The Skills School Never Taught You - Train Your Brain with Jim Kwik

14:02Jim Kwik:Well, I think also we make decisions based on what we value the most, like what's most important to us in our life and I think when we're talking about the human mind, when we're always deleting or we're distorting or we're generalizing, it's nice to know what's most important to us and especially in our relationships, the people that we're talking to on a regular basis and communicating, the people we care about. I would say that knowing this, because you were talking about having too many choices and we talked about in the last episode, we talked about 10 keys for unlocking your good memory, your superhero brain

14:32James Altucher:that's three years ago, our last podcast

14:33Jim Kwik:and so one of them, we talked about one third of people's memory is predetermined by genetics and biology, but two thirds are completely in our control, and we're talking about a good diet and getting rid of negative thoughts and exercising and brain supplements and positive peer group but one of them was this thing called a clean environment, right? just having, you know, getting rid of the clutter because it helps you focus, people know when they clean their office or they clean their desktop on their computer they have a clarity of mind also But you mentioned this word choice, that when you got rid of furniture and books and things like that, because you were concerned about all the decisions you had to make to be able to upkeep and hold everything together.

15:08Jim Kwik:And this is a real challenge. I think everyone who's listening to this, we all suffer from this thing called decision fatigue. This is the idea where research talks about saying we can only make a certain amount, a finite, a very limited amount of good decisions a day. And once we meet that quota, we're done. I strongly believe that.

15:29James Altucher:take a quick break if you like this episode i'd really really appreciate it would mean so much to me please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast email me at alcatra gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed thanks

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18:51James Altucher:So for instance, just as an example of what you just said, I specifically in the mornings, I call them my maker hours. So that's when the things that I truly care about and want to be creative about, let's say writing or podcasting or whatever I'm doing creatively at that moment, I do it in the morning. And then in the afternoons, as much as I possibly can, that's what I call my manager hours because most people don't have any maker hours like they're just managing from 9am to 5pm and then their business stays over they go home and they're exhausted so I'll let's say from 2 to 5pm that's my manager hours I'll talk to colleagues, partners people I work with because the phone calls are easy and just following up on decisions is easy and most of that stuff is not creative it's just like okay I gotta move the needle on six different projects, that requires a phone call.

19:46James Altucher:Did you do this? Did you do that? Should I do this? Should I do that? The maker hours is when I'm writing, is when I'm brainstorming and coming up with ideas,

19:55Jim Kwik:just thinking of everything that I love doing. And that's prime time, right? If you could win that first hour, then you could build positive momentum throughout the entire day, which is great because most people, I just did a podcast episode on how I spend the first hour of my day to jumpstart my brain. but one of the worst things people could do in the morning which most people do is they check their phone and I still think when I'm working with elite mental performers one of the things that people should not do if they want to really win that day is to check their phone because when you talk about the maker hours when you're most creative, when you're most suggestible touching your phone first thing in the morning you're in this alpha, theta brainwave state where information is just going in unfiltered with our conscious mind What do you mean by alpha, theta state?

20:38Jim Kwik:Our brain cycles, different parts of our brain through different brainwave states. So right now, you and I are in beta state. That's where we're most awake and we're alert and conscious. On the bottom of that is delta. Delta is the state we're in when we sleep. And so basically, you're measuring the frequency of our brain. And when it slows down, it goes to delta where we sleep. In between that, below beta, the waking state, is something called alpha, which is a relaxed state of awareness. That's the state we go into when we meditate. That's the state we go into when we watch television. and it's this relaxed state of awareness where information just goes in, mostly unfiltered.

21:12Jim Kwik:It's like if you see somebody watching TV and they're watching their favorite show or sports event or whatever, and you try talking to them, but they're in a trance and they don't hear you because they're in that alpha state.

21:23James Altucher:Oh my gosh, Jim. There's so many things I want to unpack on everything you just said. I just want to remind everybody listening, what I really want to do with Jim is figure out how he got to have such a dream job. Hold on one second, because I want to get back to your clean environment. I want to get back to what you just said about the alpha state. There's a couple of things that you just said that I want to get back to. But I just want to remind people a little bit of who some of your clients have been in the past or the present or maybe the future that you could talk about. People pay you a lot of money to give them this sort of advice and then some.

22:04James Altucher:So who have been some of your clients?

22:06Jim Kwik:I mean, if people look at my Instagram, I work with a high percentage of the people that people see me on Instagram and such. But I've done programs for Elon at SpaceX for his rockets. Elon Musk. Sure. A lot of actors like Forrest Whitaker and Jim Carrey, Will Smith. I'll help them speed read their scripts, help them be focused and present on set, help them to memorize their lines in a fraction of the time because there's obviously a lot of scripts and they have to stick it word to word, which is important. But high performers at our events, we've had some amazing luminaries in the audience, everyone from Quincy Jones to Matt Mullenwig.

22:39Jim Kwik:Matt's a great guy.

22:41James Altucher:He's been on the podcast.

22:43Jim Kwik:I've seen pictures of you with Richard Branson. Yeah, I've had the opportunity to do a number of things with Virgin. My goal is, those are great names. My passion doesn't matter. Because I grew up with this brain injury and I grew up with Learning Challenge. a teacher at the age of nine said that I was the boy with the broken brain. I had that label. They actually said that to you? Not to me. Because you had an injury. You had a bike injury or something? I had a very bad injury when I was five years old and I had learning disabilities. It took me an extra few years to learn how to read. I couldn't understand.

23:15Jim Kwik:I would have this imposter syndrome at this early age where I would pretend I would understand, but I really didn't understand a lot. And so that was a big challenge growing up. But my thing is I don't want people to suffer the way I suffered. and my whole thing is just one billion brains. No brain left behind. That's why I launched the podcast because I feel like our most valuable asset nowadays, it's like none of us are paid for our muscle power. We're paid for our mind power. It's not our brute strength. It's our brain strength in this knowledge economy. Knowledge is not only power, it's profit.

23:46Jim Kwik:And I don't just mean financial profit.

23:47James Altucher:No, I agree with you. I think it was the first chapter of one of my books, my book, The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth. I say ideas are the currency of the 21st century. So knowledge is actual currency in today's economy.

23:59Jim Kwik:And I think that's the world we live in. It's like this knowledge divide. It's the people who know and people who don't know certain things. And the information is out there. They're in their books and it's online. But a lot of people don't have the ability or the skill set, the capabilities to be able to filter through it, to be able to learn it, read it, absorb it, retain it, perform. The reason why memory is so important is because everyone could say that they could go on Google and these facts are at their fingertips. But at any given time, it's like we can only, our life is a reflection of our decisions that we've made to this point, right?

24:32Jim Kwik:I mean, that's pretty accurate, right? Our decisions we've made to this point are pretty much, you know, it's reflected in our lifestyle and such.

24:38James Altucher:There's kind of like a funny self-help quote related to that in the sense that if you're having a lot of problems and you start deciding things based on how you've always decided things, you have to sort of remind yourself, well, it's all of your decisions in the past that got you here. So that's why you almost need outside help to kind of get you out of here.

24:57Jim Kwik:There's a great book called The Structure of Scientific Revolution.

25:01James Altucher:Oh yeah, that is a great book. That's like four decades old, right?

25:05Jim Kwik:Yeah, it's an older book. And it basically says that there's this incredible pattern where most of the big advancements in industries, whether it's automotive or it's computers or you name it, usually comes from people outside the industry because it takes somebody from the outside to look in saying, hey guys, why aren't you doing it this way?

25:24James Altucher:Well, look at rocketry and space exploration. NASA is outsourcing to SpaceX. Elon Musk made PayPal. He wasn't a rocket scientist. And Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin going into space. And Richard Branson is Virgin Galactic. So you have a bookseller, a PayPal guy, and a music magazine guy who are leading the next revolution into outer space.

