The School of Greatness - How To Change Your Behavior And Accomplish Your Goals [MASTERCLASS] EP 1317
Episode Date: September 9, 2022Today’s episode is about motivational methods for changing one’s behavior. Three experts on behavioral psychology share their perspectives and advice for how you can increase your productivity and... accomplish your dreams.In this episode, Nir Eyal, author & lecturer, shares his key metrics for success and the difference between good and bad visioning.Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman elaborates on the brain/body contract and the common misconceptions of how dopamine affects our behavior.Jim Kwik, a master of memory, teaches the model of learning anything faster and the lies you’ve been told that are holding you back from learning.For more, go to lewishowes.com/1317 Full episodes:Nir Eyal - https://link.chtbl.com/1047-podAndrew Huberman - https://link.chtbl.com/1071-podJim Kiwk - https://link.chtbl.com/947-pod
Transcript
Discussion (0)
It's not about finishing anything.
It's not about finishing anything.
The only metric of success from now on for you should be one thing.
Welcome to the School of Greatness.
My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message
to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
Thanks for spending some time with me today.
Now let the class begin.
Welcome to this special masterclass.
We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your
life through this specific theme today.
It's going to be powerful,
so let's go ahead and dive in. You mentioned you shouldn't think about the SMART goals.
What should we be thinking about on how to set our goals and dreams for our life?
Yeah, so goals are tricky. I would say that there's nothing inherently wrong with the SMART goals goals technique, etc. There is definitely a lot wrong with the visioning of, oh, this is what I, you know, let me sit here and make a vision board and a mood board about like my five-year plan.
tomorrow. Okay. Let's just start with tomorrow as opposed to, Ooh, what do I want to do in five years? And my vision board and my mood board and all that stuff. How would the person you want to
become? Again, it's about living according to your values and nobody can tell you what your values
are. How would the person you want to become spend their time? And by blocking out that time to say,
you know what? Uh, yes, I have a dream that someday I'll write a novel. I have a
dream that I'll get my PhD. I'll get a dream, a dream that I'll have a successful business. Okay,
but how much time are you going to invest in that? And knowing that constraint to the same 24 hours
with everything else that you want to do and that you dream of forces you to prioritize. And that is
essential, you know, consistency over intensity. That is essential to getting to that long-term goal is to work on it day or over day, after day, after day.
Relentless forward momentum.
This is how we accomplish these big goals, not just dreaming about them.
The only metric of success from now on for you should be one thing.
Did I do what I said I would do without distraction?
That's it. That's all you got to do. It's not
about finishing anything. It's not about finishing anything. Because when you say to yourself in your
calendar, I am going to sit at my desk and work on my book, as you said, Lewis, right? For 30 minutes,
45 minutes, whatever it is you say you want to do. I don't care how long you work on it. Whatever you
said you're going to do.
That technique has been shown.
This is called making an implementation intention,
which is just a fancy way psychologists call planning out what you're going to do
and when you're going to do it.
That technique has been shown to be more effective.
Here's the kicker.
The people who do that actually finish more.
They actually get more done
than the people who use the to-do list technique.
It's kind of like saying, okay, I'm not going to go run for an hour today, but I'm going to put my
shoes on and I'm going to go outside and I'm going to start the run for two minutes. And I'm just
going to do that every day. But by saying, okay, I'm going to schedule this for 10 minutes or
whatever, then you typically want to do more because you're already in the flow. Right. It's a little bit more than tiny steps.
It's actually saying for that period of time. So I respect the, you know, just get started
technique. Very nice. But it's the don't stop technique. Got it. More than just get started.
Don't get just started. Go for 30 minutes. Go for the time you scheduled in your calendar.
Don't get discarded. Go for 30 minutes. Go for the time you scheduled in your calendar.
Right. Don't say, oh, I'm going to run a 730 or whatever. Say, I am going to walk for 30 minutes and I'm not going to do anything else that might take me away from working on this thing for 30
minutes in my life. Okay. I'm going to be with my child without distraction for one hour.
That's all I'm going to do. I am going to check email
and do nothing but flush through my email inbox for 15 minutes without doing anything else. I am
going to read a book and nothing else for 20 minutes. That is all you need to do to measure
yourself. Don't worry about, will I finish the book? Will I get to inbox zero? Will I have a
beautiful relationship with my child? Will I ever be in good physical fitness?
Don't worry about the end goals.
Worry about, did you put in the time to work on the task you wanted to work on without
distraction?
That's your only metric of success.
And what happens to our self-confidence or the belief in ourself when we constantly let
ourselves down with this process of not doing what we say we want to do.
Right. So if you use the, if you run your life on a to-do list and you don't finish what you said
you're going to do, which barely anybody with a to-do list actually, you know, who runs a life
with a to-do list actually does, you're reinforcing a negative self-image of another day went by and
here I go. I didn't do what I said I was going to do. Look, I still got all these things that I
didn't get to. What a loser. As opposed to when you measure yourself based on
this only metric of, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without
distraction, you are a winner with every time box. Just being your word. Yeah. It doesn't matter the
results you get. It's just that I was my word today. I was my word.
And what I said I was going to do, I did it.
And that builds a better self-image and self-confidence with self, right?
Bingo. So being indistractable, first and foremost, is about personal integrity.
It's about being as honest with yourself as you are with other people, right?
We all know that we wouldn't want to be a liar.
Being called a liar is one of the worst insults anybody could with other people, right? We all know that we wouldn't wanna be a liar. Being called a liar is one of the worst insults
anybody could say to you, right?
You wouldn't wanna lie to your friends,
to your family, to your coworkers.
And yet we lie to ourselves every day, right?
Oh, I'm definitely gonna go work out.
No, you didn't.
I'm definitely gonna eat right.
Nah, I'm definitely gonna be fully present
with the people I love.
Not really.
We lie to ourselves and that takes a huge psychic toll on our self-image
and we don't even realize it until it's too late.
And that's when people start concocting all these ridiculous ideas.
Oh, I have a short attention span or I'm bad with time management
or hey, you know what, I probably need some kind of diagnosis.
It's all ridiculous.
For the vast majority of people, there's nothing wrong with them, right?
They just reinforce this crappy self-image of someone who's incapable when they are perfectly
capable if they had the right techniques. How much does self-confidence or believing in yourself
matter in terms of accomplishing the goals we set out for ourselves? Is it, if we have a low self-esteem and low
self-confidence, do you believe that we can still accomplish the goals and dreams that we have?
