are very neuroprotective. And I would also say I'm not a doctor or a nutritionist. Everyone's bio-individual. So do allergy testing, do functional medicine testing in terms of microbiome test, nutrient profile, food sensitivity, so everyone's a little different.
In general, some of my favorite brain foods, avocados, the monounsituated fat is good for the brain. Blueberries, I like to call them brain berries, very neuroprotective. Broccoli, good for your brain. Olive oil, good for the brain. If your diet allows, eggs. The choline in eggs is good for your cognitive health. Green leafy vegetables, like kale and spinach. And now again, some people are allergic to kale, so that wouldn't be for you. Another one, I would say wild sardines, or like wild salmon or sardines.
Like your brain is mostly fat, so it's fish oils. Turmeric is a great brain food, meaning it helps to lower inflammation. You can use that while you're cooking. Walnuts. Everybody's just waiting for you to say chocolate here, Jim. Yeah. There you go. Walnuts and dark chocolate. Dark chocolate, not milk chocolate. So those are some of the brain foods. So 0 to 10. On the other side, that's not so good. Processed foods, high sugar. What does it do to the brain?
Sugar is highly addictive, right? You've had guests on here probably talking about how it's more addictive than a lot of drugs, right? There's certain things that are not good for the brain. And again, people like we've had on our podcast or we've interviewed for the book, like people like Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Daniel Amen, you know, sugar, alcohol, marijuana, certain things are just, certain things like alcohol could Some people say they use it to help them sleep, but there's a difference between getting knocked out and actually getting good deep sleep, getting good REM sleep.
Sleep is just a personal focus of mine. But sure, it was highly addictive, not good. A lot of people are also hyper, you know, the ADHD, the hyper behavior, a lot of times you could eliminate sugar. But in the US schools, it's tough. You know, we were having vending machines there with all the pop and the sodas and the, you know, just, yeah. But to get through the list, zero to 10, how good is your diet? Number two, and I'll go through these fast, killing ants.
Killing ants is actually clinically proven to be good for your brain. Ants, I get this from Dr. Daniel Amen, automatic negative thoughts. Remember we talked about the power of your thoughts and just keeping it. Even if you say you don't have a great memory, just add a little word like yet at the end. It just changes things. you know, the potentiality of that statement. So in zero to 10, how encouraging, optimistic are your thoughts and your beliefs?
Number three, in no specific order again, is exercise. There's so much research talking about the power of movement and the brain. When you move, by the way, Studies show that when you listen to your podcast, when people are listening to this podcast and they happen to be doing something rhythmic, going for a nice walk with the dogs or on an elliptical, they'll actually understand the information and retain it better. When your body moves, your brain grooves.
Just remember that when your body moves, your brain grooves. When you move your body, you create brain derived neurotropic factors, BDNF, which is like fertilizer for the brain. It's like fertilizer promoting neuroplasticity. Number four, brain nutrients. And this is, I always prefer people get it from whole, you know, their own foods. But, you know, I, again, you could get so much data nowadays. You could do a nutrient profile because if you're lacking, if your vitamin D levels are low, you're not going to perform, your brain's not going to perform at its best.
You know, if you're not getting your omega-3s, your brain is mostly, you know, made out of fad, your DHAs, your vitamin C, your vitamin Bs. Everyone comes here and talks to me about bloody vitamin D and omega-3. Yeah. Everybody says the same two things. Supplements work for that, right? Do supplements work for vitamin D? Quality supplements. Yeah. You know, I would, again, prefer people get it from sunlight and prefer people get it from natural sources, like fish or whatever.
Damn, I don't go out in the sunlight enough. I need to fix that. Yeah. You, you've had guests talking about the power of sunlight first thing in the morning to reset their circadian rhythm to help them sleep. You know, for, for me in the morning, I try to do, I try to get the elements in my life. So I think about thousands of years ago, they thought the four elements made up of, made everything up that you see. So it's like, you know, in Babylonian times and Greek times, you know, four elements of air, water, fire, and earth.
And so, like, I don't know, I take this approach in the morning, you don't have to biohack everything, you can do it for free. Go out there, outside, you know, get some earth, get your feet on the ground, right? Really simple to do. To feel more grounded and more connected. And there's also, I think, an energetic, people talk about pulse electromagnetic fields and everything, but I don't know, I feel more grounded when I just walk in the grass. Simple thing people could do.
And then I'm thinking about air. I could do my deep breathing, or some people do fire breathing, alpha breathing, Wim Hof breathing, first thing in the morning, clear the cobwebs of the night, and then some water. Drink some water or take your cold shower. You get to integrate it to whatever your morning routine is. And then fire is the sunlight for me, you know, first thing in the morning. But I just find that any of the biohacking stuff, and people follow me on Instagram, you know, I have my toys and everything else.