25:44Jim Kwik:Right, people outside the industry. Because if you're in the industry, by definition, you've been trained the same way. you have the same blind spots, the same scotomas that people have. Scotoma? Scotoma, like a mental, in psychology it's like a mental blind spot to not be able to put your focus in a certain area because we're not trained to do so. And that's why actually I think one of the best things for people to make better decisions is just to change their perspective. And very applicable. So I think everyone listening to this has a decision they've been putting off that's important in their health or relationships, where they're going to live, what they're going to do, who they're going to be with, whatever.

26:19Jim Kwik:but a lot of people going back to remembering lessons how we started this conversation a lot of people repeat the same issues they go on to another relationship but they bring themselves with them and what I'm thinking is when they're in that relationship and they're doing that thing they're seeing things from the same perspective and that's why I think sometimes it's important to change place or change people you spend time with they always say you are your environment, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with because it shapes your values, it shapes our beliefs. And I think if people want to make better decisions, there's this process called Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono.

26:57Jim Kwik:And basically, the summary of it is basically saying that if you have a problem that you need to solve, if you need to make a better decision, one of the ways of doing it is to pretend that you're wearing six different hats. And so the idea here is, as Einstein said, the same level of thinking that's created the problem won't solve the problem. The idea here is that if you're looking at a problem, imagine yourself, for example, putting on a white hat. And when you're wearing this imaginary white hat, you have to look at it from a scientific standpoint, a logical standpoint. And I'll give people a memory aid.

27:29Jim Kwik:A white hat is kind of like a white scientist's coat. So you have to look at it through the lens of logic and facts, this issue or this problem or this decision. But if you put on a red hat, the red hat is red like the heart. You don't look at it logically, you just sort by emotion. How does this make you feel? A black hat, for example, is the critic, if you will. And so black is kind of like a judge, like a judge robe. It would remind you that's the critic or the judge. So that's where you judge the idea. The yellow hat is the optimistic point of view, like what could go right in this situation, what's positive about this, which is interesting way of looking at it, which is opposite of something that's more judgmental.

28:13Jim Kwik:finally the green is growth and so the green is out of the box thinking so if you're looking to solve this problem how do you look at it what's a solution that we haven't even thought of green like growth like plants or grass and stuff so what could be a new possible solution and finally the sixth hat is blue and the blue is kind of the overseeing hat of all of them it'll listen to your answers from the white and the red and the black and the yellow and the green and blue kind of like the blue sky which overlooks everything else will listen to all the other answers and then it will come up with the decision.

28:46Jim Kwik:After it listens to everything from all these different points of view.

28:49James Altucher:I have never heard of this mental model before. You ever see that book, A Hundred Decision Models? It lists all these different models. I can guarantee you this model is not in that book. I've memorized that.

29:01Jim Kwik:The reason why I like this is it's so simple. Let's give an example though.

29:06James Altucher:Come up with an example where this works.

29:08Jim Kwik:This would actually be great for you. If there's something, is there a decision that you're thinking about or a problem that you want to be able to solve yourself and we can maybe try this out?

29:17James Altucher:Well, you know, the thing is, this is related to the choice-ism, is that really, whether I realized it or not, I did a lot of this. And so right now, I really am so much doing everything I love doing. And I don't say this to brag. There's always room to improve. In fact, everything I'm doing, I'm very stressed about because I want to improve on them. So for instance, podcasting, I want to have the best possible podcast. Not that I feel competitive with anybody else. Not even that I feel competitive with myself. I just want to provide a better and better service. And I think it gives me pleasure.

29:56James Altucher:Going back to your love, life, and lessons, I love doing it. So it gives me more and more pleasure as I get better. It makes my life better as I learn more. Because I feel like with podcasting, there's a lot of micro skills. Like it's like maybe most people don't realize this, but there's like probably 500 micro skills to being a good podcaster. You probably are realizing this as you're doing your podcast. And so it improves my life. And just the lessons, there's actually then concrete lessons as I pursue what I love, as I do what makes my life better. And as I learn these lessons. So I feel like in general, not that I have an easy life because I don't because I'm only doing the things I want to do it actually makes my life very difficult because it puts a lot of pressure on me to improve at them but I don't really have the problem of making a decision because I usually know at some point when I'm ready for the next thing

30:52Jim Kwik:I like that too and I like that you do the difficult things because there's that whole saying that says that if you just do the easy things in life then life is hard

31:00James Altucher:I'll give you an example of that So I felt, so I've been trying, as many of my listeners know, I've been trying to do standup comedy for the past four or five months now, really for a year and a half, but more intensely for the past four or five months. And so I felt like I need to be a little, I've always been fearless in front of a public speaking crowd, but I wanted to be a little more fearless in front of a potentially enemy crowd. And I also wanted to be tighter on my one-liners. and so to overcome this fear and to get tighter on the one-liners I went on a subway and going from 42nd Street down to the Brooklyn Bridge and from the Brooklyn Bridge up to 42nd Street each car each stop I went into a new car and would do stand-up comedy really and just to focus on one-liners and so it forced me to write down one-liners which is very difficult to do like a joke in just like 10 words and then oh my god it was so scary to just talk in front of an audience who really does not want you to talk.

32:04James Altucher:They do not want you to open your mouth. And so yeah, I challenge myself on everything. And I try to figure, where's the line where I can no longer challenge myself? And then how can I go a tiny bit past that line? And that's how I came up with that idea.

32:20Jim Kwik:I mean, have you done like improv also? No, no, I actually specifically don't like improv. Really? Yeah. It gets recommended to me a bunch being just a public speaker.

32:28James Altucher:I think improv is great. I like watching it, but I like doing things in my brain. I like doing things on my own.

32:37Jim Kwik:I love it. What we're talking about here, for just everyone who's listening, is just we live in an age right now where there's these, I always talk about superheroes and superpowers, and I think that there's some modern-day supervillains that generations ago weren't here. We're talking about in this digital world, we have digital overload, where we feel like there's too much information, too little time. The amount of information is doubling at dizzying speeds. I think most people who are listening to this could appreciate they have things they need to learn, but it feels like it's taking a sip of water out of a fire hose.

33:13Half-life of information is just so quick.

33:17Jim Kwik:People who are graduating school, a lot of the stuff that they're learning is not even accurate. There's this digital overload and overwhelm which creates information fatigue. they call it information fatigue syndrome, right? Higher blood pressure, compression of leisure time, more sleeplessness.

33:31James Altucher:Can I ask you about that real quickly? It's not just, I feel like it's not just digital overload and this is related to you suggesting earlier in the first hour, don't check your phone. I feel like it's not only like there's so much information that happens every morning. It's also, there's a lot of annoying information. Yeah. Like, oh my God, he went to Greece on vacation and they're all together. Why didn't they invite me? Like there's all this, you see all these things your friends are doing because they only are giving you a filtered version of the information about their life. And you're like, oh, I didn't do that.

34:03James Altucher:And so it's not just digital overload. It's like digital, like you suck. And everyone else is great. And that's like forced down your throat.

34:13Jim Kwik:And we've heard these terms, right? Like Facebook depression and these things where everyone's seeing the most amazing highlight reel of everyone's life as opposed to what's going on on a day-to-day basis. so people get depressed because there's this huge FOMO and that people are missing out and they're not good enough. And fundamentally, I think one of the big human fears that we have is that we're not good enough. We're not good enough, so we're not going to be loved. We're not going to be loved. We're not going to survive because we needed to to be loved by our parents. Otherwise, we had no protection.

34:44James Altucher:That's so interesting. So you're saying kind of this Facebook depression or viewing this highlight reel of everyone else's life, it's almost, and I'm going to use the bag of chemicals analogy again, it's almost pushing down your oxytocin, which is the neurochemical which tells you where you are in social acceptance of the tribe. So when you see that all the tribe is having fun, but hey, I didn't have fun last night, you're feeling like that the tribe is kind of pushing you towards the fringe where the lion is going to potentially eat you first.