Or do we really need to start building confidence and belief in our actions and in who we are
with those actions in order to accomplish those goals?
Yeah. So this is where the psychology of agency comes into play, that believing that you can do something is incredibly empowering. The question, of course, is, well, how do I get that belief? And where most people go wrong is that they have these big, hairy goals, right? We've all heard about, oh, you have to have a specific, measurable, actionable, you know, the SMART goals and all that stuff.
It turns out that the literature around, this is another one of these areas that we've seen,
the pop psychology is so off base.
One of the most popular things that you hear these days around goals is that you have to have visioning.
Let's all sit down and make a five-year plan and a visioning board so that we can envision
what we want.
It turns out that studies show that people who do this are shooting themselves in the foot.
Wow.
That we know that studies find that thinking to yourself, oh, you know, I want that beach body is pretty much the worst thing you can do if you really do want that beach body.
Really?
What should you do instead?
Here's the difference.
There's a good visioning and bad visioning. Bad visioning is envisioning, you know, this bullshit, excuse me, that comes
from this idea of the secret, right? The law of attraction that, you know, envision yourself
wealthy, envision yourself being in love, envisioning yourself being in good physical
shape. Terrible. Don't do that. The good kind of visioning is not visioning the outcome because
what's happening when you envision the outcome is that you are satiating that desire. By imagining it, you are satiating it. It feels
like you already got it. Instead, the good kind of visioning is to envision what you will do when
something gets in the way of the actions you have to take to get that goal. So, instead of thinking,
oh my God. When you're distracted, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do? Exactly. So, instead of thinking, oh my God, I'm going to look so good
with a six pack. Instead, think about what am I going to do next time I go up with my friends
and they offer me a piece of chocolate cake. That's the right kind of vision.
Because envisioning this incredible result in a year or 10 years is nice in theory,
but it's going to be extremely hard to get there with a big goal that you might have, a big dream, launching anything, a book,
the physical body, the relationship. It's not just going to happen instantly without effort and work.
So, what I'm hearing you say is to focus on that's going to take a lot of work and time,
energy. So, every time I'm pulled away from that, envisioning how you're actually going to show up for yourself
to support yourself in getting there.
That's right.
That's right.
And so that's why reimagining these internal triggers is so important.
As we talked about earlier, what is the dialogue?
What techniques will I have?
What arrows will I have in my quiver ready to go when I am tempted with procrastination and distraction?
What will I do in those times?
Is there good research on, what did you call this?
Revisioning or what did you call this?
Yeah.
Yeah, there is.
There's actually some, there's an article on my blog.
I can give you a link in the show notes where I talk about the difference between good visioning
and bad visioning.
Very, very important because if there's one mantra I live by and is kind of the foundation of my life now
since writing this book,
and I didn't used to be this way, by the way.
I'm 42 years old.
I used to be clinically obese.
Today, I'm in the best shape of my life.
I actually have a six pack for the first time ever.
And I'm not saying this to brag.
I'm saying this because what I've learned
is that consistency is more important than
intensity, right? Consistency over intensity in every area of your life. You want good relationships,
you have to be consistently present with the people you love. You want to be great at your job,
you have to consistently do the hard work that other people don't want to do. You want to have a,
you know, be in good physical shape, you have to consistently show up and do the workouts. It's not
about the intensity. It's not about, oh, it's New Year's. I'm going to make a resolution
for five days and then quit. It's about consistent action. And that only comes not,
here's a really important point. It's not about knowing what to do. You know, we become so obsessed
with, oh, what's the right workout? What's the right diet? What's the right, uh, this, that,
I better go get a book to tell me what to do. Like, let me go listen to some guru to give me all the answers.
We basically all know what to do, right? And if you don't know what to do,
Google it for God's sakes, all the answers are right there, right? We basically know what to do.
What we don't know how to do is how do we stop getting in our own way? The real problem is not
that we don't know what to do. It's that we don't know how to stop getting distracted. So how do we get out of our own way?
Yeah. So we went through one and a half of the strategies. Number one is mastering the
internal triggers. Number two is making time for traction, which we talked about a little bit in
terms of why making a schedule is so very important. It turns out the vast majority of
people don't keep any sort of It turns out the vast majority of people
don't keep any sort of a calendar.
Two-thirds of people don't keep a calendar.
Even those who do keep a calendar
typically don't do it properly.
And the proper way to do it
is by using what's called a time box calendar.
And I show you how to do that.
This technique has been around for ages.
It's been around for decades.
It's actually one of the most studied techniques out there.
Very, very
well-researched technique of planning your day. It's called making implementation intention.
But we can go beyond that too, where what I advise in the book, and this hasn't been published
elsewhere, is this process of what I call schedule syncing, which is very, very important.
So making time for traction is all about deciding how you want to spend your time, right?
But to do that, well, the question is, well, how do I do that?
How do I decide how I'm going to spend my time?
And this is where a lot of people get stuck with the time boxing technique.
You know, we've all heard it, but this is why people don't do it.
They don't understand that what is the first step?
How do I really get started in time boxing?
The first step is to start with our values, okay?
Turning our values into time.
So what are values?
Values are attributes of the person you want to become.
Let me say that again.
What are values?
Values are attributes of the person you want to become.
So what we're going to do is we're going to ask ourselves,
how would the person I want to become spend their time?
And we're going to ask ourselves this in three life domains.
These three life domains of you, you're at the center of these three life domains,
then your relationships, then your work.
Most people do it in the wrong order, right?
They start with their work and then only then they give the whatever scraps of time are
remaining to their friends, their family, and to themselves.
No, we want to start with you.
So we ask ourselves, how would the person I want to become spend their time investing in themselves?
Now, it is not up to me or anyone else to impose their values onto you. You have to ask this of
yourself. How would the person I want to become spend their time investing in themselves? So how
much time would they invest in physical fitness? If that's important to you, I'm not saying it should be, but if it's important to you, is that time to go to the gym, to go on a
run, to go on a walk, whatever it might be, proper nutrition, rest. Oh my God. How many of us know
we have to get quality sleep? Everybody knows this. I don't need to tell you that. You've read
tons of literature that says sleep is important. How many of us have a bedtime?
How many of us actually have our calendar? Yeah, scheduled.