They're just to mimic nature, you know, a lot of the times. You know, the red lights and the cold plunges and all that stuff. Nature, point number five is a clean environment. Yeah. So after brain nutrients, zero to 10, rating yourself five as a clean environment. And this is for everything, including the quality of the air that you're breathing. You know, like I had somebody on our podcast talking about the neurotoxins in brand new carpets or furniture, you know, in terms of what they're sprayed with and the off-gassing that comes from it and how it could have a toxic effect, you know, on your brain.
Yeah. You wrote air pollution is a massive and underrated health risk. They cause up to 30% of all strokes. Life expectancy is appreciably lower in cities than in the countryside, even accounting for differences in wealth and lifestyle. Yeah, I mean, we sorted through a number of research talking about air pollution, water pollution also as well, in terms of the certain residues that happens to be in, whether it's in tap water or what have you, or some people are concerned about plastics that come from bottles also as well.
And other people are concerned about, we've had a couple of episodes talking about EMFs. How does that impact my brain though? I don't think we know. All I know is that the brain hasn't changed a lot in the past 100,000 years, but technology certainly has. We talk about these videos that we make, about morning routine and evening routines, and millions of views, just simple things like don't touch your phone the first 30 minutes of the day or the last 30 minutes of the day, something so simple.
And then seven is brain protection. Brain protection. So clean environment, even just cleaning your desktop, your external world's reflection of your internal world, or making your bed just helps you get how you do anything is how you do everything. Number number. Sorry, that was number six. Yeah. Number seven is sleep. So very concerning with sleep and brain performance. We know when you don't sleep, how's your thinking the next day? How's your ability to solve problems?
How's your ability to focus, remember things? When you sleep, if you have long-term memory issues, get a sleep study done. That's where you consolidate short to long-term memory is during sleep. When you sleep, the sewage system in your brain kicks in because there's energy to do so also as well. Your brain doesn't stop at night. If anything, it's sometimes more active. It's consolidating short to long-term memory. It's cleaning out beta amyloid plaque that can lead to brain aging challenges.
Often a lot of the studies show that with a lot of disease, there's a kind of a sleep deficiency component also as well. Sometimes I'll wear a device to monitor it because it's not that people ask the quantity of sleep, what's the perfect amount, seven, eight, nine hours. It's absolutely not the quantity, it's the quality of your deep sleep and your REM sleep. Your deep sleep, you could imagine, is where you're recovering your body, your REM sleep is where you're restoring your mind.
§03Transcript — part 3
So seven is sleep, zero to 10, how much focus, energy, attention are you putting towards it? We've done stress management, we talked about how stress impacts the brain. We talked about sleep there, we've talked about novelty. Yeah, the last three really quickly are protect your brain, wear a helmet, your brain's very resilient but it's very fragile. So I get to work with a lot of sports figures that have post concussions or TBIs. Yep. And so we have protocols for that.
And obviously see a doctor, zero to 10, rate yourself. New learnings is big. We talked about the power of learning. Novelty. Novelty. And for me, reading. Reading is to your mind what exercises your body. I think it's the best. People, you get all fancy apps and everything else. I think, look. Someone who has decades of experience, like yourself or your guests, and they put into a book, and you can sit down and read that book in a few days, you can download decades into days.
That's the biggest advantage, right? And reading is incredible exercise for your mind, especially the way we teach it. And then finally, stress management, which you mentioned, you know, zero to 10. How well are you mitigating stress and coping with stress? What mechanisms and tools or rituals or practices do you have? You know, my go-to is meditation. How is our gut linked to our brain? You know, people often on this podcast have said to me that there's a really significant link between the two.
Yeah, they call your gut your second brain, right? And so there's a lot of neurotransmitters there. You create a lot of your serotonin there also as well. What you eat matters, especially for your gray matter. What to eat matters, especially for your gray matter. There's a lot of microbiome tests also that you could test for food sensitivity that exists in the market. We had Naveen Jain on our podcast, and he has a company called Viome, and they do that test also as well.
But it shows you green, yellow, red. Green, you could eat pretty much as much as you want of it. Yellow, eat it sparingly and mild. Red, ideally, avoid. But imagine your gut is kind of like the roots of a plant that's feeding the stem and the stalk and the flowers of your brain. So what you eat, it should nourish you because you are what you, not only you are what you eat, you are what you absorb, frankly. And so gut health is extremely important.