35:14Jim Kwik:Right. I mean, it's tough because we learn through contrast and comparison through things. And so when we see people succeeding or having, it puts us in a place where we feel like we might not measure up. And I think that ultimately that's one of the deepest fears we have, whether it's, you know, the root cause of challenges where people feel vulnerable public speaking. I don't know how you, have you always been natural on stage and in media?

35:36James Altucher:No, but here's where I have a, up until the one second before I'm on stage, incredibly terrified. Really? So I will even say to the conference organizer, I'm sorry, I'm leaving. I'm too scared. But once the mic is in my hand and I'm looking at the audience and I start, then it's like somehow I don't know what happens. It's like I get this boost of energy and I'm like a different person and I'm fearless. And I know beforehand that's probably going to happen, but I'm still scared to death. I am scared all the time. Aren't I scared all the time? So I'm scared all the time.

36:22Jim Kwik:Yeah, I can appreciate that because when I grew up with this brain injury and such, I would actually, if a teacher in high school asked me to talk about my book report in front of class, I would lie and say I didn't do it and I would throw it out on the way out because I was so terrified of public speaking. And it's interesting because my two biggest challenges growing up were learning and public speaking. And you could say the universe has a weird sense of humor because that's what I do pretty much every week.

36:45James Altucher:But I find that it's funny. I find that with a lot of my guests that the things they were specifically challenged with, you know, overcoming those challenges make them an expert. So for instance, you know, I wrote a book called The Power of No. Sure. Why it's important to be able to say no in your life. I didn't write it because I was such a great expert at saying no. I wrote it because I'm really non-confrontational and horrible at saying no. So the exploration of that led to the book.

37:13Jim Kwik:And it's interesting to see when a struggle becomes, could turn into a strength. Like my biggest mess growing up was my learning disabilities. And now my mess has become my message.

37:23James Altucher:Well, I love that mess goes to message. But I want to repeat your story, which we talked about before, which is you were in college and I guess it was your roommate's dad asked you to write down kind of the 10 things you were interested in. And you might've felt unconfident about them. And he said, you know, Jim, you're this close. and he put his fingers close together. You're this close from achieving all of them. And that is a very choicest philosophy also because I feel like you then started doing the things you love doing that would improve your life and you started looking for the lessons that would help you with memory and brain performance and so on.

38:04Jim Kwik:Yeah, and it's about responsibility, right? Because I feel like the most successful, productive, fulfilled people, they feel like the locus of control is coming from the inside, that they are a cause, that life is not happening to them, but it's happening more for them in their favor.

38:20James Altucher:So it's the same thing we discussed earlier of like blaming circumstances to reduce stress as opposed to doing something to reduce stress. So what did you do? When this guy said that to you, what did you start doing that anybody can start doing in some analogy or metaphor or whatever? What did you start doing to kind of make, build the life and career that you have now?

38:45Jim Kwik:So when I was 18 years old and I met this gentleman, I was ready to quit my freshman year of school because it was just not for me. I felt like I wasn't smart enough, I wasn't good enough, I wasn't getting the grades, and I was just learning challenge. And it's funny because when you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them, right? And I was always arguing, saying I'm not smart enough, I'm not good. It's this script that we have, this story that keeps us from what we desire and what we deserve. And so I'm fighting for my limitations with him. And he's saying, well, why are you in school?

39:15Jim Kwik:What do you want to do, be, have, share? And I start coming up with things and he makes me write them down like a bucket list. And when he looks at it, as you said, he says, Jim, you're this close to everything on that list. And he spreads his index fingers about a foot apart. And I was like, no way, give me 10 lifetimes. I'm not going to crack that list. And then he puts his two fingers on the side of my head, inside of my temple, meaning it's my brain inside there that's going to be the key. And he takes me into a room of his home that I've never seen before. It's wall to wall, ceiling, the floor covered in books.

39:43Jim Kwik:And remember at this time, I'm learning challenge. I never read a book cover to cover. I mean, to be equivalent of somebody who's phobic about snakes walking into a room full of snakes. I mean, that's how I felt in that library, right? And what makes it worse, he started grabbing snakes from the shelves and handing them to me. And I started looking at these titles and these biographies of men and women in history and some very early personal growth books, books that you and I have read, like Thinking We're Rich, Power Positive Thinking, Psycho-Cybernetics, How to Win Friends and Influence People, like all the classics, right?

40:09Jim Kwik:Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill and everyone. He says, Jim, I want you to read one book a week. And I'm like, are you crazy? I have all this schoolwork. I just told you I have midterms. I can't even keep up with what I already have. And he said, Jim, don't let school get in the way of your education, right? Famous Mark Twain quote. But I didn't know that because this was 25 years ago. And I'm like, that's a great quote and saying, but I still can't read one book a week. And then very smart man, he takes out my bucket list, which he still has. And he starts reading every single one of my dreams out loud.

40:37Jim Kwik:And something about the strangers, is obviously very successful hearing my dreams and my fantasies, my goals in somebody else's voice in the universe, mess with my heart, my mind, something fierce. And honestly, James, a lot of things on that list were things I wanted to do for my family that they can never afford to do for themselves. And with that extra leverage, and we know the power of drive and having reasons and start with why and such. With those whys, I agree to read one book a week on top of my schoolwork. So now I'm sitting at school and I have a pile of books I have to read for school and then a pile of books that I want to read that I promised.

41:09Jim Kwik:And I want to fulfill my commitments and I can't keep up. And that's where it goes downhill. I don't eat, I don't sleep, I don't work out, I don't spend time with friends, family, I just live in the library. And that's where I had another accident. I ended up passing out in the library, I fell down a flight of stairs, I hit my head again, and I woke up two days later in the hospital. And at this point, I mean, I've lost so much weight because I wasn't eating.

41:29James Altucher:Were you depressed?

41:30Jim Kwik:Yeah, I was very depressed. I was in a very dark place. It's not a, even when I'm talking about it, you know, I get a little, choked up. But I was down to 117 pounds. I thought I died. And it was a bad place. And when I woke up, another part of me woke up saying there has to be a better way. What I'm doing is not working for me. And that's when I started studying those books and studying the brain. I want to understand this thing where I want to understand how my brain works so I can work my brain. And I started studying adult learning theory. I found a book. I'm not saying it's the law of attraction, but I visited one of my friends on campus and on the book, I was, you know, his roommate's like, you know, bed was like a book on speed reading.

42:10Jim Kwik:I've never even heard of speed reading before. And I started studying that and the old school memory training and everything. And then about 60 days, two months into it, a light switch just popped on and I started to understand things for the first time. I started to have better focus, retention. I started to do better in school and with my grades improving, my life improved.

42:26James Altucher:What is that light switch? Is it something that happens naturally when you put six months of thought and, you know, kind of responsible thought into something and reading and so on?

42:34Jim Kwik:I mean, I think when people do deep immersion, I mean, people learn things lots of different ways. There's a way of, you know, called space repetition where we break things down into intervals, like, you know, kind of like working out where we do some Nautilus training here. Like we spread things out and consolidate from short term to long term memory. But another way of learning is through just deep immersion, right? Where you have no distractions, you're putting yourself in an environment where you're feeding your mind this information for eight plus hours. and that's what I was doing. I remember actually the moment where I actually understood there was a difference because sometimes you don't see your progress because you're in it.

43:07Jim Kwik:Kind of like with your kids, you look at your kids and you don't know if they've grown a lot, but friends who haven't seen them for six months or a year, they see the big growth because it's contrast. And so the time where I realized I had these superpowers was about 60 days into it. I remember I was in a lecture center, a few hundred people there. And back then there were no computers. There was just like, you know, remember those like overhead projectors where you'd write with one of those pens and stuff. They put something on the overhead projector on the screen in the lecture center and it was all these words and paragraphs.