Yes. Very few people do, right? We have to have that time scheduled because you know what you're
going to do if you don't. You'll check Facebook for another five minutes. You'll watch another
thing on Netflix. Right. You've got to have that time scheduled. Now, again, if you say,
you know, the way I invest in myself is I play video games for four hours a day.
I got no problem with that.
I'm not one of these chicken little tech critics that's going to say, oh, no, you know, watching football is okay, but playing video games is bad.
No, ridiculous.
Anything you want to do with your time is fine as long as you decide in advance.
So if you say, I want time to play video games, great,
but put it on your schedule. Don't do it according to the tech company's schedule.
Do it according to your values and your schedule. So that's the you domain.
Next comes the relationship domain. And this is a really important one.
Part of the reason we have a loneliness epidemic in this country. And, you know, we know that researchers
tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity. It is a real crisis
right now. The reason this is happening, this is not happening because of social media. Social media
is the symptom to this disease, which is that the proportion of time spent in planned social engagements
in this country has been in a precipitous decline.
Okay.
So if you read Robert Putnam back in the 1990s, he wrote this book called Bowling Alone, right?
Way back before Facebook and social media.
And he documented this trend, this 50-year trend now of people spending less time in
scheduled engagements with their friends. So he called it bowling alone because bowling used to
be a big social activity. You'd go to the bowling league and you'd see your friends and you'd get
together every Thursday night with your buddies. And that doesn't happen like it used to, right?
The secularization of the United States, not that I'm, you know, I'm a pretty secular
person. I'm not saying people should go to church or synagogue or whatever. I'm just saying
that those regular pillars of social engagement in our life for more and more people don't exist,
right? So the lack of those scheduled times for our relationships takes a deep psychological toll.
So you have to ask yourself, how would the person I want to become
spend time with the people they love?
Okay, not giving them whatever scraps of time
are left over between everything else,
but actually booking that time, right?
How many times have we, oh, we should get coffee someday.
Yeah, okay, right.
That's code for never, right?
So having that time with your children,
your family, your parents, your siblings, your best friends, having that time on your schedule.
I know many of us are at home right now during COVID. Got it.
Maybe one of the silver linings is that people now are more proactive about scheduling those Zoom calls.
I hope those will continue. Right. I mean, I'm spending much more time over Zoom with my parents than I was before COVID. So scheduling that time, you know, with your spouse, very, very important.
Having that time on your calendar, say, okay, this is our time together, whether it's a regular date
day, a walk time, whatever it might be, having that time scheduled and sacred for the people
you love. And then finally, the last domain is the work domain. And when it comes to work, we have to realize there are two types of work, okay?
There's what we call reactive work and reflective work.
Reactive work is a part of everybody's job, okay?
It's the phone calls, the meetings, the Slack channels.
It's reacting to whatever's happening in your work environment. And that's
part of the job. I get it. Some jobs, few jobs, are 100% reactive. If you work in a restaurant,
if you work in a call center, your job is to show up. You're not a schedule maker. You're a schedule
taker. You take whatever schedule is given to you. You show up, you do whatever needs to get done. It's all reactive, okay? Or almost all reactive. Other jobs are almost all reflective. So if you're a software
engineer, a marketing executive, a salesperson, you're not a schedule taker, you're a schedule
maker. You have to sit down and say, wait a minute, how will I plan my day? How should I spend my time?
And you have a tough job because your most important job is to figure out how to spend your time. What most people do is they take the easy default.
The easy default is I'll just take whatever comes to me. They think they're working in a
reactive job, but really they're working in a reflective job. And those are the kind of people
who suck at their jobs, right? Why? If you want a competitive advantage advantage if you want to be better than everyone else in
your field let me give you a little secret okay that no one else is doing think think make time
to actually sit and think in your day you know why because nobody else is doing it. I promise. They're reacting. Exactly. They're constantly reacting. But look, to plan, to strategize, to think ahead, you have to sit down without distraction and make some time to be with yourself in your own head to figure out what to do next. Right. You have to prioritize. That takes time to think without distraction. So I implore everyone,
if your job requires some level of reflection,
which almost everyone's job does,
give yourself that 30 minutes, 45 minutes,
heck, an hour a day to work without distraction
and put it on your calendar and keep it sacred.
Okay, so now we have these three life domains.
We have our time box calendar.
The final step is to do what we call a schedule sync. And this is what's been missing, I think,
from everyone else who's been taught, who's, you know, espouses this technique of time boxing,
and it's been around again for decades and decades, is, well, what happens when in reality,
I have a boss and a spouse, and I I have kids and I have other people who demand my
time, that schedule gets blown to bits. And the reason it gets blown to bits is because we don't
do what's called a schedule sink. Here's what a schedule sink looks like. Let me destroy yet
another piece of bad productivity advice, which is we've all heard that, you know, if you want to stay focused, if you want to be productive,
the best thing you can do is learn how to say no, right? Haven't we all heard this advice?
Learn how to say no to people. What kind of stupid advice is that, Lewis? You're going to look at
your boss, the guy who pays or the guy or gal who pays your bills, and you're
going to tell them, you know what, boss? No. Are you serious? Who would give that kind of advice?
If you've actually had a job, you know you can't tell your boss no. You'll get fired. So instead
of telling your boss no, what you're going to do instead is to say, hey, boss, look, can we sit
down once a week, okay, Monday morning, it's going to take 15 minutes max, and you're going to do instead is to say, hey, boss, look, can we sit down once a week? Okay, Monday morning, it's going to take 15 minutes max. And you're going to show them your schedule. Okay, now that
you've made a time box schedule, you're going to show them, right, you have a physical artifact,
you can share with them. And you say, hey, boss, here's my schedule for the week. Here's all the
stuff I'm doing. Okay, per per, you know, the priorities at work. Okay, here's how I'm spending
my time during the workday. Now you see this other list here? Okay, I wrote down on this other list here on this piece of paper,
all the stuff I couldn't fit into my schedule for the week. Can you help me reprioritize?
That's your boss's number one job, okay? A boss's job, number one, is to prioritize.
Yeah, what's the most important thing right now that you need me to do?
Exactly.
And can you have someone else support with these other tasks? Can we delegate to some other things if you want me to do this right now?
Absolutely. So if you say, look, if there's something on this list that's not in my calendar, no problem. What should I swap out?
Right.
Help me understand how to reprioritize.
Exactly. Schedule syncing, right.
