How To Change Your Behavior And Accomplish Your Goals [MASTERCLASS] EP 1317

Today’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 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nir Eyal?

  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.

• 0:10Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 0:34Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to this special masterclass. We've 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.

• 0:51Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 1:00Nir Eyal?

  Yeah, so, so, goals are tricky. I would say that, you know, there's nothing inherently wrong with the SMART goals technique, etc. There is definitely a lot wrong with the visioning of, oh, this is what I, you know, I, let me sit here and make a vision board and a mood board about like my five-year plan. My best piece of advice is, let's just start with tomorrow. Okay? Let's just start with tomorrow, as opposed to, oh, 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? Yes, I have a dream that someday I'll write a novel.

• 1:44Nir Eyal?

  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 of the same 24 hours with everything else that you want to do and that you dream of forces you to prioritize. And, and that is essential. 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 gotta do.

• 2:27Nir Eyal?

  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, Louis, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.

• 3:06Lewis Howes?

  It's kind of like saying, "Okay, I'm not gonna go run for an hour today, but I'm gonna put my shoes on and I'm gonna go outside and I'm gonna start the run for two minutes. And I'm just gonna do that every day." But by saying, "Okay, I'm gonna schedule this for 10 minutes," or whatever, then you typically want to do more because you're already in the flow.

• 3:26Nir Eyal?

  Right. It's a little bit more than tiny steps. It's actually saying for that period of time. So I respect the just get started technique. Very nice.

• 3:37Nir Eyal?

  But it's the don't stop technique.

• 3:38Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 3:39Nir Eyal?

  More than just get started.

• 3:40Lewis Howes?

  So don't get discouraged. Go for 30 minutes. Go for the time you scheduled in your calendar.

• 3:45Nir Eyal?

  Right. Don't say, "Oh, I'm gonna run a 7:30," or whatever. Say, "I am going to walk for 30 minutes and I'm not gonna do anything else that might take me away from working on this thing for 30 minutes in my life." Okay? "I'm gonna be with my child without distraction for one hour. And that's all I'm gonna 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.

• 4:29Nir Eyal?

  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.

• 4:36Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 4:47Nir Eyal?

  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 gonna 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 gonna do. Look, I still've 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.

• 5:17Lewis Howes?

  Being your word, just being your word.

• 5:19Nir Eyal?

  You reinforce that stuff in it.

• 5:19Lewis Howes?

  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 gonna do, I did it. And that builds a better-

• 5:28Nir Eyal?

  That is exactly right.

• 5:29Lewis Howes?

  ...self-image and self-confidence with self, right?

• 5:32Nir Eyal?

  Bingo. So, 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 say to you, right? You wouldn't want to 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

• 6:16Nir Eyal?

  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.

• 6:31Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 7:00Nir Eyal?

  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. We've all heard about, oh, you have to have a specific measurable actionable, you know, the smart goals and all that stuff. And it turns out that the literature around, this is another one of these areas that we've seen, you know, the pop psychology is so off-base, right? You know, 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, right? So that we can envision what we want. And it turns out that studies show that people who do this are shooting themselves in the foot.

• 7:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 7:46Nir Eyal?

  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.

• 7:55Lewis Howes?

  Really? What should you do instead?

• 7:57Nir Eyal?

  Yes. Here's the difference. There's a good visioning and bad visioning. Bad visioning is envisioning, you know, this bullet, 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.

• 8:42Lewis Howes?

  So instead of thinking, oh, my God. When you're distracted, what are you gonna do?

• 8:46Nir Eyal?

  What are you gonna do? Exactly. So instead of thinking, oh, my God, I'm gonna look so good with a six-pack, instead think about, what am I gonna do next time I go out with my friends and they offer me a piece of chocolate cake?

• 8:56Lewis Howes?

  Because...

• 8:57Nir Eyal?

  That's the right kind of visioning.

• 8:58Lewis Howes?

  Because envisioning this incredible result in a year or 10 years is nice in theory, but it's gonna 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 gonna happen instantly without effort and work. So that what I'm hearing you say is to focus on, that's gonna 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.

• 9:32Nir Eyal?

  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?

• 9:48Lewis Howes?

  Is there good research on, what did you call this? Re-visioning or what did you call this?

• 9:52Nir Eyal?