43:37Jim Kwik:And then I started laughing out loud and I'm very shy in class. If anything, the superpower I had back in school was invisibility because I didn't want to be noticed. I didn't want to be heard. Deep down, I think all of us want to be heard and seen but I really didn't want that attention or spotlight on me. But I started laughing out loud. I didn't even realize I was doing it because I read what they put on the screen. and then everyone looked at me. I felt very awkward. And then about 15 seconds later, everyone else started to laugh and I realized that I read what was on the screen really quickly because of these newfound powers.

44:09Jim Kwik:And that's where I realized there was a fundamental difference. I don't even think it's reading at 500, 600, 800 words a minute where the average person reads about 200 words a minute is speed reading. I feel like it's just regular reading. We're just not taught these skills. I feel like we live in, and we had this conversation last time, we live in this age of, when we're talking about Elon Musk, We're talking about autonomous electric cars and spaceships that are going to Mars. But our vehicle of choice when it comes to learning is like a horse and buggy. It hasn't changed a whole lot as much as the world has changed.

44:36Jim Kwik:And I feel like if someone's listening to this, they feel like these three villains, the digital overload, which is like too much information, and it's not even filtered, right? There's more information being created every day with blogs and podcasts and YouTube and everything else. Trump's tweets. Right, exactly.

44:52James Altucher:And I don't even say that as a joke. that's actual competition with other information.

44:56Jim Kwik:And going back to our original conversation about not checking your phone the first hour of the day, when you're in that alpha-theta state, when you're in that relaxed state of awareness, you're fully impressionable, and you're going through your phone the very first thing when you're that impressionable and suggestible, and you're looking at comments, because you're getting these dopamine fixes from every time you get a like, a share, a comment, and you're metaphorically frying your brain, you're fatiguing it. Remember we were talking about choice fatigue and decision fatigue? we're using all those choices and those decisions to be able to scroll and look at cats and doing all these memes and everything and we wonder why we're tired and going back to this idea of decision fatigue the reason why Mark Zuckerberg or Tony Hsieh these people they wear the same sweatshirt or Tony always wears the same Zappos t-shirt being CEO of Zappos most of the time you ask them and they say that they do it because they don't want to waste one of their good decisions on what am I going to wear today they want to systemize everything and turn everything into processes so they can focus on the things that matter the most to them.

45:58Jim Kwik:And so that's one of the challenges, digital overload. But the other two, really quickly, are digital distraction. Because every time, the other challenge with opening your phone, there's two challenges with checking your phone the first hour of the day. Number one, it trains you to be distracted because you're looking at all the different things. And also the other problem is training you to be reactive. Meaning that when you're looking at text messages and emails and all these things from people wanting something from you or fires that you need to put out, then you're training yourself not only to be distracted, but you're training yourself to be reactive.

46:31Jim Kwik:And you're never going to have, especially the entrepreneurs that need to take the invisible, make it visible, turn their vision into reality and such like that. You're not going to have a quality of life if you're just reacting to all the things of everyone else's agenda that they have for you. And so that's why I pick up the phone that stays really bad to do rather than sitting down, doing what you're doing, being a maker, right? Planning the three things that you need to accomplish personally and professionally and keeping your eye on the prize. The third obstacle besides digital overload and digital distraction is digital dementia.

46:59Jim Kwik:And digital dementia is this new term used in healthcare, basically saying that our brains, like we're getting more and more forgetful. Everyone's feeling like senior moments are coming early, even if they're in their 20s or 30s. Why is this happening? And part of it is they're saying, doctors are saying it's because we're relying so much on our smart devices. And it keeps our to-dos, it keeps our calendars, it does simple math for us, it remembers all the phone numbers, all things that are convenient. Nobody wants to memorize hundreds of phone numbers, right? But we've lost the ability to do so.

47:28Jim Kwik:And that creates a lot of challenges. And they call it digital dementia, where your mind is like a muscle, grows stronger with use.

47:34James Altucher:Do you think that's true? Do you think that because someone's outsourced their contacts to a phone list, they're not actually just saying, okay, now my mind can do other things?

47:45Jim Kwik:So nature abhors a vacuum. So if you have this extra free time that you're saving from reading faster or anything an hour or two a day, then you're always going to fill it with something else. So there's two parts to it. I think that it's not black and white. I rely personally on my smart devices because I don't want to memorize everything. It's convenient. But I also don't want to lose the ability to if I need to. and so the challenge becomes so if you lost half of your memories if you forgot half the people that you know if you forgot half the words like the understanding of what those words meant you'd be at a disadvantage obviously and so the same could be said if you could potentially double your capacity to be able to remember these things you'd be twice as effective in these ways also having information at your mental fingertips especially in this age where we're paid for our expertise for our knowledge bank and our ability to make good decisions.

48:38Jim Kwik:We can only make good decisions based on the information that we remember at any given time. But if we lost that information, we're not very productive and our performance obviously hurts. The other thing I would say for digital distraction is we live in a world where people are addicted to being busy. They start bragging that they're busy all the time. They wear it as a badge of honor, which is a challenge. Because if you are getting significance or you're meeting some of these values by being busy, because basically when someone's saying that they're busy, which is something we all have a habit of saying is just basically what we're saying is we're important.

49:09Jim Kwik:We're so important, we have lots to do. And if people are getting rewarded through that, some kind of secondary gain out of it, the challenge is they start unconsciously designing their life to be busy all the time so they could feel that importance. And we know busyness is not necessarily the answer. The whole conversation we're having in the first half of this conversation was about putting first things first. You're focusing on life, love, and lessons, the things that we value most. We're majoring in the major things in life.

49:47James Altucher:Let's say I was just focused on money, which I was for many, many years. And I was making it, I was losing it, I was making it, I was losing it. I never felt good like up in my chest, meaning I never loved what I was doing. I always felt this stress in my gut. And I would even get sick in my stomach because I was just always thinking about money. And it wasn't something I necessarily... And I was doing things that I didn't necessarily love doing. And it's only in the past, let's say, seven years, it started moving up. My activities during the day started moving up how I felt in my body. So now I can tell when something's a good decision if I feel it up here in my chest, if I love it.

50:29James Altucher:Whether I'm good or bad at it, if I love it, then I can say, okay, this is something I want to get a lesson from or this is something I want to improve my life with because it makes me feel better up here and that's much more pleasant than the worry I always had in my stomach. It's very biological for me, decision making.

50:47Jim Kwik:One of the things that there's always some kind of gift that comes out of some of these challenges and one of the themes we and I were talking about is how struggles become strengths. That through challenge comes the level of change, right? How the mess becomes some kind of new message for people. We were talking before we got in the studio about my sleep issues. And so I don't talk about this publicly ever, but I think it could help maybe when a couple people are listening to this. So I've suffered from sleep apnea for the past five years, very severe, because as you get older, it gets worse and worse.

51:14Jim Kwik:And sleep apnea is this breathing disorder where you don't get enough oxygen when you sleep, so you wake up suffocating. And I use a CPAP breathing device to help me get air and dental devices that put my jaw forward and helps me to be able to breathe a little bit easier. but nothing's really hacked it.

51:31James Altucher:Do you think it's related to that? I've seen photos of you in the hospital bed really looking like a wreck through this. Do you think it's related to those early brain injuries?

51:41Jim Kwik:No, the apnea is actually a structure issue. It's actually because my tonsils were just very large and this soft palate in uvula in the back of my throat prevented oxygen to go through it. Usually, it's the people who usually suffer from it. I recommend anyone who wakes up still fatigued to get a sleep study done. You could do it at your local, your doctor could do it and order it for everybody. But I think more people suffer from this than they realize. And so what it is, it's usually because somebody's overweight and they carry a lot of extra weight around their neck and it prevents them from being able to get to breathe.

52:13Jim Kwik:But for me, it was purely genetic. What made it, and so I've had surgery and everything. I was hospitalized a number of times. Okay, so I was getting about 90 minutes to two hours a night for five years combined.

52:25James Altucher:And obviously, and this has come up on the podcast a lot, essentially most people need eight hours. Right. Not even on average. You just need eight hours every day.

