Unlock Your Limitless Potential- An Extract of Limitless

We, humans, are the most dominant species on Earth. We are not particularly strong or fast, we can’t fly or breathe underwater… The major advantage that we have over other creatures in the animal kingdom is our brain! Human intelligence today has enabled us to explore the ocean depths, move tons of weight, fly, and explore the vastness of space…

Believe it or not, we have the ultimate technology built right into us. It’s sitting right between your ears and enables us to do wonders! It allows us to learn, love, think, create, innovate, make decisions, and experience various emotions… The book Limitless describes the extraordinary capabilities of the human brain and the ways we can make the most out of it.

Jim Kwik is the CEO of Kwik Learning, Learning Expert, Trainer, and Advisor. His book Limitless focuses on harnessing the power of our brain and using it as a tool to learn anything faster. Here’s the summary of what I’ve read so far…

The book begins with Jim’s story, the story of “the boy with the broken brain”. As a little boy, Jim struggled a lot in learning and surviving in school, until he found the method to train the brain to learn anything efficiently. He now teaches those principles to others and helps other people do the same and become the limitless version of themselves.

Jim has been fascinated by superhero stories since childhood… Movies and comics… He’s specifically a great fan of X-men. The book follows a superhero story plot… Where you, the reader, are the superhero of your life… And like every superhero movie there are supervillains who always try to create hindrances for you reaching your Limitless version. The four supervillains mentioned in the book are -

1. Digital Deluge — this mentions the information flood which drowns the modern-day man. With the availability of so much information about everything just at our fingertips, we rarely let our mind wander or get bored, which has harmful long term consequences like poor memory, mental fog, and fatigue. Jim suggests that letting our mind wander is the key to creativity and long term information retention. He suggests to schedule 30 minutes a day away from technology, to clear our mind, relax, and be creative.
2. Digital Distraction — this section deals with our desire to be always connected. By being always-on we invite distractions all day long. With all the social media applications easily accessible on our mobile phones.. constantly demanding our attention through notifications.. we seem to be losing our ability to focus on the task at hand. Jim suggests that we can easily keep this supervillain at bay by turning off all the unnecessary app notifications. Also, we can form an alliance with focus mode on our devices which pauses notifications and disables the distracting applications.
3. Digital Dementia — this section highlights that the overuse of digital technologies causes the breakdown of our cognitive abilities. We’re constantly becoming dependent on our gadgets to remember things for us. Most people don’t even remember the phone no. of the person they talk to the most. They reach for their devices to find quick answers rather than trying to retain things in their mind. This resulting inactivity of the brain harms our learning mechanism. If we don’t exercise our brain muscles, they get weak and eventually we fail to remember even important things. Jim Kwik suggests using your own memory to store important and relevant information as unlike the digital storage devices, our brain’s memory storage doesn’t get full upon storing too much information… Rather, it increases. For starters, he suggests memorizing the phone number of the person you talk the most with.
4. Digital Deduction — Here, the author suggests that with the overuse of digital technologies, humans are falling behind on deduction skills like critical thinking and problem-solving. Who’d like to think hard when it is so simple to find multiple opinions Just with a few clicks? People tend to find opinions and solutions online instead of exercising their brains. Which might, in turn, cause them to lose their creativity. Jim suggests a quick exercise to think about an important decision you need to make and schedule some time to work on that decision without the use of any digital devices or internet.

In the book, Jim suggests for us to fight these supervillains and honor the most subtle and advanced technology sitting right between our ears. The book promises to provide us tools to do just that! He discusses the 3 keys to unlock our potential. He strongly emphasizes the limiting beliefs that we develop thought-out our lives… Due to which we restrict ourselves greatly. The book focuses on 3 M’s for a Limitless life — Mindset (possibility), Motivation (purpose), and Methods (process). At the intersection of mindset and motivation is Inspiration, mindset and methods form ideation, and motivation and methods lead to implementation. The intersection of all the 3 M’s is Limitless. The limitless model is shown below-

The rest of the book tackles each of these three M’s and suggests how we can use them to enhance different areas of our lives…