  Yeah. Yeah, there is. There's actually some, there's an article on my blog. I can, 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, uh, because it, you know, 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 use to be this way, by the way. I, you know, I'm 42 years old. I used to be clinically obese. Uh, today I'm in the best shape of my life. Uh, 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 era of your life. You want good relationships, you have to be consistently present with the people you love.

• 10:34Nir Eyal?

  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, 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, you know, 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.

• 11:17Nir Eyal?

  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.

• 11:27Lewis Howes?

  So how do we get out of our own way?

• 11:31Nir Eyal?

  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, you know, why making a schedule is so very important. 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.

• 12:12Nir Eyal?

  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.

• 12:57Nir Eyal?

  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?

• 13:40Nir Eyal?

  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?

• 14:07Nir Eyal?

  How many of us actually have our calendar?

• 14:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, scheduled.

• 14:09Nir Eyal?

  Yes. Very few people do, right? We have to have that time scheduled because you know what you're gonna 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 gonna 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.

• 14:54Nir Eyal?

  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. So if you read Robert Putnam, back in the 1990s, he wrote this book called Bowling Alone,

• 15:37Nir Eyal?

  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. The secularization of the United States. Not that 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. So the lack of those scheduled times for our relationships takes a deep psychological toll.

• 16:23Nir Eyal?

  So you have to ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend time with the people they love? Not giving them whatever scraps of time are left over between everything else, but actually booking that time. How many times, "Oh, we should get coffee someday." Yeah, okay, right. That's code for never. 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 think I hope those will continue. I'm spending much more time over Zoom with my parents than I was before COVID.

• 17:06Nir Eyal?

  So scheduling that time 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. There's what we call reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is a part of everybody's job. 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.

• 17:50Nir Eyal?

  Okay, if you work in a restaurant, if you're working a call center, your job is to show up. You're not a schedule maker, you're a schedule taker. Right, 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.

• 18:33Nir Eyal?

  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, 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, almost nobody. Yeah, 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

• 19:18Nir Eyal?

  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

• 19:57Nir Eyal?

  and decades, is, well, what happens when, in reality, I have a boss and a spouse, and 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 sync. Here's what a schedule sync 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, Louis?

• 20:38Nir Eyal?

  You're gonna look at your boss, the guy who pays, or the guy or gal who pays your bills, and you're gonna 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 gonna do instead is to say, hey, boss, look, can we sit down once a week? Okay? Monday morning, it's gonna take 15 minutes, max. And you're gonna show them your schedule. Okay? Now that you've made a time box schedule, you're gonna 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, you know, the priorities at work. Okay, here's how I'm spending my time during the workday.

• 21:23Nir Eyal?

  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.

• 21:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What's the most important thing right now that you need me to do?

• 21:44Nir Eyal?

  Exactly.

• 21:45Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 21:51Nir Eyal?

  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?

• 21:56Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 21:57Nir Eyal?

  Help me understand how to reprioritize. Exactly. Schedule syncing, right? Synchronizing 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 idea.

• 22:16Lewis Howes?

  We are hiring more and more people and, you know, luckily, we're pretty good at it because we use Slack and Monday.com. So we have 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 it's luckily we have some of those tools. But if you were, if you were like, hey, this is my calendar for the week, the things that I'm planning to create this week.

• 22:49Nir Eyal?

  Time boxed.

• 22:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And, and you were like, hey, what can we eliminate or how can I delegate this? Then I'm sure it would make that, that person pretty excited.

• 22:58Nir Eyal?

  Right. Or, 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?

• 23:08Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 23:09Nir Eyal?

  Right?

• 23:10Lewis Howes?

  I'm overwhelmed. I'm overworked. Yeah, yeah.

• 23:12Nir Eyal?

  Exactly. And, 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, it, you know, 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 know, 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.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  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?

• 23:51Lewis Howes?

  The story we tell ourselves.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  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...

• 24:22Lewis Howes?

  Most people actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well. Like, when you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So, you know, 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 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. 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.

• 25:02Lewis Howes?

  So, how do you get it to dance together?

• 25:03Speaker 02

  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 shows that you can introduce thoughts.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  So, I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time. But we can introduce a positive thought.

• 25:57Lewis Howes?