52:35Jim Kwik:You need more. I mean, I don't know what the range is, but certainly more than a couple hours of sleep. And because the sleep is, people think that, like when I ask people how do they build muscles, they're like, oh, I go to the gym, I exercise. But in actuality, that's not where you're building the muscle. That's where you're tearing, literally tearing the muscle down. When you're building it is when you rest. And a lot of that is sleep is so important. It's like one of the best life hacks there is, performance hacks. Because when you don't sleep, your ability to make good decisions, your memory, your focus, everything is compromised the next day.

53:04Jim Kwik:And so that's a big challenge. And so for me, I never got enough sleep because I couldn't breathe. I would stop breathing 200 plus times a night. Each time was more than 10 seconds. So I'd wake up. The equivalent of this sleep doctor was saying, it's like somebody's coming in 200 times a night and suffocating you with a pillow. And so it's no wonder you're waking up.

53:20James Altucher:Did you realize this was an issue? Or did you think everybody just, this is how everybody slept?

53:25Jim Kwik:I've never slept really well, but as we get older, it gets worse progressively, sleep apnea does. The reason I bring this up though is the gift. What I've learned to do is train myself when I go through struggle. I'm trying to think, what's the gift in this? People don't realize, you were talking about all the struggles that people have and how people could grow from it. That's actually a powerful word because we've all heard of post-traumatic stress disorder. and people don't realize that there's also this thing called post-traumatic growth. That going through trauma, going through adversity, going through extreme difficulty, the most difficult times of your life, there's a number of people, percentage of people that come through it and they're actually thankful for that.

54:06Even though that they wouldn't wish it

54:09Jim Kwik:on anybody that they cared about or anybody because what they had to go through in terms of suffering, they got a certain level of meaning from that experience. They got a certain level of commitment. They got a certain level of newfound strength from it. And it changed everything. Like for me, I struggled for a decade and a half with my learning challenges, but I wouldn't trade that for anything because it put me on this path. And so I would say, what's the gift out of me not be able to sleep for five years and travel to Dubai and Hong Kong and do these mental feats, memorize a hundred people's names from stage when I'm really, really tired.

54:39Jim Kwik:I would say part of it is certainly is willpower because I focus on gratitude. I get really scared going on stage still because it's more my nature. I'm more introverted, but I focus on a couple of people. I feel like I can help in the audience and it puts my focus off of myself. I think that's important. I focus on giving, not to be able to get, but giving because it's who we are. And I would say that the gift out of not sleeping is two things. Number one is I would say that it's forced me to double down on the things that I teach because I could be as efficient and effective as I am getting done what a lot of people, it would take three or four people to do because I do what I teach in terms of learning and performance and all these brain hacks and stuff.

55:18Jim Kwik:But number two, besides doubling down on my capabilities and unique abilities, which I think everybody has, is I've gotten really good at filtering exactly what you're saying in terms of not overcommitting, saying no more often because it's this whole idea where I feel like a lot of stress that we're carrying is unconscious because we're overcommitting to so many different things. We have so many projects. We're trying to do so many things parallel. And we know that multitasking is a myth that it's not even accurate, that people who feel like they're multitasking, I'm not talking about walking and thinking and being on the phone, I'm talking about doing two cognitive activities or more at once where you're switching.

55:52Jim Kwik:And that's exactly what it is. The actual term for multitasking, more accurate, is task switching, where you're going from task to task, but every time you switch, your researchers are saying you're losing about five to 20 minutes because it takes that much time to regain your focus, regain your flow, if you will. Also, those people who are multitasking, not only is it wasting time so their performance goes their productivity goes down but also they're making more errors you know which is a big challenge also but we live in this world where people are over committing and they have all these windows open on their computer metaphorically even that even if it's minimized it's still taking up space and I'm saying that when I was sleeping two hours a night now it's up now to three or four hours now it's because I'm just working with some specialists but I would say that it forced me to really analyze the things that I want to and you know in the spirit of you know the one thing or essentialism everything is hell yes or it's hell no.

56:42Jim Kwik:And so like right now, James, there's nowhere else I'd rather be, there's nowhere I'd rather be with. Well, I am certainly glad about that. Because it was like automatic yes. And that's how I filter things. You remember you're saying in your chest, you do the things that you love, even if they're more difficult, they're more fulfilling for you. And I would say that it's good because you want to go through difficulty because anyone who's been given everything and if they have had an easy life, they don't develop pride and they don't develop strength. And I feel like over the past five years, it's forced me to really double down again on my capabilities the things that I teach about speed reading, memory just things that keep me productive and also it's forced me to say no 80 % of the time and only say yes to the things that really light me up

57:21James Altucher:So in terms of making those decisions let's go back to the hats so the white hat, red hat, black, yellow, green, blue let's put it in that context so white hat when you're making a decision What's an example of decision you've made where you've used this mental model?

57:40Jim Kwik:Yeah, I mean, so this would be really good. So I had surgery. I haven't talked about this, but one of the things, I was being hospitalized every single year because I would go X amount of days without sleep, and it got very, very bad, and I would have to be sedated and such. And I wanted to get the surgery done. They call it a UPPP. It's pretty severe. It's not like having your tonsils out when you're a kid. As adults, it's a lot more pain associated to it. And the challenge is I found out that 80 % of the time it's a failure. And so I'm like, why is everybody having the surgery and four out of five times it doesn't work, right?

58:11Jim Kwik:Because it's a very painful process, very costly process. And a number of my celebrity clients had gone through it and they still haven't fixed the problem with their breathing. And so I use the six hats as an example. I won't go through it completely, but when I'm wearing the white hat, I was going through it and looking at it analytically. Like looking at the data, looking at the research, why is it just four out of five? And also part of it is just the red hat. I was thinking, how do I feel about this? what's the emotional attachment because I don't like being nobody wants to be under anesthesia and out and everything else

58:42James Altucher:actually I like being under anesthesia but other than that it's so pleasant they say countdown to 10 and then by 7 you're gone and then you are groggy when you wake up it's like this new world it's like this science fiction aspect of anesthesia

58:57Jim Kwik:and I started going through it I looked at it through the critical standpoint wearing the black hat saying what could go wrong here and I started looking at the yellow and what could go right The one that actually made a difference was the green one. The green one is what other options do I have? And I started to ask around, and I happened to be talking. I just did a podcast on effective listening skills, and I would love to talk to you about how you become such a great listener. But I was having a breakfast with Larry King, and I was asking him these questions, and I was losing my voice when I was very concerned.

59:24Jim Kwik:And he recommended this doctor in Los Angeles, which led to another conversation with the head of throat at UCLA. Anyway, short story. I was like, I got a meeting with this guy, and I was looking at green. I was like, there's any other option besides the surgery? And she's like, yes, what we do here is we actually don't do this surgery unless it's actually necessary. And what we do that other doctors don't is we actually sedate you with anesthesia and then put a scope up your nose, down your throat to actually see where the obstruction is. Because lots of times it's actually the tongue that falls on the back of your throat that makes you snore or you can't breathe and that's why the apnea is there.

1:00:00Jim Kwik:And obviously they're not doing surgery on your tongue. but most are not effective because they're taking out parts of your oral cavity that doesn't need to be taken out. Why doesn't everybody do that? So he put me to sleep and then I said to him the specific instructions that if you see that my tonsils are actually the presenting issue then take them out and that's what he did. And it led to this new solution where I felt really good about it and it's made a difference. Instead of getting 90 minutes I'm getting 3 or 4 hours still and I'm still building it up and I'm in the middle of the process.

1:00:31Jim Kwik:But I think, again, our lifestyle, our life, our happiness is a reflection of our decisions. But nobody teaches us these things. School is a great place to learn what to learn. Math, history, science, Spanish. Important subjects, but zero on how to learn, how to listen, how to be creative, how to think for yourself, how to solve problems, how to focus, concentrate, how to read faster, how to remember things, how to be financially literate, all the things that could really serve us.

