Limitless — Jim Kwik

 

Rating: ★★★★½

Review: The last half of this book is a veritable treasure trove of practical tools and concepts for learning, remembering, and thinking more optimally. 

What I liked most about Limitless was its heavy emphasis on active learning. There are moments at key junctures throughout the book where the reader is compelled to participate, and try out the exercises instead of just reading about them.

While I had already encountered many of the memory techniques that Kwik outlines during a reading of Joshua Foer’s superb book Moonwalking with Einstein, I found I actually took more away from Limitless in terms of applicability. 

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The book covers other really important ground as well. It can help you develop the right mindset, enter flow states more efficiently, offer you superb tools to enhance your thinking ability, and teach you dynamic reading and meta-learning strategies to enhance your performance and output, regardless of your profession or academic focus.

Key Concepts:

• The 4 D’s (digital deluge, digital distraction, digital dementia and digital deduction) are insidious forces to be continually contended with. 

 

• We remember things most at the beginning of a learning session/experience (primacy effect) and at the end of a learning session/experience (recency effect). Keeping study sessions short and using the pomodoro technique can help you unlock the power of these two phenomena.

 

• Multitasking is a myth, and switching between tasks non-stop can actually deplete our brain’s supply of fuel more quickly, leading to exhaustion and poor productivity. 

 

• We are constantly limiting ourselves with stories about what we can’t do and negative labels about who we are (Kwik calls these LIES: limited ideas entertained). Monitoring self-talk and replacing these stories and labels with positive ones can lead to radical change.

 

• Positive mood states like love, contentment and curiosity can lead to much more rich, complex learning. Negative mood states shut down the brain and force it into survival mode. 

 

• This quote →  “When you get down to it, we all have the same purpose: to help other people through our passion. The greatest task we have in this life is to share the knowledge and skills we accumulate.” 

 

• Prioritize your values.

 

• Active recall (making a point of remembering things after you read them, or before you review them) and staged repetition (coming back to material multiple times over the span of days/weeks/months and focusing on what you didn’t retain) are excellent learning strategies.

 

• I am a predominantly kinaesthetic/auditory learner. This means I need to work on my visual learning skills.

 

• Humans have remarkable visual and spatial memory. 

 

• You can 10x your memory in a radically short period of time by approaching content with an active mind, visualization, association, emotion and location (I went from remembering 3-4 things on a list to remembering 14 in a single day!)

 

• De Bono’s Six Hats is a tool for thinking through issues from six different perspectives (I was able to quickly memorize them using the tools above)​​