Schedule syncing.
Synchronization so that, exactly, so that, and let me tell you, your boss will worship the ground you walk on. I've started
two startups. Most bosses have no idea how their employees are spending their time.
Zero.
No idea.
We're hiring more and more people. And luckily, we're pretty good at it because we use Slack
and monday.com. So we have projects projects that are managed and, you know, project managers and all that.
But I'm not looking in those things.
So, I have no idea actually what's being done unless I ask my project manager or my COO and say, are people even working today?
I don't even know.
You know, so, luckily, we have some of those tools.
But if you were like, hey, this is my calendar for the week, the things that I'm planning to create this week.
Time-boxed.
Yeah.
And you were like, hey, what can we eliminate or how can I delegate this?
Then I'm sure it would make that person pretty excited.
Right.
Or reprioritize.
Or here's the thing.
The boss is thinking, what the heck are people doing all day?
Right.
Why aren't things happening faster?
Employees are thinking, oh, my God, doesn't my boss know how much is on my plate right now? Right. I'm overwhelmed. I'm overworked. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And this,
of course, because there's no visibility into our schedules. And I'm telling you, it's 10 minutes a
week. It's 15 minutes max. If you sit down and say, here's my schedule.
Okay, here's how I plan to spend my time.
Help me reprioritize.
If you do this, your boss will say, actually, you know what?
That one thing, you really don't need to be at that meeting.
But that other thing is super important.
Can we swap that out?
This is how we get on the same page.
This is how we synchronize our schedules.
The question that you're asking is a very important one. It's actually the question, which is to what extent does our subjective narrative, the story we tell ourselves,
actually mean something for the body? And to what extent does the body actually mean something for
the subjective narrative? So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now. And so I do want to highlight
that it's ongoing work, but I think, you know, the old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago,
was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile. Well, if that worked, we would have a lot less
depression than we see out there. Now that does not mean- Most people actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well.
When you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about
yourself a little bit?
The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are
constantly in dialogue.
So the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures, when
we're feeling good we tend to be in more defensive type postures. When we're feeling good, we tend to be in more like relaxed and extended postures.
All true.
But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind.
Right.
That's a first step.
Think about like two interlocking gears.
It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going.
So how do you get it to dance together?
Exactly.
dance together before you can get the whole system going.
So how do you get it to dance together?
Exactly.
So subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body.
To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold?
So a couple of things that are important.
First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are.
Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time.
They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection, but thoughts can also be
deliberately introduced. For instance, right now I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide
to write your name and you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it. So
that's a deliberate thought, which says that you can introduce that. I'm gonna decide to write my name and you can do it. So that's a deliberate thought,
which says that you can introduce thoughts.
So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts
directly by trying to suppress them.
Generally, they tend to just wanna continue
to geyser up all the time.
But we can introduce a positive thought.
Can you think of two thoughts at the same time?
Probably not.
So you can only have one thought at a time.
Right, but they come very fast.
But it comes and goes. So you have to constantly one thought at a time. Right, but they come very fast. But it comes and goes.
So you have to constantly be intentional
and deliberate about what you think.
Otherwise, a spontaneous thought will pop back in.
Based on your experience, based on sensory,
based on how you're feeling or perceiving something,
your environment, it's just gonna keep popping in.
So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often?
Right. So I'm a big fan of wellness and I think it's a great community, but it tends to run in absolutes and there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say in science.
And what I love about your questions, you're asking for really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions.
One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your
body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. What a challenging thing.
I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value,
however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now, the reason is not because I think it's just
because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort.
And that relates to the dopamine pathway.
So the molecule dopamine is a reward.
It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal,
you meet the love of your life.
Someone likes your photo.
Someone likes your photo, the great love of your life,
you complete something.
But most of our dopamine release
is not from achieving goals.
It's actually released when we are en route to our goals,
where we're in pursuit of our goals,
and we think we're on the right path.
This is why a lot of people get depressed
after they achieve a big goal,
because they feel like,
I'm supposed to feel something greater.
I felt this thing for two minutes,
and now that's it?
That's right.
High achievers know to attach dopamine
to the effort process.
To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks,
the growth, the lessons, the losses,
like everything, right?
Well, and it can be to some wins along the way,
but growth mindset, which is the academic discovery
and laboratory discovery of my colleague,
Carol Dweck at Stanford,
is the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things.
One is I'm not where I want to be now,
but I'm capable of getting there eventually.
The other is to attach a sense of reward
to the effort process itself.
In fact- Don't reward the of reward to the effort process itself.
In fact, don't reward the result, reward the effort.
That's right.
And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do,
they don't peak and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs.
But really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine
to the effort process. And actually Carol's,
one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing
math problems that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles,
but in this case, they knew they couldn't get it right, but they love doing it. And it incidentally
or not so incidentally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer
because they feel some sense of reward
from the effort process.
Now the cool thing about dopamine
is that it's very subjectively controlled.
We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain
in response to things that are in a purely subjective way.
Our interpretation.
Our interpretation.
But it has to be attached to reality.
So, you know, one should never confuse.
What is real?
Right, so if you're thinking about
the effort you're expending.
So let's say somebody right now
is financially back on their heels
and they're setting up a new business, for instance.
And it's hard. is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business for instance and
it's hard if they can take a few moments or or minutes each day to reflect on the fact
that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially that it's
giving them an opportunity that it's somehow they are on the right path or they're or if
they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path, or if they're not in movement along that path, or at least oriented on the right path, they're not lying in bed all day.
They're taking a step forward.
They're taking a step.
If they can reward that process internally, two things happen.
First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger, so you get better at that process and second and most importantly
dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine and what I
mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal cell excellent journal
cell press journal a couple years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort we use and
we release more and more epinephrine it's kind of adrenaline
but in the brain with more effort every time every time you put in effort so every time you make for
this let's keep it if i were to keep it in the business context every time you make to write
that email every time you let's see it's a person who's a craftsman or a craftswoman every time
you're working in the in the shop and doing that every bit of effort you're taking a little bit of
money out of this epinephrine account you're spending epinephrine at some
point those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you you feel like
quitting it feels exhausted this was done in a beautiful study actually where
they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control
the visual environment so sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward this is actually
kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion would give them the sensation that they
were actually making progress and other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just
keep the the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they
were going anywhere epinephrine's climbing climbing climbing
and eventually they quit now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you
anyone the the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to
continue and you've seen this actually like football's a good example. Two teams play, say the Super Bowl,
both teams are max effort the entire time.