That's why I You know, we talk about the power of probiotics for people, you know, that take it on. Maybe they do it first thing in the morning, but good bacteria. My friend turned around to me this weekend on this stag do I was at. And he said, because we were talking about a book we'd read. And he said to me, does it matter that I don't read? He doesn't read. Yeah. He's dyslexic. I think he struggles with reading a little bit. Yeah. And he asked me, does it matter that I don't read?
Yeah. He's just not interested in it. So we can consume information however we consume it. Some people prefer to read it. Some people prefer to watch it. Some people prefer to listen to it. And so we all have different styles. Because in your book, Chapter 14, it says, there is a direct relationship between our ability to read and our success in life. Readers enjoy better jobs, higher incomes, and greater opportunities. Yeah. I do believe... So if people have seen photos of me with Oprah or Elon or these individuals, you know, people invariably ask, you know, how did you connect?
How did you build? We bonded over books. You know, Elon and I were geeking out over some of our favorite sci-fi books. Right. And then, you know, he brought me into the SpaceX. I did training for their rocket scientists. But it was leaders are readers. You read to succeed. I talked about earlier that someone's decades experience and they read it. You can read it in a few days. You can download decades into days. It's a huge advantage. And they say Warren Buffett reads 500 pages a day.
So you want to read to succeed because you learn from other people's experiences. You don't want to spend the same time, money, trouble, stress from somebody else. Now, my reading has changed. For four years, I read a book a day. Um, because I was just so most people don't read cause they're not good at it. So if I'm not very good at golf, Steve, so like you don't find me on the courses, uh, on the links to them very much cause I'm not very good at it.
So I don't really want to do it. And most people don't read because they're not good at it because reading is a skill and like all skills that can be developed through training. But when's the last time you took a class called reading? How, how old were you when you took a class called, not a college literature club, but a reading class? Seven, I don't know. Yeah, so most people are still reading like they're seven or six. So the difficulty in demand has increased a whole lot, but how people read it is from the last time they learned it.
And people think just because they've been doing something for so long, they're better at it. That's absolutely not true, right? Somebody even, somebody, the other day said, I have 30 years of experience in sales. I'm like, but you talk to them, they're like, not really with the results. he has like one year of experience that he's repeated 30 times. There's a difference between growth and somebody who's just kind of stalled, right? And same thing with reading.
If you're just doing the same thing, just because you're doing the same, it's like typing. If I'm typing with two fingers, there's a cap in terms of how far, and if you do this for 30 years or three years, it doesn't matter. You're only gonna reach a certain point as opposed to people using more of their faculties. Now I know people who are listening in mass could triple their reading speed. Right. Not of everything. Like I can't. How do I triple my reading speed?
So, okay. So what I teach is not traditional speed reading. Traditional speed reading is more associated with skimming, scanning, skipping words, getting the gist of what you read. You know, we train a lot of wealth managers and and doctors, you don't want your doctor to get the gist of what she reads, right? So you wanna be able to retain it. So there's smart reading. So most of the time when we, and we have students in every country in the world online through our academy, we kind of built like a Khan Academy, but instead of for math, it's for accelerated learning, reading, memory, and so on.
So on average, people with triplet reading speed, how do you do it? Well, I'll give you a couple of tips because there's different training is different than a tip, right? Like we have time for a couple of quick tips. Doing a training would be skill acquisition. But if you allow, like there's a link in my Instagram I put in. for this publication. And there's a free one hour masterclass. People could double their reading speed and bring whatever book they want and go for it.
And it's there. Did you say most of your clients triple their reading speed? On average, about triple reading speed. So reading is very measurable. Now there's an upward cap. Some people think you could read 20,000 words a minute. The average person reads about 200 words a minute. on average, you know, and so now, by the way, when you read, it doesn't make if you can't understand a subject, reading it faster is not going to help. Right? If you don't if you don't, if you don't understand Arabic, speed reading, it's not going to if you don't understand nuclear physics, that reading it faster is not going to help, right?
So there's there, you need to you're not gonna read any faster than you can understand. But I'll give you everyone a couple quick tips. Number one, when you're reading, Most people lose focus, right? And that slows them down. Their eyes go in different places. And so if you use a visual pacer when you read, you'll read faster. What do I mean by visual pacer? If you're watching on video, I'm using my finger to underline, or a pen, or a highlighter, a mouse on a computer will help you to read faster.