  Can you think of two thoughts at the same time?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Probably not.

• 26:01Lewis Howes?

  So, you can only have one thought at a time?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Right, but they come very fast.

• 26:04Lewis Howes?

  But it comes and goes. So, you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think. Otherwise, and... A spontaneous thought will pop back in.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 26:13Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:20Lewis Howes?

  So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  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. You know, 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

• 27:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:26Lewis Howes?

  Someone likes your photo.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:42Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  That's right. High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process.

• 27:56Lewis Howes?

  To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything, right?

• 28:02Speaker 02

  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 will, 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 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.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  And actually, Carol's, one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that loved 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 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. Yeah. 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.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  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. If they can take a few moments 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 if they're not in movement along that path, they're at least oriented on the right path. They're not lying in bed all day. They're taking a step. They're taking a step.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  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 of 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.

• 30:47Lewis Howes?

  With more effort.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  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, write that email, every time you, let's say 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. And 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, of taking steps and moving forward, this is actually kind

• 31:32Speaker 02

  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, that 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.

• 32:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  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, they have.

• 32:20Lewis Howes?

  They're exhausted right before then.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  That's right. 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.

• 32:41Lewis Howes?

  So we need dopamine to keep the effort going. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 32:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  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. 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,

• 34:15Speaker 02

  or it needs food for its young, it's gonna 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 gonna feel agitation and start looking, and roaming, and searching. Foraging, as it's 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. Whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain that's involved in depression and disappointment, that if it goes to that place, and it turns out it was the wrong path, there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine, so that you don't repeat that mistake again.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  So you don't give up? That's right. You just don't repeat it again? That's right. And those events then- So it 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."

• 35:22Speaker 02

  You're gonna repeat those.

• 35:23Lewis Howes?

  Don't do those.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Those actions led to failure previously, and don't repeat those.

• 35:27Lewis Howes?

  So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  That's right. So you asked, how do you do this? So to really make it concrete.

• 35:35Lewis Howes?

  And is there too much, is there too much thing, is there such thing as too much dopamine?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Well.

• 35:39Lewis Howes?

  If you're not on drugs?

• 35:40Speaker 02

  So cocaine and 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, 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 to break this down really concrete,

• 36:24Speaker 02

  we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort. Just effort with no subjective label on them, good or bad. Effort, whether or not it's 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.

• 36:48Lewis Howes?

  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 gonna be broken in our life. Isn't that right?

• 36:57Jim Kwik?

  Yeah, this, this model really is a framework for learning anything faster. So for people who are listening and watching and they wanna learn a language, they wanna learn Mandarin, music, martial arts, management, marketing, math.

• 37:10Lewis Howes?

  Anything. Any skill.

• 37:11Jim Kwik?

  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 can grant you any one wish, but only one wish, what would you wish for? If it was only one wish, what would you wish for?

• 37:24Lewis Howes?

  You know, most people would say money or this or that, but you think learning is the...

• 37:28Jim Kwik?

  I mean, I think a lot of people go for...

• 37:29Lewis Howes?

  I think being the Matrix, like downloading the Matrix.

• 37:32Jim Kwik?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Lewis Howes?

  It's where I could learn Jiu-Jitsu in a second.

• 37:35Jim Kwik?

  Exactly.

• 37:36Lewis Howes?

  If I could learn a language in a second, if I can have this skill.

• 37:39Jim Kwik?

  So I think the hack a lot of people would do is if it was any one wish, they would wish for more wishes.

• 37:44Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 37:44Jim Kwik?

  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 like become a master at it. The equivalent, 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.

• 38:28Jim Kwik?

  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 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 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.

• 39:12Lewis Howes?

  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 position 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 practicing.

• 39:48Jim Kwik?

  Right.

• 39:48Lewis Howes?

  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 gonna learn and then, okay, I know it, I feel like I need to work in it.

• 40:00Jim Kwik?

  I feel you.

• 40:01Lewis Howes?

  Get dirty, you know what I mean?

• 40:02Jim Kwik?

  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, like 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?

• 40:18Lewis Howes?

  What's the difference?

• 40:19Jim Kwik?

  So you are smart through experiential learning, like in the book we talk about.

• 40:23Lewis Howes?

  Oh, how are you smart?

• 40:24Jim Kwik?