Max effort.
The team that wins, suddenly, in a moment,
has the energy to jump all over the place,
party for days, they can talk,
I mean, they have energy.
They're exhausted right before that.
Well, that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind,
except it was neural energy.
And what happened was effort is this adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline.
Eventually, people quit.
They just quit.
The dopamine is able to suppress that.
And so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it.
So we need dopamine to keep the effort going.
Is that what I'm hearing you say?
That's right.
Dopamine is not just about reward.
It's one of the biggest misconceptions.
Dopamine is about motivation and drive.
It's like a jet that propels you along a path.
How do we get more dopamine?
You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind.
Like how?
Okay, so that's a great question.
First of all, there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through
drugs or through supplements.
I want to be really clear.
There is a drug, there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine.
They're called cocaine and methamphetamine.
That's what gets us addicted because it feels so good.
The problem is, exactly, the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source.
It becomes the goal and the path.
It becomes the path and the destination.
And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine and that baseline on their life goes down very, very fast.
Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good.
That's right.
And that's the greatest feeling you'll have. So why do anything else when you
can have that feeling? That's right. And if you think about, remember these neurochemical systems,
adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and
to hunt and gather or to build fortune 500 companies. They were designed to do anything.
They were designed to be generic
so that depending on our circumstances, we could adapt. So in an animal context, an animal that,
let's say, is hunting or it needs food for its young, it's going to feel agitation. That's
stress. That's cortisol. It's like hunger. My babies might not eat. I might not eat.
Maybe it's looking for a mate. It's going to feel agitation and start looking and roaming
and searching. Foraging is called in the animal behavior world. It's foraging. At some point,
it might catch a smell of something, a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty.
At that moment, dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path.
dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain and that's involved in
depression and disappointment that if it goes to that place and turns out it was
the wrong path there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you
don't repeat that mistake again so you don't give up that's right you just
don't repeat it again that's right and those events that reminds you like that's not the path to go down.
That's right.
Interesting.
And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change
itself in response to experience.
Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions
led to success previously.
You're going to repeat those.
Those actions led to failure previously
and don't repeat those so dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path that's right so you asked
how do you do this so to really make it concrete and is there too much is there too much thing is
there such thing as too much dopamine well if you're not on drugs so cocaine amphetamine are
bad because they lower the baseline on life.
They make people very focused on things outside of themselves.
That's the other thing that dopamine does.
It can be positive or negative.
But when we have dopamine in our system, we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of
things in our environment.
You can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that.
But I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes. But, but the, you know, I love social media for the reason
that you see the molecules in the memes. So it's like, get after it. You know, what do sharks do
on Monday? Or I can't remember the specific things. Or then they're the, like, sometimes it's just
time to chill. Well, that's a different molecule. That's serotonin, right? And then dopamine is the
get after it molecule. And epinephrine is effort. So if we were going to break this down really concrete, we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort, just effort with no subjective label on
them, good or bad effort, whether or not stress or you're pursuing something you want to do. It's
just, it's exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards.
There's a method that you give or a model for how to become limitless.
And if we don't follow this model, then something's going to be broken in our life.
Isn't that right?
Yeah.
This model really is a framework for learning anything faster.
So for people who are listening and watching and they want to learn a language, they want to learn Mandarin, music, martial arts, management, marketing, math.
Any skill.
I think if there's one skill to master in the 21st century, it's our ability to learn faster.
Like if there was a genie and a genie could grant you any one wish, but only one wish,
what would you wish for? If there was only one wish, what would you wish for?
Most people would say money or this or that,
but you think learning is the key?
I think a lot of people go for-
I think being the matrix, like downloading the matrix
to where I could learn jujitsu in a second.
Exactly.
If I could learn a language in a second,
if I could have this skill.
So I think the hack a lot of people would do
is if it was any one wish,
they would wish for more wishes, right? Exactly, they would wish for more wishes. Right.
They would ask for infinite wishes.
So the equivalent, if I was your learning genie and I could grant you any one wish to learn any subject or any skill, just become a master at it,
what's the equivalent of the answer of asking for infinite wishes?
It would be learning how to learn.
Because if you can learn how to learn, the world is yours, especially today.
Because nobody who's listening and watching gets paid for their brute strength,
it's their brain strength.
It's not your muscle power, it's completely your mind power.
And the challenge is your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual,
it's not user friendly, and that's the reason why I wrote this book.
But the Limitless Model is an explanatory schema,
a framework for learning anything faster.
And not only that,
but really for accessing our human potential. Because I think if there's one infinite,
limitless resource on planet Earth, it's human capability. There's no limit on our determination.
There's no limit to our imagination. There's no known limit to our creativity. And yet,
we're not shown how to be able to access that and so this framework is a three-part framework and what I would offer
everyone to do is I love to turn this into a like a little master class make
it really engaging and so don't listen passively because we don't learn through
the human brain doesn't learn through consumption it learns through creation
and creativity and getting involved in things I know a lot of us learn faster
when we actually roll up our sleeves and do it.
So I would encourage everybody as they're working out
or cleaning the house
or whatever they're doing at the same time
to try to get involved in this.
Well, I think as an athlete, I can speak to that
because for me in school,
it's really hard to remember or learn things
because I didn't feel like I was participating
in a way that worked for me.
But as an athlete playing basketball,
when a coach would tell me,
okay, I want you to watch this video and then automatically shoot in a certain way with your
hand positioned this way and follow through this way, just by watching a video and not actually
implementing and practicing it, he would take me out on the court and we would practice it and do
it over and over again. And he would correct me and I would learn through muscle memory as opposed
to just watching something and then thinking I can do it without actually over again. And he would correct me and I would learn through muscle memory as opposed to just watching something
and then thinking I can do it
without actually practicing.
So putting it into practice quickly for me
is how I learned sports.
And it's how I try to apply it
in other areas of my life
as opposed to just,
I'm going to learn and then,
okay, I know it.
I feel like I need to work in it.
I feel you.
Get dirty.
You know what I mean?
I do.
I do.
I think a lot of people,
this is the thing. It's not how smart you are. It's not literally not how smart you are. It's
how are you smart? It's not how smart you are or how smart your kids are or how smart your business
partner is. It's how are they smart or how are you smart? What's the difference? So you are smart
through experiential learning. Like in the book, we talk about- Oh, how are you smart? Gotcha.