1:00:55James Altucher:So obviously this became a passion for you, in part because your mess became your message. How did you first get into the business of having all these clients where you would help them improve their memory, speed read, do brain performance hacks, and so on?

1:01:09Jim Kwik:Completely. I know you have a lot of entrepreneur listeners or people are on that path that starts business or they're transitioning and such or they value their freedom. I would say a couple of things. When I was growing up, my parents immigrated here and our family lived in the back of a laundromat in this small room and such. We had no financial means. I had no education. I had just learning challenges and disabilities and I knew nobody. So a lot of people, when they want to be successful, they just say, oh, you need money, you need education, you need contacts, connections, and network, and everything.

1:01:46Jim Kwik:But I feel like it's not, and people have said this before, so I'm not the one saying this, but it's not about your resources, external resources. I find it's the most successful people or have strong internal resourcefulness, creativity, ability to think, persistence, grit, growth, all that stuff, discipline. And so I would say that struggling all through my academically, when I had these breakthroughs, how I ended up teaching this in terms of my career and this is my 25th year of teaching. Well, I haven't thought about that. So yeah, it's 25 years. Is that when I got these results, I started helping friends and they started getting amazing results, right?

1:02:21Jim Kwik:Like what was the first friend you helped? Yeah, so I helped my roommates and sweetmates because they saw a big change in not just my grades, but just everything. You have one thing that's holding you back, and you fix it, and all of a sudden it opens up. It primes the bumps.

1:02:36James Altucher:Not only that, you find you have a passion for what fix was.

1:02:41Jim Kwik:Especially because this was my kryptonite. And so that's the challenge. It's like every single day, a thousand times a day, unconsciously, and probably hundreds of times consciously, I was thinking I'm not smart enough. I'm not good enough. I can't do this. And I would make up all these stories. And so when you overcome the biggest challenge that you have, I mean, it liberates you of something fierce, right? And so I would say that I started helping people and tutoring them. And then I wanted to help other people, right? And then someone was saying, hey, because I didn't have any money in school.

1:03:11Jim Kwik:And friends were always ordering Pizza Hut and chicken and broccoli. And I was like, you know, 40 pounds underweight and such. So I couldn't afford to do that. So I was like, how do you want you to tutor this? and I was like, I don't know how to first think about doing that but I noticed that there was a classroom that wasn't being used one Thursday night around 7 o 'clock and I saw, okay, next, I had this idea next Thursday at 7 o 'clock I'm going to put 5 or 10 people in that room for free and just teach them for a couple hours and then maybe afterwards one of them or two of them wants to be tutored ongoing so I could eat and then so I go back to my dorm room I take out a piece of paper and it's my very first marketing I wrote, free speed reading memory tips, get better grades in less time, Thursday, 7 o 'clock, and I put the lecture center room in there.

1:03:51James Altucher:I love this. So basically, it's as if you anointed yourself a professor in a university setting, took over a classroom without permission, of course, from the gatekeeper, which was the university who decides what courses go in every classroom. You announced it as if you were, you know...

1:04:11Jim Kwik:So it was really, it was exactly that. Like the next morning, so I wrote this down, hand wrote it, the flyer, and the next morning I make some photocopies and I put it on bulletin boards on the way to class. Not a lot, but just on the way to class. Fast forward to Thursday, the next Thursday, 7 o 'clock, I'm walking into the classroom and I'm just hoping five, ten people show up for this information session. And I turn the corner and there's a crowd of people outside the room. And I honestly, James, my first instinct is this. It's like, oh my goodness, I was like, I hope whatever's going on ends soon so I could do my thing.

1:04:43Jim Kwik:And I go there, I can't even get in the doorway, there's a tall guy, I was like, what's going on inside? And this guy looks at me, he's like, there's a speed reading class. And I was like, wow, what a coincidence. What are the odds there's a speed reading class, the same room, the same night, the same time. And I push my way in, this is how slow my mind is, and there's a room full of people there, even people standing in the back, and there's no one teaching. That's where I realized, it took my slow brain all that time to realize why they're all there. And I do a head count, and instead of 10 people, there's 110 people in that room.

1:05:13Jim Kwik:now keep in mind like I'm 18 years old I'm wearing t-shirt shorts I have nothing prepared to talk about and I'm phobic of public speaking so my heart's beating out of my chest I can't even breathe so I leave because I can't even I can't perform right and I think we've all had these choice points and I'm embarrassed but I left and there's these fountains because I can't even go back to my dorm room because I don't my friends will just make fun of me right and ask me what happened and everything but I go to these fountains and I just meditate you know and I think meditation is part of my practice, part of my daily routine.

1:05:44Jim Kwik:I just like to meditate 20 minutes a day. I think it's important to slow down, get that white space. Anyway, when I'm meditating, I hear this voice inside my head and it's my mom's. And basically she says to me that all these, you promised these hundred people that you're going to help them and they all came out and you're disappointing them and you're disappointing me kind of thing. And I'm doing this walking meditation back to my dorm room and I don't even realize it, but I stop and I take one step back to the classroom. And it's funny, James, because metaphorically, how one step in another direction can completely change your destination, your destiny, right?

1:06:20James Altucher:I can relate to that a lot. It's not even, so in your case, a physical step, but I think any small committal action in the right direction kind of says, well, I did that, I could do the next thing exactly so i just want to give an example and it's totally not related to this yours is much more important and serious and yours is this i've read a lot about you and this is the first time i'm hearing this origin story so believe me i'm going to make you continue it but when i described you before this subway comedy the first i wanted to videotape it so someone was with me with a video camera and I was like, forget it.

1:07:02James Altucher:I'm not going to do it. We're just going to get off the subway at the next stop and go home. But then I said, why don't you just turn on the video? And I still was not planning on doing anything, but that led to a series of mental actions that said, ladies and gentlemen. It does.

1:07:21Jim Kwik:I have this podcast and it's a solo podcast, but I did one on procrastination. And I think that a lot of times people don't take on things because they have no momentum. And I think just taking one step, even going back to the Zygarnik effect, makes it a little bit easier. This researcher out of Stanford, his name is Dr. BJ Fogg. He's a habits expert. And one of his students co-founded Instagram. Think about it. You want to make those addictive and habitual for people to check. And I think they say that the average person checks in on Instagram like 54 times a day or something. Certainly my kids do.

1:07:50Jim Kwik:It's extraordinary. And if you're doing less, then that means there's somebody out there doing a lot more. But when you're talking about habits, he has this idea of tiny habits where, for example, like everyone knows, they should floss, but a lot of people don't floss their teeth. And he's saying, okay, just floss one tooth. Because nobody is, are you going to stop at one tooth? Of course not, you're going to end up doing all your teeth, but it's just doing something. Even when I get people to do speed reading and I do these drills with them, I just say, hey, don't worry about reading for 20, 30 minutes, just read one word, right?

1:08:18Jim Kwik:Just get the book open, and then from there, people can build positive momentum.

1:08:22James Altucher:And that's often very good writing advice, like, okay, don't write a chapter of your novel, write a hundred words of what happened to you this morning and that kind of loosens the or greases the pipes or whatever the analogy is. Is that how it got you through your books? Probably, yeah.

1:08:40Jim Kwik:Because you experience writer's block all the time. But okay, so you take a step back. So basically I take a step back to the classroom. I don't even realize it's unconscious and I go back to the classroom. Same hundred people are there and I end up doing a talk for two hours.

1:08:54James Altucher:What was the first thing you said? You get up into the front. You must have said, thanks everyone for coming. But after that.

1:09:00Jim Kwik:And I apologized for starting late and everything. But I honestly, as a memory coach, as a memory expert, I don't remember what I talked about for two hours. Because I don't know how you are on stage, but this is my very first public speaking experience. And it just flowed right through me. And I don't know, some speakers, I know Wayne Dyer did that. He never prepared. He just trusted that he'd be able to present and such. But I don't remember what I did for two hours. But I remember exactly when I came out of trance at the end, I was just like, I don't know what to do. I remember I said, I was like, look, I don't know if I could help all of you, but I need about 10 hours to teach you what I know to get better grades and less time, speed reading, study and memorize all this stuff.