And don't believe everything I'm saying, test this. So what I would do is after this conversation, grab a book that you're reading, put a mark in the margin where you start, and just read how you would normally read and time yourself on your phone for 60 seconds. And then pick up where you left off, give yourself another 60 seconds, but this time just underline the words. Don't touch the screen if you're reading online or don't touch the book, but just go back and forth.
and a rhythm that's comfortable for you, and then count the number of lines you read the second time, that second time on average will be 25 to 50% faster. And most people will say after they practice a little bit, you know, like practice for a few days, that their understanding is actually better. People feel more in touch with their reading. I'll tell you why. Number one, as hunter gatherers, we are visual creatures. That's our survival. If you are, you have to look at what moves.
So if your finger is moving, you're going to follow the visual pacer because it's your survival. Like if something ran across this room, you wouldn't look at me. You would look at what moves because that's your survival, right? Because if you're hunter-gatherer in a bush and you're hunting... that rabbit or whatever your diet is, right? And that bush next to you moves, you have to look at what moves because number one, it could be lunch or number two, you could be lunch.
So either way, you have to look at what moves. So your fingers going across the page, your attention is being pulled through the information as opposed to your attention being pulled apart, right? The other reason why, and I'll tell you neurologically, certain senses work very closely together. Meaning, have you ever tasted a great piece of fruit, like fresh from the farmer's market, like a great tasting peach? You're not actually tasting the peach.
You're smelling the peach. But your sense of smell and taste are so closely linked that your mind can't tell the difference. It can tell the difference if you're sick. If you can't breathe out of your nose and you're congested, what does food taste like? Nothing. It tastes bland, right? And so just as your sense of smell and taste are closely linked, so is your sense of sight and your sense of touch. That people literally using their finger while they read will say they feel more in touch with their reading.
In fact, when people lose their sense of sight, how do they read? Touch, right? When you train people on this, so that's the first one is using visual pacer. Is there another tip? Oh, yeah. There are many. I mean, that will boost your reading speed and focus 25%, 50% across the board. And then you'll learn. So there's something called fixations. And fixation is where your eyes will stop. And how many stops you make across the page determines how fast you're going to read, right?
So it's like in traffic. If you're stopping, if they're 10 words, most people are stopping at every single word. So they're taking 10 stops. Faster trained readers will actually use their peripheral vision to pull in more than one word. So if you look at a word on that page or on your screen, you could probably see the word to your left and to your right. Right. And so that's a trained skill. So a person seeing three or four words doesn't have to make 10 stops.
They can make two or three stops. Right. So it's less taxing and you can go faster because it's not start or stop. And so there are all these different tips. And the master class will walk people through it so you actually get training on it. And again, it's free. 95% of what we publish is absolutely free because we want to democratize this to the world. But for your comprehension, the key to comprehension, though, is asking more questions, what we talked about.
Most people aren't looking for the pug dogs. So even when you're taking a test, usually the questions are at the end. In my books, I put the questions in the beginning. So it charges your reticular activating system. So when you read, they're like, oh, there's an answer. There's an answer. There's an answer. But the real culprit to reading faster is something called sub vocalization. You ever notice when you're reading something, you hear that inner voice inside your head reading along with you?
Yes, that's what was just happening. Hopefully it's your own voice, right? It's not somebody else's voice. The reason why it is an obstacle to effective reading is if you have to say all the words in order to understand them, you can only read as fast as you could speak. That means your reading speed is limited to your talking speed and not your thinking speed. Yeah. So what we do is we train individuals to reduce the sub-vocalization because the truth is, do you have to say all the words?
Do you have to say New York City to understand what New York City is? Do you have to say the word computer to understand what a computer is? The truth is you don't. Because 95% of words are what they call sight words. They're words you've seen tens of thousands of times, like a stop sign. You don't have to say stop every single time, but you understand what it means. 95% of the words in your book that you're reading online, emails, are words you've seen before.
You don't have to say it in order to understand those words. So we train people to reduce this sub-vocalization. Lastly, on concentration and flow and these kinds of topics, what advice would you give me if I'm trying to get into what they call the flow state more often and I'm trying to do deeper work and be less distracted? I mean, there's all these techniques. There's one called, what's it, the Pomodoro Technique? And there's all of these different techniques.
But what have you found to be most effective? All right. For those people who are struggling with concentration and focus and getting in the zone. Right. We've done a number of podcasts, this whole chapter dedicated to flow. The the art and science of getting in the zone. Right. Flow is a state where you feel your best and you perform your best. That's what those flow states that the markers of it are usually three things. Number one, you lose your sense of self.
Right. The second thing you lose, it's effortless. It almost feels like you're in that zone, you don't have to exert a lot of effort. And the third thing is you lose your sense of time. You don't know if five minutes went by or five hours because you're in the moment, you're present. So you could actually, here's the, here's, you like first principles. One of my first principles is taking nouns and turning them into verbs. I get in the habit every day of hearing a noun and turning it into a verb.