  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 gonna drop a lot of like practical methods. When you're taking, 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

• 41:06Jim Kwik?

  just, 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.

• 41:19Lewis Howes?

  Probably don't know if it'd take me 10 minutes.

• 41:21Jim Kwik?

  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 is the, which one was easier, first or second? And you would say the first was easier. Which one is, is more comfortable, first or last?

• 41:40Lewis Howes?

  The first one.

• 41:41Jim Kwik?

  The first one. So not only was it faster, it was easier. And then which one was higher quality? Let's check that out.

• 41:46Lewis Howes?

  This, the first one.

• 41:48Jim Kwik?

  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, what I'm saying is 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.

• 42:15Lewis Howes?

  So how do we know how to learn with our dominant hand as opposed to the opposite hand?

• 42:20Jim Kwik?

  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.

• 42:31Lewis Howes?

  Or watch someone lecturing and or talking about it.

• 42:33Jim Kwik?

  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 guide, a guidebook to be able to level up those areas. So you could 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, it's like we're, it's like we're failing school as opposed to the way school maybe is failing us.

• 43:14Jim Kwik?

  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.

• 43:23Lewis Howes?

  Well, it teaches you how to think and learn in one way.

• 43:25Jim Kwik?

  Exactly. And when I talk about in the book, I talk about the, the four supervillains that are holding you back in your work, in your schooling, in your life. It's 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.

• 44:09Jim Kwik?

  You want your mental muscles to be stronger, more energized, more pliable, 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. And 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.

• 44:43Lewis Howes?

  You don't see your brain.

• 44:44Jim Kwik?

  Exactly. And that controls everything. And so when I point to the brain or honor what they're sure 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.

• 44:59Lewis Howes?

  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. It's also heart health is a big thing right now. It's just like the emotional health, self-care, self-love, you know, mental health and emotional health kind of tied together.

• 45:18Jim Kwik?

  And I love your work because you bring that to everybody, to the world. And it's all connected. I talk about in the book, you know, 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. And so, and it's connected too. And sometimes 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, which is not, it's not really a thing, there's And then there's food. There's sugar. 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 neuroprotective, this area of neuro nutrition.

• 46:02Jim Kwik?

  It's really fascinating that your brain has different nutritional requirements than the 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 gotta do something. You put something in this book. And so because fundamentally, I'm a reading teacher. And, you know, 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 in the days. And readers are leaders, we know that. Reading is to your mind what exercises your body. It's the best mental fitness.

• 46:46Jim Kwik?

  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 three, 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? Right, 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, 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 these down. Three master questions.

• 47:28Jim Kwik?

  You know, we were talking about some of the famous actors that I work on before we started filming, and we were, you know, Will Smith did the cover endorsement of the book that says, you know, Jim Quick, you know, gets the maximum out of me as a human being. I've learned so much from this, this man, just being around, so many around clients. What have you learned from Will? So one of the things is this, 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 thirty pages of scripts, there's a lot of.

• 48:01Lewis Howes?

  I can't remember a sentence.

• 48:02Jim Kwik?

  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're there, we spent the day together and it was winter time in Toronto. They were filming from six PM to six AM, which can you imagine?

• 48:26Lewis Howes?

  It's so hard overnight.

• 48:28Jim Kwik?

  That's very difficult, but during the day, I went, we went through an exercise and I believe. So in there, I talk about how we have fifty to seventy 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.

• 48:54Lewis Howes?

  Like what?

• 48:54Jim Kwik?

  So here's the thing, I talk about dominant questions that you have one, two, three questions that you ask a lot of. 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 asks 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 don't 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 gonna be like?

• 49:38Jim Kwik?

  What's her life gonna be?

• 49:40Lewis Howes?

  Well, I guess it could be, 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.

• 49:57Jim Kwik?

  And it's absolutely true. She actually does both of those things.

• 49:59Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 50:00Jim Kwik?

  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.

• 50:08Lewis Howes?

  Send yes to everything.

• 50:09Jim Kwik?

  Yeah, you 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, 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.

• 50:52Jim Kwik?

  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, my little sister started sending me emails and postcards and pictures and photograph of a very specific kind of dog. It was a pug dog. You know those little... Cute little dogs. The 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, they don't care. And, and she starts, 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, she's a smart marketer, right? Planting those seeds. And here's the magic, though. I started seeing pug dogs. Everywhere.