1:09:41Jim Kwik:I get$30 an hour to tutor. And I made this up because I used to get$30 an hour teaching tennis back in high school. And that was my only reference. I'm making this up as I go. And I said, I'm not sure how to do this, but maybe meet a couple hours a week for five weeks. And if you're interested, I'll be in the student center tomorrow at noon to answer your questions. And I swear to you, James, a hundred people just get up and they just leave. Nobody talks to me. I'm totally confused. I feel completely, two things, I feel completely exhausted and spent because when you face your biggest fear, I mean, afterwards I was wiped out.

1:10:11Jim Kwik:I mean, mentally, physically, emotionally, I was just spent. And I was also confused. I was like, did anyone like me? Did I just totally mess this up? And I ended up, I was so spent and exhausted, I actually fell asleep. on the carpet in that classroom. And I got woken up, and that was the best sleep of my life to this day. I got woken up the next morning from the class coming in the next morning, and I freaked out. I went back to my dorm room, showered, went to breakfast, went to class, 12 o 'clock comes, and I was like, oh, shoot, I have to go and meet people. Hopefully one or two of them shows up and are interested in tutoring.

1:10:43Jim Kwik:When I get to the students that are at 12, I'm hoping one or two people are there. That same crowd of people are there. And I swear, after two hours, 71 of the 100 kids signed up for a program that didn't even exist.

1:10:56James Altucher:How did you have the time actually? And so here's the thing. That's 140 hours a week.

1:10:59Jim Kwik:So I put those individuals, I put them into classes, three different classes of 25, right? Or 2025. And I didn't realize it because I didn't do the math that$30 an hour for 10 hours was$300. Because all these kids in the student center, there was the ATM machine was right there. They all went to the ATM machine and took out$300 cash. And I didn't realize they could do that because I didn't even have an ATM card. I didn't even know what that was because I didn't have that resource. And so I'm not even 19 years old and I have$21 ,000 cash in my backpack. And going back to my original mentor who said, don't let school get in the way of your education, I actually use all the money.

1:11:37Jim Kwik:Part of it I used to feed my body because I was so underweight and I ordered food and Chinese food and Pizza Hut and all that good stuff. But I actually use the majority of it to feed my mind. I travel around the country going to every event, seminar, audio program just to learn my craft.

1:11:52James Altucher:Because suddenly also, it seems like you're, it's like in stages. It's like, oh, you did this for six months and now suddenly you're getting better grades and your roommates who you loved and trusted noticed this difference and you felt, hey, this is a way for me to be higher up in the tribe. So you were getting this mental reward for it. Then you give this class and then the next stage, which is like, oh my gosh, people I don't even know are rewarding me for it and giving me money. And so of course you're going to double down on exactly what it is that's giving you such pleasure.

1:12:26Jim Kwik:And I take all that revenue, if you will, and I reinvest it back into myself, into my skill set in terms of my own learning. And the reason why I'm still teaching it to this day is one of the students, she is remarkable. She read 30 books in 30 days.

1:12:41James Altucher:I remember reading this story because she wanted to read about battling cancer.

1:12:45Jim Kwik:Yeah, and so all the books were health and wellness, maybe by a lot of our mutual friends. And her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, was only given 60 days to live by doctors. And the books she was reading were books to help save her mom's life. And she ended up doing so. By the way, credit to her mom for listening to her daughter over doctors. Yeah, and the thing is, and I'm not, again, people should talk to qualified health practitioners and stuff and get good information to make good decisions. It's just the doctors end up calling it a miracle, but her mother attributed it 100 % to the great advice she got from her daughter and learned it from all these books.

1:13:19Jim Kwik:And that's the thing. That's where I realize the fundamental belief that I have is that if knowledge is power, learning is your superpower. That if knowledge is power, learning is your superpower. And the challenge is we're just not taught how to learn. That's all.

1:13:30James Altucher:Well, we're not taught how to learn, and we're also not taught what to learn. And I think, like you said, we can all sit around and read math textbooks, but that might not be something we love. It might not be something that improves my life, and it might not be something, a lesson that I'm going to be able to kind of take into other areas of my life. So how would you suggest, so someone listening to this, they're listening to all this and they're like, well, I could read books any day or I could listen to podcasts or whatever. What should I, how do I find what I love, what's going to improve my life and how do I find the lessons that will contribute to that?

1:14:03Jim Kwik:Yeah. And I don't think that that's necessarily an easy one line sentence to be able to solve that.

1:14:09James Altucher:But because, I mean, you look at your example, it took this series of challenges. It was like the guy bringing you to his library. So he gave you, he kind of became this weird Yoda-like example. And then the next thing was your roommates sort of rewarding you. And then the next wave was these hundreds of people rewarding you and then money rewarding you. And then the extra knowledge you were gaining from all these conferences. So there's like a series of stages. Like people sort of think success happens at the end, but you kind of have to reward yourself and celebrate the little successes all along the way.

1:14:40James Altucher:You obviously celebrated the little success of reading that first book, then the little success of your roommate saying, hey, what happened to you? Then the little success of 100 people showing up for a classroom and so on.

1:14:51Jim Kwik:Right. We've all seen the memes and the graphics on social media where success is not a straight line. It's this really weird squiggly line. But I think that there's, it's cliche, but I really feel like that we only fail when we fail to learn. When we win, we feel happy. But when we lose, instead of happiness, we get wisdom, hopefully. That feedback, if you will. Which is hard. It is.

1:15:16James Altucher:Because it's hard not to get depressed. If you want to get better at tennis and you lose a game of tennis, you might say, I hate this. I hate this feeling of loss so much. I am not going through it again.

1:15:28Jim Kwik:Right. And that's why I think if I was to boil down the characteristics of that mindset, if you will, success mindset or whatever. I would say 4Gs. I would say that growth, which we know that we're grossly underestimating our capacity, that our intelligence, our potential, our memory is not fixed like our shoe size. So this growth mindset. When we're green, we grow. And when we're brown, we rot. But besides growth, I would say grit is important. And this is the idea where a lot of success shows up when we show up. and the challenge is when we reach this pain point, a lot of us pull back because we don't want to feel, we don't want to be disappointed, we don't want to get our hopes up or maybe just we don't have the great muscles, meaning that like yesterday, I hurt my back a little bit working out and I went to a chiropractor and when I was going in the office, there was a cryotherapy place right next door and I was like, wow, that's neat.

1:16:23Jim Kwik:Have you seen, have you done this before? No. So there's this idea of cold therapy where that if you bang your knee on a table, you put ice on it to reduce swelling, to reduce inflammation. And we know a lot of athletes and performers, dancers, they take ice baths like Michael Phelps because it lowers inflammation, helps them recover better. So there's these cryo chambers in most major cities at spas where you could go into this nitrogen chamber and it brings it down to negative 200, negative 240 degrees and you're in there in your underwear basically. Won't that kill you right away? No, it's safe.

1:16:59James Altucher:If I go into a water that's 200 degrees, I feel like my body's going to go into shock within 40 seconds.

1:17:05Jim Kwik:Right. That would be ice. So what I'm saying is there's people like Wim Hof who go in regularly in these ice in the Arctic and stuff like that and they go swimming. It's insane. But anyway, there's these closely monitored spas that they have these cryo chambers. And you go in and you're in there for 90 seconds to 3 minutes max and it's cold. It's negative 200, negative 240 degrees. But the idea here is it's like a nervous system reset. It helps you lower inflammation and recover better and all these other benefits. The reason why I'm bringing this up is because the last 30 seconds for me is very, it's difficult and I want to leave.