Meaning I think a lot of people hypnotize themselves by the words that they use. They say, I don't have motivation today. I don't have focus today. I don't have energy. You do not have those things, you do them. So you don't have motivation, there's a process for motivating yourself. You don't have energy, there's a process for generating energy. You don't even have a memory. You do a memory. There's a three-step process for memorizing, encoding, storing, and retrieving, right?
And so I think a lot of what our podcast, Your Mind, and our work is, is about transcending. Trance end. It's about ending the trance. Ending this mass hypnosis through marketing or media that were broken, you know, like I felt for so long, that I felt like I wasn't enough, like you did. Or transcending our own thoughts, meaning like I am a procrastinator, right? How do you change that if that's your identity, right? And so going back to the power of words and taking nouns and turning to the verbs, focus, you don't have focus, you do it.
There's a process for focusing, right? And so what I would do if I want to get into flow state, the trigger for flow, getting in the zone, is when competence and challenge connect. Meaning that imagine a diagram, right? And on one axis is challenge and one axis is competence and skill. If something is too challenging and you have low competence, that's just stressful. Right? It's a bigger challenge and you're capable of handling. If the capability is too high, you're highly skilled, and the challenge is too low, then you're bored.
You're too skilled, and this challenge is not even a challenge. So you're not getting in that flow state. Flow happens when you're at that edge, where it's just challenging enough to keep you engaged, and it's stretching you also as well. So it's a state of mind that you could create. And what I would recommend doing it with everything is a small, simple step. Right. And when you're in flow, the world kind of disappears. So you have this natural focus.
Is there anything that you have an activity like writing where you can lose sense of time and effortless? Mm hmm. So people could create that in their job, in their relationship, on the on the field also as well. So so obviously. up level your capabilities, right? And then have an acceptable amount of challenge there also as well. Also, a lot of that comes through finding passion and focus. So flow starts with focus. And what I would say is focused activities of work, eliminating distraction to the best of your ability.
Let's say you need to focus on this activity, your phone is not there. people, your family knows that not to be bothered, right? And then you're engaging somewhere, somewhere. Meaning there's something called the Zygarnik effect that I talk about in the book. And this is a doctor. She was a psychologist in Europe. And she noticed that when she's having coffee out at the cafe outside, that all the wait staff would easily memorize all the orders without writing them down until they were delivered.
And once the wait staff delivered that order, they would forget. Right. And she called it the Zygarnik effect after her last name, that our our ability when we start something, there's a high propensity for us to want to finish it. Right. To have closure, to have to close that loop. You know, that's how people keep people coming back to every Netflix show or whatever, because there's an open loop, right? Some kind of suspense that they want to get closure on.
So you have to behave and follow through. The Zygarnik effect, if you start somewhere, anywhere, because you procrastinate, you're more likely to finish that activity because it's an open loop. And that open loop will engage somebody to get into flow. Okay. What's the most important thing we haven't talked about in your view, based on all of the mission that you articulated so well at the start of this conversation? What's the most important thing?
Okay. So I love this discussion about disrupting education, you know, in terms of the power of meta learning and learning how to learn. If there was a genie right now who could grant you any one wish, but only one wish, everyone who's watching and listening would ask for more wishes, right? Because then they could get money, they could get everything else they want. If I was your learning genie and I could help you become a master and expert in any one subject or skill.
By the way, everyone that thought food or something stupid before he said one more wish, you're not the only one. So if I was your learning genie and I could grant you one wish to learn, to become an expert in any subject or skill, people could think, oh, I want to be a great dancer. I want to understand money or invest in whatever it is. The equivalent of asking for limitless wishes is learning what? learning how to learn. Because if you learn how to focus and concentrate, read, understand, remember, what can you apply that to?
Everything. Yeah, money, Mandarin, martial arts, music, management, marketing, everything gets so much easier, right? So it's sharpening the saw that to be able to, you do that first and all the other, everything after that cutting, it's a lead domino, right? And so I think that limitless is a treatise on an owner's manual for a brain, the best diet, sleep, everything else, and the processes for focusing, remembering, Learning how to learn. I would say the thing that I would want on my professional tombstone would be a Venn diagram with three things.
And this is the core to my work. I realized that a lot of people know what to do, but they don't do what they know. That most people have forgotten more about personal development and growth and transformation and money and wellness, whatever they're hearing, than most of the people that they know because common sense is not common practice. How do you get yourself to overcome self-sabotage, procrastination, and actually get something done? And so I would end with this.