Exactly. It's not how smart
somebody is like their IQ or their intelligence. It's how are they smart? And it's always context
dependent. And so some people learn, we talk about learning styles in the book. It's like,
have you ever been interested, just like you were saying, you're interested in a topic,
but you're not getting it. Because sometimes the way you prefer to learn is different than the way
the teacher prefers to teach. And it's like you're two ships in the night and you pass each other.
And you don't even realize there's no connection.
You don't even realize the other one is there.
And it feels uncomfortable.
Like if I asked everybody as an exercise to take out a piece of paper, I encourage everyone to take notes.
Because I'm going to drop a lot of like practical methods.
If you were to write your name first and last on a piece of paper.
Actually, you could do it right now.
First and last.
And everyone encourages you to do this.
Or imagine you're writing your name first and last on a piece of paper.
And then when you're done, I want you to switch hands.
And in your opposite hand, right below it, write your first and last name with your opposite hand.
I don't even know if it would take me 10 minutes.
And so while people are doing it, you'll notice when you're doing it with the opposite hand as we're doing it, that's actually pretty good.
That if I was to ask you which one was easier, first or second, and you would say the first was easier, which one is more comfortable, first or last?
The first one.
The first one.
So not only was it faster, it was easier.
And then which one was higher quality? Let's check that out. The first one. The first one. So not only was it faster, it was easier. And then which one was higher quality? Let's check that out. Hopefully the first one's higher quality
also as well. And so here's the thing. That means the second time it took longer. The second time
it also was not as comfortable. And the second time also the quality wasn't quite as good.
And here's the thing. When I'm saying it's how you learn, some people are trying to learn something with the opposite hand.
So it takes longer.
It feels weird.
And the quality is not quite as good as opposed to if you're using your dominant hand.
So how do we know how to learn with our dominant hand as opposed to the opposite hand?
Yeah, and that's a metaphor for how we like to take in information.
Some people like to learn by reading.
Some people, they just cannot get through a book, though.
They have to listen to that audio or that podcast.
Other people need to—
Or watch someone lecturing it or talking about it.
Exactly.
And so we all have different styles, and it's not right or wrong.
Now, we can actually improve our ability to read.
We actually can improve our ability to listen and apply.
So if there are areas where we feel weak,
you know, this book is a guidebook
to be able to level up those areas
so you can be more of a whole brain learner also as well.
But really when it comes to accelerated learning,
it's not again, how smart you are,
it's how are you smart?
And that honors us and it takes the judgment out.
Sometimes in school, it's like the top 10% get As,
another 10% get Bs, and then 80% were like you and I.
It's like we're failing school as opposed to the way school maybe is failing us.
Because school teaches you what to learn, what to focus on, what to think, what to remember, but not how to learn and how to think.
Well, it teaches you how to think and learn in one way.
Exactly.
When I talk about in the book, I talk about the four super villains that are holding you
back in your work, in your schooling, in your life is driven by technology, but one of them
is digital deduction where we're depending on technology to tell us what to think.
We're not even using the children right now.
They're finding that their reasoning abilities,
their ability to analyze critical thinking
is not as sharp as where it should be
because of technology,
because technology is doing the thinking for us.
And our mind, I'm gonna say this repeatedly,
is like a muscle, it's use it or lose it.
And just like when you go, you have your personal trainer
to make your muscles stronger,
more energized, more flexible, more pliable, you know, more, you want your mental muscles to be
stronger, more energized, more pliable, more, more flexible. And so many people refer to me as a brain
coach because what I do is I train your brain because I think we're in the millennium of the
mind. I mean, it's really about mental fitness, our ability to adapt, our ability to think, our ability to solve problems. And this
really is everything. When people see me wearing brain shirts all the time or pointing to my brain,
the reason why I do that is because what you see, you take care of. You see your hair,
you take care of your hair. You see your skin, you take care of your skin. You see your clothing,
you take care of your clothing. You don't see your brain. Exactly.
And that controls everything.
And so when I point to the brain
or honor it with their shirt,
it's just like people have their emotions on their sleeve.
You know, I have my brain on my chest
because I want to put it forefront
to remind people to love their brain,
to care for their brain.
Yeah, I think it's, I mean,
that's why a lot of people, doctors and nutritionists,
are talking about gut health.
It's like, we can't see it, but we can start to feel rashes or we can start to feel the effects of it.
I think it's also heart health is a big thing right now.
It's just like the emotional health, self-care, self-love, mental health and emotional health kind of tied together.
And I love your work because you bring that to everybody, to the world.
And it's all connected.
I talk about it in the book. There's this heart intelligence and also your gut, to the world. And it's all connected. I talk about it in the book.
There's this heart intelligence and also your gut, as you mentioned. A lot of people call
it your second brain. It's the second highest concentration of nerve cells.
Really?
And it's connected too. And what you eat affects how you think. We know that because of the
guests we've had on our shows and everything else, that when you eat junk food, it's not really a thing. There's junk and then there's food.
There's sugar and there's food.
Exactly. And what you eat matters, especially for your gray matter. I remember in our previous
episode we did years ago, I showed people how to memorize the brain foods and all of the best
neuroprotectants, area of neuro nutrition nutrition it's really fascinating that your brain has different nutritional requirements than than the rest of rest
of your body but I'm going back to the limitless model there are three keys to
reaching your goals and this is my distinction here because originally I
remember years ago when you prompted me to write this book you're like Jim you
know it's been you know over two decades. You've got to do something. You put something in this book.
And so because fundamentally, I'm a reading teacher.
And somebody has decades.
Why I love reading.
If somebody has decades of experience and they put it into a book like you,
and all of a sudden people could read that book in a few days,
they could download decades into days.
And readers are leaders.
We know that.
Reading is to your mind what exercises your body.
It's the best mental fitness. And so the limitless model as an exercise, what I want everyone to do,
so it's not hypothetical, because in part of the book, I demystify the seven lies of learning.
There are seven lies that hold you back to learning. And one of them is knowledge is power.
We hear that all the time. I've even said it also as well. But when we think about it, is it really true?
Is knowledge, just knowing something, give you power?
No, not unless you act on it, not unless you apply it.
So knowledge times action equals power.
And so I would encourage everybody as you're listening to this to take immediate action.