• 51:37Jim Kwik?

  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, where, where, 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 kinds of things. Yeah. Right?

• 52:21Jim Kwik?

  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, you start paying attention. And your mind just starts focusing automatically, it becomes a reaction, a reflex.

• 52:34Lewis Howes?

  And you start to attract more of the fear and anxiety or worry that's in the world that's being posted.

• 52:38Jim Kwik?

  Very much so.

• 52:39Lewis Howes?

  You start to subscribe to whatever that is to receive more of it.

• 52:42Jim Kwik?

  Exactly.

• 52:43Lewis Howes?

  You're thinking about it.

• 52:43Jim Kwik?

  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.

• 52:48Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 52:49Jim Kwik?

  And same thing with negativity and same thing with opportunity also as well. So the questions make a difference. So questions are the answer.

• 52:55Lewis Howes?

  What are the two questions you've been, that are dominant in your mind over the last five years the most?

• 53:00Jim Kwik?

  Yeah, so for learning, because I grew up with the broken brain, many people know my, my story from the last episode. When they see me do these demonstrations at Summit Series or it's, you know, events you and I have.

• 53:12Lewis Howes?

  Remembering a thousand people's names in ten minutes.

• 53:15Jim Kwik?

  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, right? 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. Cause 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 wouldn't call on me or I wouldn't be bullied or something like that.

• 53:59Lewis Howes?

  I would do that as well, except for I was just a giant in the class. So I was always picked on.

• 54:04Jim Kwik?

  So for me, I would actually be sitting behind you and I would, I would be guaranteed no one would be able to see me. But going back to my, 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 we have, if they 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,

• 54:49Jim Kwik?

  why am I, why, why am I broken? Why am I the stupid one? And I started getting answers of why I'm so stupid, right? Every time I did badly on a test, I would be like, oh, because I have the broken brain, right? If I was in picking in sports, I'd be like, oh, because 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, why is that person so, why, why are they so smart? And how come I'm studying three times harder and getting less grades than, 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?

• 55:30Jim Kwik?

  But the three questions that I focus on, and let me tell you first what Will's is. Will Smith, 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-

• 55:47Lewis Howes?

  Every moment, or like in acting alone?

• 55:49Jim Kwik?

  This moment. This moment, any moment. Like, and, and it shows up, right? In his, 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, it was really cold, because it was in Toronto, and it was, 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, hurry up and wait. Exactly. And I, and I asked him this question, because I believe genius leaves clues. I was like, you know, how do you, how do you prepare? How do you get ready? When the director, you're just sitting here for hours, and then the director calls on you, how do you get ready? And he was like, Jim- I don't have to get ready, I stay ready.

• 56:34Lewis Howes?

  That's good.

• 56:35Jim Kwik?

  And I'm like, wow, that's good to be Will Smith.

• 56:37Lewis Howes?

  It's hard to stay ready for six hours.

• 56:38Jim Kwik?

  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 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.

• 56:55Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 56:56Jim Kwik?

  And we're all outside and shivering. And when he wasn't shooting, he would, 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 lives, he 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.

• 57:28Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 57:29Jim Kwik?

  And if you get a, this is a 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 a power of note taking. Because people don't realize this, when you listen to a podcast or you go to, you know, 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 take, put a line right down the page.

• 58:12Jim Kwik?

  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. Right, you're capturing information. You're like, this is how Jim remembers his name. This is how Jim reads, 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, you're note taking. On the right side, you're 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.

• 58:55Jim Kwik?

  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? Could 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, you know, in my career. Second question I would ask is why must I use this? Why must I use this? You know, 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 gonna 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?

• 59:37Jim Kwik?

  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 gonna 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 age, which is your heart, which are the emotions, right? Because we are not logical, we are biological. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, these, this chemical soup drives us to act. Just like people don't buy logically, they don't fall in love logically, they do these things emotionally. So, find your emotions.

• 1:00:20Jim Kwik?

  And in this book, we do, 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.

• 1:01:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Jim Kwik?

  Right? If it's not in our calendar, it just doesn't get done.

• 1:01:05Lewis Howes?

  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. And 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. 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.