Limitless is not about being perfect. It's about progress. But in what area of your life, if you're still listening to this, do you feel like you're stuck, that you're not making progress? Think of you don't have to share this, but I know you're very vulnerable. But is there an area of your life you feel like you're in a box? And it could be your learning. You might be feel like, yeah, I wish I could learn faster, remember better, read faster. I wish I was more organized.
If you could see what my suitcase looks like right now, my cameraman walks into my room. It's like a fucking hurricane had hit the room. Right. Yeah, that's embarrassing. And the organization also will help with your focus and everything else because your external world affects your internal world. So imagine everybody right now listening. Let's make this practical. Where are you stuck? I'm going to admit something I've never admitted. When I connect my AirPods to my iPhone, it says Apple AirPods, brackets, 23.
because that is my 23rd pair of Apple AirPods. So that's how unorganized I am. For me to keep hold of those little things, it's an impossibility. So anyway, sorry. No, no. And we can work on that also because I mean, do you have- It's expensive. Well, the thing when I teach meditation or I do mindfulness, it's not just about that 20 minutes you're in silence externally and internally, whatever's going on. You could bring mindfulness into your eating.
You know, I show people just challenge them to brush your teeth with the opposite hand. Maybe it engages a different part of your brain, right? The opposite side, but it forces people to be present, you know? And I think flexing that presence muscles and that mindfulness muscles first thing in the morning is just very important, especially when you could tag it to a habit And so eating. So it's not just what you eat. Ask the other questions, right?
It's why you eat. It's where you eat. It's when you eat. It's how you eat also as well. Some people are so stressed out about their diet, you know, measuring every micronutrient and everything and so stressed out about some ideology that it negates any health benefit they're getting from it because they have so much anxiety around eating, right? But it's also not only why you eat, but how you eat. Some people, as they're eating, they're working at the same time.
And you've heard about the sympathetic, parasympathetic, right, in terms of our nervous system. The sympathetic is kind of like your beta, your fight or flight, but your sympathetic is rest and digest. But some people, when they're working, they're not even that parasympathetic person. place where they could rest and digest their food because they're also, while they're doing this, they're working and stressed out or on conversations or anything.
So, you know, going, going back to this, I want everyone just to imagine an area of their life. This is what I would teach on my professional tombstone. is the limitless model. It's a Venn diagram, three intersecting circles. And I want everyone to imagine an area of your life where you feel stuck in a box. Your income, your impact, your learning, your finance, whatever it happens to be, your relationships. Where do you feel like you're not making progress?
And by definition, that box, it's a cube, right? And that cube is three dimensional, right? So the three forces that contain that box, that's keeping you in there, it's the same three forces that will liberate you out. Now the three forces that I'm talking about are the limitless model. And if you're watching this on video, I'm going to make three intersecting circles on a pad of paper. So three intersecting circles. Most people know this as a Venn diagram.
It kind of looks like Mickey Mouse, two ears and a head. And so these are the three forces that will liberate you to help you become limitless in any area of your life. And this works for a person, a family, a team, a nation, a world. Okay, so it could be a micro or macro. And this is how real transformation happens. So here's the thing. You're taking something specific, maybe your income or your reading speed or your memory. Let's say your memory, you feel like you're in a box, you can't get out of it, right?
The first circle, the top left, is... I'm going to give you three M's is your mindset. All right. So your first circle is your mindset and your mindset. I am going to define as your set of assumptions and attitudes you have about something, your attitudes, assumptions about being unorganized. Yeah, exactly. And that's going to contain you in that box, right? Because it's defining the borders and boundaries of what's possible. So if somebody could also, whose finances, their mindset, and assumptions and attitudes about money.
If people think money is the root of all evil or money doesn't grow on trees, whatever their mindset is, it could contain them in that box. If their memory, if they feel like they're limited in a box, you know, it could be, I'm getting too old. I'm not smart enough, right? That's mindset. attitudes and assumptions about something, especially attitudes, assumptions, besides your attitude assumption about a relationship. What does that mean? It means I lost my freedom.
Does it mean whatever it is? That's going to affect your, your quality of box. But the other part of it is your mindset and attitudes assumptions about yourself. So three things I would put in mindset, what I believe is possible. So you could believe it's possible for, you know, Steve, I have like millions of followers and make all this money or whatever, but you might not believe it's possible for you. So what I believe is possible, what I believe I'm capable of, that somebody could, those could be different.
And the third thing is what I believe I deserve. Like people don't feel like they deserve to have this body or this business or they have imposter syndrome or they don't think they deserve to be happy in a relationship. That's going to affect all behaviors belief driven. Right. In order to get a result, new result, you have to do a new behavior. In order to do that new behavior, you need a belief that allows that to be possible. So that's mindset.