And there are three questions I want you to ask as you're listening to this episode to make it very valuable.
And I would encourage you to write as you're listening to this episode to make it very valuable.
And I would encourage you to write these down.
Three master questions.
We were talking about some of the famous actors that I work on before we started filming.
And Will Smith did the cover endorsement of the book that says, Jim Quick gets the maximum out of me as a human being.
I've learned so much from this man, just being around, so many around clients.
And before I-
What have you learned from Will?
So one of the things is this idea of,
we were in Toronto and I help actors speed read scripts,
help them to memorize their lines faster.
I mean, you imagine like 30 pages of scripts.
There's a lot of-
I can't remember a sentence.
There's a lot, right?
And some of them have their strategies. And no matter how great
somebody is, you know this because you make your life about studying and researching greatness.
They always know there's another level. And they get really good at the fundamentals and
the basics. But one of the things when we were there, we spent the day together and
it was winter time in Toronto. They were filming from 6 p.m. To 6 a.m
Which can you imagine like so hard like one night time that that's very difficult
But during the day I went we went through an exercise and I believe so in there
I talked about how we have 50 to 70 thousand thoughts a day, right?
And these thoughts are controlling our lives and a lot of those thoughts are questions that we ask ourselves
You know thinking is that process of asking and answering questions. And if people are asking, is that true? Notice you had to ask a question to define if it's
true or not, right? And there's certain questions we ask more than any other question. So here's
the thing. I talk about dominant questions that you have one, two, three questions that you ask
a lot. And I want everyone to think about what your dominant questions are, including you. And I'll give you a couple of examples to get you started. So for example,
one of my friends, we went through this exercise of meditating and writing journaling down. We
found out her dominant question is, how do I get people to like me? How do I get people to like me?
Now she asked that question all the time and you don't know anything about her. You don't know her
age. You don't know her background. You don't know what she does for a living. You don't know what she
looks like. You know where she lives. You don't know anything about her, but you know a lot about
her. If you asked yourself, how do I get people to like me hundreds of times a day? What's her
personality? What's her personality going to be like? What's her life going to be like?
Well, I guess it could be either side of the spectrum. She could be super outgoing and super adventurous to try to get people to be more attracted to her.
Or she could be super shy and introverted because she's so worried about what people think about her.
So that's the first thing I thought of, but I'm not sure if that's true.
And it's absolutely true.
She actually does both of those things.
Really?
I mean, if you ask yourself, how do I get people to like me?
Then what are you doing?
You're people pleasing all the time.
You're a sycophant.
Just, you know.
Say yes to everything.
Yeah.
People take advantage of you because you're martyring yourself because they're always
trying to do, they're making themselves less than or their personality is never consistent
because their personality changes.
The chameleon, the change for people.
Exactly.
And you know all that about her and you only know one question she asks herself, and that's
one of her dominant questions.
I would offer everybody who's listening to this, what do you think your dominant question
is?
Because questions are the answer.
You know this from the work that you do in high performance and greatness, that the questions
you ask determine what you focus on.
You have part of your brain called the reticular activating system,
RAS for short, and it's your filtering system.
So at any given time, there's a billion stimuli
that we could be paying attention to.
And primarily, your brain is a deletion device.
It's trying to keep information out.
Otherwise, you would go crazy, right, if you paid attention to everything.
So what gets in?
So, for example, years ago, my little sister started sending me emails and postcards and pictures and photographs of a very specific kind of dog.
It was a pug dog.
You know those little dogs?
Exactly.
Men in black dog, right?
Yes, exactly.
Very smushy faces.
They're very compliant.
You could dress them up as ballerinas and they don't care.
And I didn't know why.
So my question was like, why is she sending me these pictures all the time?
That became a dominant question of the day.
And then I realized her birthday was coming up.
So she's a smart marketer, right?
Planting those seeds.
And here's the magic, though.
I started seeing pug dogs, Lou, everywhere.
I would go to the grocery store.
I'd be checking out.
And I swear to you, a woman's carrying a pug dog at the register.
I would be running and jogging in my neighborhood
and somebody's walking six pug dogs.
Now my question for everybody is,
did these pug dogs magically appear
all of a sudden in the world?
No, they were always there, but they were not,
I wasn't paying attention to them
because they weren't important
because I wasn't asking that question.
Once you ask a question,
you start to pay attention to those things
and that focus determines how you feel,
determines your behaviors,
and primarily, it's so interesting,
it's kind of like social media.
There's an algorithm to your mind,
like there's an algorithm to Facebook and Instagram,
that what you engage with the most,
you like and you share, you comment,
you start seeing more of those kind of things, right?
And so, just like your mind,
what you start engaging with,
if you start watching all this news about fear and all the things that are going on so just like your mind, what you start engaging with, if you start watching
all this news about fear and all the things that are going on, you start paying attention
and your mind just starts focusing automatically. It becomes a reaction, a reflex.
And you start to attract more of the fear and anxiety or worry that's in the world that's
being posted. Very much so. You start to subscribe to whatever that is to receive more of it.
Exactly. So just like on social media,
if you start just liking all the cat stuff and everything else,
they'll just start feeding you cat stuff.
And same thing with negativity and same thing with opportunity also as well.
So the questions make a difference. So questions are the answer.
What are the two questions you've been that are dominant in your mind over the
last five years the most?
Yeah. So for learning, because I grew up with the broken brain,
many people know
my story from the last episode, when they see me do these demonstrations at Summit Series or
events you and I have. Remembering a thousand people's names. Right. 10 minutes. All of that
kind of stuff. I say that I don't do this to impress you. I do this to express to you what's
possible. Because the truth is we could all do that and a whole lot more. We just weren't taught.
If anything, we're taught a lie that somehow our intelligence is fixed, like our shoe size.
But I do it as a demonstration because I grew up with learning difficulties.
I had my brain injury when I was five.
I fell, had a very bad fall when I was in kindergarten, rushed to the hospital.
Before I was curious and very energized, my parents would say, but then I became very shut down.
And my superpower growing up was being invisible
It was shrinking because I didn't want the spotlight. I didn't want to be called on so I was literally physiologically
I was always trying to look smaller to protect myself
So teachers won't call on me or I wouldn't be bullied or something like that
And I would do that as well except for I was just a giant in the class
So I gotta do that. So, except for I was just a giant in the class. Right, right. So I was always picked on. So for me, I would actually be sitting behind you, and I would be guaranteed no one would be able to see me.