So that's Mickey Mouse's left ear. Right. Now, Mickey's right ear is going to be the second hand, which is motivation. Okay. Huge. Because you could have a limitless mindset about money, about change, about your health, your memory. and you're not motivated to get out of that box, so you're not getting out of that box. So motivation, people talk about it like a warm bath. For me, motivation is very structured. It's only three factors that you have to unlimit.
The formula for limitless motivation, to motivate yourself to work out, to read, to meditate, or to motivate someone to buy, or your kids to clean their room. Three things, P times E times S3. The letter P times the letter E times S3. And what does this mean? And now see yourself in that box. If you're not motivated, you're procrastinating. The P is purpose. Start with Y, as Simon talks about. But if you don't feel it... Like I had, I saw somebody on the street the other day and he was, I didn't even recognize him because when I knew him years ago, he was so unhealthy.
I mean, like the worst extreme and all friends would do interventions, say, give him suggestions. He would ignore all of it. He would take pride in being unhealthy. Right. I see him on the street, he lost all his weight, he looks younger, I didn't even recognize him. And I'm just like, what have you been doing? He tells me all his stuff. I'm like, we've been telling you for like 20 years to do this stuff, why are you all of a sudden? And he's like, I came home, tell me about this work trip, he came home and his daughter's like crying hysterically and she had a dream that he died, right?
And wasn't there for him. And that was purpose, right? So that's the thing, we are not logical, we are biological. dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, we could get that through life circumstances or to focus on something that drives us. So I would- Sometimes we need a rock bottom moment to get a new purpose in life. That kind of explains why that is the case. So many of my guests here, when I hear about their life stories say, this particular thing happened, and then my life changed.
And what you're saying there is, it was an increase in their purpose. I would say there's some things in my experience that you could only learn through a storm. Like some storms come to teach us things, you know, or to clear a path for us. But certainly rock bottom is an interesting perspective. We talked about the six thinking hats to be able to look at something from a different point of view, you know. So the purpose, so feel the purpose. And so just like people don't buy logically, they buy emotionally.
§04Transcript — part 4
Get them emotional, right? But then if you don't have an emotional reason to read that book, emotional reason to remember that name, emotional reason to do that. Okay, so E is emotion, right? No, the E, P is the purpose, which is emotion. The E is energy. So some people aren't motivated because they're exhausted. You know, like, so like the idea here is like, I mentioned newborn baby. If you haven't slept for three nights in a row, you're not gonna be very motivated to work out.
Right, if you had a big processed meal and you're a food coma, you're not gonna be very motivated to study or read that day. Okay, so like physiological energy. Perfect. So remember, you don't have energy, you do it. So the things we talked about, reducing stress, getting good night's sleep, eating the best brain foods. S3. Now, S3, somebody could have limitless purpose. They know why they do it. They're doing the right things for the right reasons, and they could have unlimited energy and still not be motivated because they're overwhelmed or because they're confused.
Maybe that goal is too big. They want to meet their soulmate and live happily thereafter. That's way too big, right? They want to make the next unicorn. That's way too big, right, on Dragon's Den, whatever. S3 stands for small, simple steps. Because often what stalls us is we're intimidated or we're confused, and a confused mind doesn't do anything. Even if you're marketing to somebody, give them purpose, have them energy, meaning having resources, capital.
But are you making it so simple they can't fail? Small, simple steps. Because if you make that too confusing... They won't go do anything. So a small, simple step, this is how you find it, with a question. I ask myself this question every day. When I get confused or I get overwhelmed, I say, what is the tiniest action I could take right now that will give me progress towards this goal where I can't fail? What's the tiniest action I could take right now that will give me progress towards this goal or I can fail?
So let's say somebody doesn't work out, right? Because this is beyond, that's too big of a jump. Small, simple step, put on their running shoes. Maybe somebody, leaders or readers, they're inspired now to say that they're gonna read every day for an hour, that's too big. Maybe small, simple step, opening up the book, reading one line. Can't get your kids to floss their teeth? Get them to floss one tooth. Right. Nobody's or put one sock in the hamper, you know, to get clean because nobody remembers that Garnick effect.
Nobody's going to stop at one tooth. They're going to go to completion. So I believe little by little, a little becomes a lot. And that's the key for motivation. Mindset motivation. And then the last things, the head there is the methods. And I put that last because a lot of people know the methods. but they're not doing it because they either don't have the right mindset or they don't have the right motivation. Now, here's the reason why I share this, and I'll put this on my professional tombstone, is because this is the gap between what keeps people limited to limitless, meaning any area of your life, you control the controllables.
Right. And what you could always control is your mindset, your motivation and the methods you're using to reach that goal. So what I would do with this is I would put like goal on top and then you could even use this as a role modeling. I can listen to all your podcasts and discern and elicit. what is their mindset? What is their beliefs and attitudes, assumptions about that topic, money, Ray Dalio, whoever you're talking to, right? Then I would say, what's their motivation?
What's the purpose? You know, what are their small, simple steps? And then the methods that they're using, because the methods that work today, you know, they want the methods that worked 10 years ago in marketing aren't necessarily the same methods that will work for today, right? Or investing or in wellness, because there's a big information upgrade. So my message for everybody is the past few years have been very frightening for a lot of people.
And out of that fear, I feel like they've downgraded their dreams to meet this current situation. And I think that's the wrong approach. You shouldn't be downgrading your dreams to meet the current situation. You should be thinking, how do I upgrade my mindset? How do I upgrade my motivation? How do I upgrade the methods I'm using to be able to meet those bold, audacious goals, right? Jim, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for.
Okay. The question that's been left for you is, ooh, wow. Good question. What is the last thing you did that you deeply regret? Okay, I'll say this. Without giving names, I committed to an event to speak at out of this country in your neck of the woods. And it's an event I really want to go to. And I put it off for years. I do regret because I'm going to be missing Father's Day here in the United States. And this boy I've learned so much from, he's only a few months old, but, and I, it's funny going into fatherhood, the three growth areas I've had in my life were entrepreneurship and you can identify with that, right?
Like when it's all lies on you and if dozens of people that rely on you to, for their livelihood and the impact it's, it's a lot of responsibility, my personal relationship, you know, where you're intimate with somebody and you're that vulnerable and. But the third thing is fatherhood. And I went into this thinking, I'm going to upgrade this kid's brain and biohack the heck out of this kid. I've noticed over the past few months that I've taken a different approach.
I'm just like loving this kid so much, but just observing. And I don't remember the times a lot of my childhood because of what I went through, but just watching these revelations that he has hands. and that he can manipulate the world. And I realize that my perspective has changed instead of me teaching him stuff. You know, I want to protect him and provide, but I feel like he's reminding me of these important core memories that I had forgotten.
Jim, thank you so much. Jim Quick knows how to get the maximum out of me as a human being. A wonderful quote that Will Smith has put on the front of his book, and that's exactly what you're doing for so many people. That's the mission you're on, and that's certainly what you've done for me. I've been a fan of yours for some time now. Having struggled with a lot of the things you talk about in this book, even the process of meeting you and getting to do the research has advanced.
So many of those in critical areas of my life. Really, I think the key thing is it's let down a series of limiting beliefs that have held me prison prisoner and hostage you know the first the left ear on that mickey mouse thing was was mindset that's probably where i'm struggling the most and from reading your book limitless that's certainly the wall that has been left out that has been that has been um torn down so thank you for that and thank you for the mission you're on because i can feel in everything you say and all the stories you tell how internally motivated and how authentic you are about what you're doing And that's a service to the world that I think is incredibly necessary.
So thank you so much, Jim. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your vulnerability. And thank you for your wisdom. Can I challenge everyone to do something, Steve? Please. I would love everybody knowing that knowledge by itself is not power, that a small, simple step could lead to something big. Just take a screenshot of wherever they're consuming this. on social media and Spotify, on iTunes, wherever, and tag you and I so we get to see it. And I have a question for everybody, because this will be my question for your next guest.
Is my normal question is, what are you gonna do for your brain today? And I would love to hear that also. But over the past 12 months, What is a new behavior or a belief or a habit and understanding that you've adopted that has served you this past year? A new behavior or belief that has been supportive of you. And I would love for you to post that, tag us so we see it. I'll repost some of my favorites and I'll actually gift a few copies randomly for the book out to people.
Signed copies or... We could do that also as well. That's very generous of you. Books are everything for me. And then I encourage people to connect. And again, I put that link, if that's okay to mention, in our Instagram. for the quiz for the brain animal, mybrainanimal.com and to our podcasts and everything. But I appreciate Steve, I'm being a big fan and follower of your work. Impeccable the amount of so many shows like you're on, like somebody will say something so deep and then, and I'll be so upset because the interviewer will go on, well, my next question is this.
And I'm like, whoa, whoa. But you're so good at being present, you know, and since you create space for so many people to just be vulnerable and, you know, it's real, it's raw, and it's extremely rewarding. So thank you. Thank you. So, so unbelievably kind of you to say that. It means the world to me, Jim. Thank you so much. Pleasure to meet you and become friends. Thank you.