But going back to my question, my question became all the time, first of all, when I was nine years old, I was slowing the class down.
And a teacher pointed to me and said, that's the boy with the broken brain.
And that label became my limit.
And so think about when you're listening to this what are the labels that we put
on ourselves it's like we're not born we're born with a blank slate right but
through experience through expectations of other people through our environment
we learned that we are limited and the good news is we can unlearn it and that's
that's that's the point of the book but because I was in the broken state I would always ask myself you know you
know why am I why am I broken why am I the stupid one I started getting answers
of why I'm so stupid right every time I did badly on a test I would be like oh
cuz I have the broken brain right if I wasn't picking in sports I'd be like oh
cuz I'm the broken one and that became my self-talk adults have to be very
careful with their external words because they become a child's internal words. But later, I started to get so
frustrated. I started asking, getting curious. And when you're curious, you start to ask different
questions. I was like, why is that person so, why are they so smart? And how come I'm studying
three times harder and getting less grades than them, right? And I started getting answers. My primary question started, my dominant question ended up being like, how do I make this
better? But the three questions that I focus on, and let me tell you first what Will's is,
Will Smith's, one of his dominant questions when we went through this exercise is, how do I make
this moment even more magical? How do I make this moment even more magical?
It used to be...
Every moment or like an acting moment?
This moment.
Any moment.
And it shows up, right, in his life.
Because later that night when we're filming,
it was like 2 o'clock in the morning,
and his family, we're all outside for the superhero movie
that many people know of.
And it was really cold because it was in Toronto, and it was wintertime, and we're all outside for the superhero movie that many people know of. And it was really cold because it was in Toronto.
And it was wintertime.
And we're all just waiting and just waiting and waiting and waiting.
Because people think that, and you meet all these people all the time on your show, and they think it's so glamorous.
No, it's hard to wait.
Exactly.
And I asked him this question because I believe genius leaves clues.
I was like, how do you prepare?
How do you get ready when the director, you're just sitting here for hours and then the director calls him.
How do you get ready?
And he was like, Jim, I don't have to get ready.
I stay ready.
And I'm like, wow, that's good to be Will Smith.
It's hard to stay ready for six hours.
Yeah, exactly.
But that's just who he is because I believe the life you live are the lessons you teach.
The life you live are the lessons you teach. The life you live are
the lessons you teach others. Going back to his dominant question, his family was there also at
the same time visiting the set and, you know, from West Philly, you know, you know the song.
Yes.
And we're all outside and shivering. And when he wasn't shooting, he would bring us blankets. He
would make hot chocolate and bring it to us. He would crack jokes. He would live that dominant question because the life he lived.
He's like, how do I make this moment even more magical?
Now, before it was like, how do I make this moment magical?
Then we played with it like even more magical,
presuming it is already magical and amazing.
And so these questions we ask are very important.
Now, there are three questions when I said there's turning knowledge into power
that I want everyone to obsess about. I mean, this will make you a master. And if you
get a, this is it, three questions to turn knowledge into power, because knowledge alone
is potential power. Number one, how can I use this? When you're listening to this podcast moving
forward, every time you listen to it, I want you to ask yourself, how can I use this? Get obsessed
about this, like even write it down. And this is where your mind can be very creative. Because in here,
I teach the power of note-taking. Because people don't realize this. When you listen to a podcast
or you go to a summit or an event or have a great conversation with somebody, within two days,
80% of it is gone. We forget it. They call it the forgetting curve. And one of the ways to retain it is by taking notes, exactly what you're doing.
Now I encourage people to take notes a very specific way, is to put a line right down
the page, and on the left side of the page I want you to take notes, and on the right
side I want you to make notes.
So on the left side of the page you're taking notes.
You're capturing.
So you're going to list the quotes.
Right, you're capturing information. You're like, this is how jim remembers name this is how jim reads a you know a book a
day or whatever it is so you're on the left side you're capturing but on the right side you're
creating now that's a subtle difference on the left side your note taking on the right side your
note making what's the difference again on the left side you're taking notes you're writing down the quotes and the strategies the processes
but on your right side what you're doing the right side creativity instead of
your mind being distracted when you're listening have it be distracted on
focused on how can I use this on the right side is where you're writing your
impressions of what you're learning how can I use this another great question second dominant question I would ask is not only how can I use it,
because you come up with all these answers, just like I see, you start seeing pug dogs
everywhere.
It's like, oh, this is how I could use this in my relationship.
This is how I could use it in my career.
Second question I would ask is why must I use this?
Why must I use this?
We know one of the people that endorsed my book,
he's on your show, is Simon Sinek.
And, you know, one of my favorite books,
I'm going to mention a lot of books, including your own,
start with, you know, his is start with why, right?
And so why must I use this?
So once you have all these ideas of how can I use this,
why must I use this?
Because if you don't have the reasons, you won't get the results.
Right. You won't care enough about it.
Exactly. Reasons reap results. I'm going to give a lot of people a lot of quickisms here
because it goes from your head to your heart to your hands. You could affirm things in your head
all day, set goals in your head all day. But if you're not acting with your hands, you're
procrastinating, putting things off, check in with your second H, which is your heart,
which are the emotions, right? Because we are not logical. We are biological. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, this chemical
soup drives us to act. Just like people don't biologically, they don't fall in love logically,
they do these things emotionally. So find your emotions. And in this book, we really uncover
and I decode motivation.
Not motivation getting hyped up and dancing on chairs and then the next day not changing.
We figured out this formula of sustainable motivation in this book.
But the second question is, go back to why must I use this?
Because if you don't have the why, you won't do the what.
And then finally, the third question.
First question, how can I use this?
Write all the answers down. Think about that. Second question, why must I use it? Gives you the energy and the
fuel and the drive to do it. And finally, when will I use this? When will I use this? Because
we know that one of the most important performance productivity tools that we have is our calendar.
Yeah. Right. If it's not in our calendar, it just doesn't get done.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed
today's episode and it inspired you
on your journey towards greatness.
Make sure to check out the show notes in the description
for a full rundown of today's show
with all the important links.
Also, make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe
over on Apple Podcasts as well.
I really love hearing feedback from you
guys, so share a review over on
Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. podcast as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys. So share a review over on Apple
and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's
told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
And now it's time to go out there and do something great.