1:17:42Jim Kwik:And you obviously have the option to leave at any time. But I push myself because for me, grit is like a muscle. Because how we do anything is how we do everything generally. and I want to build that muscle because that will show up in other areas of my life. And so whenever you push yourself in certain ways to get more out of yourself, you tend to do that in other areas when you need it the most. And so growth grit.

1:18:07James Altucher:But by the way, just on that point, I notice, and I'm saying this in a positive way, you use a lot of really great cliches. So like how we do everything is how we do anything or how we do anything is how we do everything. That's something that's been said a million times before. It's in lots of books. I'm not criticizing you saying that. I actually think there's a reason something's a cliche. It's a great way to learn a valuable life lesson.

1:18:35Jim Kwik:Because like all cliches, there's a truth to it. I think there's a difference between dabbling in something and really becoming more on this path to, for lack of a better word, mastery. I feel like lots of times people have listened to this show, other shows, and they could repeat a lot of what the expert could say because they've heard it somewhere before. But I feel like we do a disservice to ourselves if we kind of overlook the fundamentals. And for me, in terms of high performance and when it comes to accelerating people's learning and learning things in a fraction of time, I feel like it comes back to the basics in terms of the things that are to move the needle the most.

1:19:18Jim Kwik:with the kind of results we want to be able to get. But a lot of times people always want to know the new thing, the new thing, the new thing. And for me, the old thing is always the new thing. I agree with that. So we have four Gs I'm talking about. So my main point in bringing this up is people can listen to a podcast, even if they've heard it before, maybe they listen to it in a different way or a deeper way and really think, because I feel like if people aren't doing it, or if they can't do it, that they don't really understand it unless they're doing it.

1:19:41James Altucher:I think that's really true. And it's so interesting. So I did give a talk related to this once. I was at a conference and everybody was talking about content marketing, which is this idea that, oh, you shouldn't just put up an ad. You should write about what your brand means and what your company's motivation and vision is. And I said, that doesn't actually work. You have to actually do things that show you're living the example of what you believe in. You can't just write about it because then it's just theory. Then it's just words. And that's related to the grit. But you can't say, you, Jim Quicks, can't say being in cold helps your life unless you have the grit to go through this.

1:20:21Jim Kwik:And the two things I'll bring up, because I dropped these names for the purpose of, if I mentioned John Smith, a lot of people wouldn't necessarily put a picture in people's minds. But a lot of memory has to do with triggers. And that's a lot of what my memory training is based on, controlling triggers. And triggers is a very important element in creating new habits. Because there's three parts to creating new habits or breaking habits. You have this behavior that you want to create, this new habit. Let's say you want to read 20 minutes a day or you want to journal or you want to meditate or whatever.

1:20:49Jim Kwik:According to Dr. BJ Fogg, ETS has three parts. They call it BMAT. So B is behavior, M is motivation, A is the ability, and then T is the trigger. And so motivation, ability, trigger. And so in order to be able to change a habit, you need the motivation to want that. Because if you're not motivated to do it, If your motivation is zero, zero times anything is going to be zero, so there's not going to be a big change.

1:21:14James Altucher:And again, I think motivation, just to kind of relate it back, I think that's going to be related a lot to does this kind of satisfy

1:21:22Jim Kwik:some of this life, love, lessons idea? If it's relevant to us or to a problem that we're suffering from or to a value that we have, because a lot of things going back to school, sine, cosine, X tangent, hypotenuse, Y, most people aren't going to remember that or the periodic table or anything because it had no relevance to them.

1:21:52James Altucher:I would just encourage people listening to this because I think motivation for a lot of people, particularly young people, and I know this was a motivation for me, is simply money. I need money to afford things that I want to buy or to not worry or to protect my family. I think the motivation has got to be one level higher than that at least. And it's worth thinking about at least. Even if your motivation is money, at least think about what motivations

1:22:16Jim Kwik:might exist higher for you. And I think there's certain things we could do psychologically to enhance our level of motivation. Like what? So even putting a number to it, like I just happen to do unconsciously, saying if your motivation happens to be zero, we could always do in a self-assessment, like what's my motivation to read this book today? And it happens to be a four. I could think about what I need to do inside my mind or outside in the world, either my perception of it or my procedure on the outside to be able to make it a six. Just jump it up two points. I'll say, okay, maybe I'll give myself this reward if I read this book.

1:22:46Jim Kwik:Or maybe if I read this book, I'll be able to do this. And really feeling it increases my inherent motivation. The reason I bring up motivation is because motivation is like a state. It's like a mood of our mind and body. It's like a little snapshot because it's always in flux. It could go from zero to 10 or whatever. The reason I bring it up is because I find that I could get results with anybody as long as they have two qualities. that they are motivated and that they are teachable. And this is whether you're a parent or you're a teacher, you're a coach, the same thing applies because you can't help somebody teach them how to speed read or learn a language, whatever it is, if they're not motivated to do so.

1:23:20Jim Kwik:But even if their motivation was 10 out of 10, if their teachability or their open-mindedness was zero, they're not willing to learn new things because they feel like they've already know it. Oh, I've been in sales for 40 years, so what am I going to learn from you kind of thing? then teachability, if it happens to be zero, zero times 10 is still zero. But the opposite happens to be if someone's very teachable, maybe 10 out of 10, but their motivation is zero, then they're not going to get the results. I can't make someone more teachable. I can't motivate somebody inherently because they need something more intrinsic.

1:23:51Jim Kwik:But if people have those qualities, I feel like I could grow them. But going back to the 4Gs, so we talk about growth mindset.

1:23:57James Altucher:Oh no, go back to BMAT. We're in the middle of like 16 acronyms.

1:24:06Jim Kwik:And the whole thing with a lot of teaching styles in terms of parables and open loops, so people want to know what the answer is. So M is motivation. A is ability. So let's say you want the new habit to be flossing your teeth. You need the ability to know how to floss your teeth. If you're able to read, you need to be literate. Let me ask you about this though.

1:24:24James Altucher:Let's say I want to be in better shape and the sport I love the most is tennis. I'm just making this up. and so I'm motivated to play a lot of tennis to get in better shape. But I'm 50 years old, so I'm not going to have the ability that an 18-year-old would have.

1:24:44Jim Kwik:And that's true for any kind of skill development. Am I too late to do BMAT? So BMAT is universal. It's like gravity. It applies for anything. So if you have the ability, obviously everyone's abilities range because of different ages, different genetics, different abilities, nature and nurture and such. But I mean, I have a belief when we're going back to growth that everyone has the ability. Like if you take anybody, regardless of their age or whatever, you put them on a wellness program, they're moving and such, they're going to make growth, right? They're going to make progress.

1:25:10James Altucher:But let me do a counter example, which is like the Beatles. So the Beatles were teenagers. They played music. So they wanted to be better musicians and they were motivated by music. They loved it. They may or may not have had the ability, but they had the time to put in those so-called 10 ,000 hours which many adults, after they get kids and jobs and mortgages, don't have that time.

1:25:35Jim Kwik:Right. I mean, and that's one of the reasons why they say children are such fast learners. You know, they think of languages or musical instruments faster. But in actuality, part of it is, besides having a natural wonder and not being filled in terms of their teacup, you know, not knowing what they know, is they have a lot of time, children do, compared to an adult.

1:25:54James Altucher:So now someone listening to this is thinking, well, I have a mortgage, I have kids, I got to pick them up after school, I got to do this, I got to do that. How am I going to work on my ability?

1:26:03Jim Kwik:Right. Okay, so not everyone is equal in terms of their income. Not everyone's equal on their network. Not everyone's equal with their education level and everything else like that. But what we all are equal to is we all have 24 hours in a day. And how people spend and invest their time, people's time, in terms of where they put their attention, expresses their values, right? because we can be very creative going back to, I don't believe that there's time management as much as it is managing our priorities. What's most important to us? Like for you, we were talking about love and we're talking about life and we're talking about learning, right?

1:26:40Jim Kwik:Our lessons and such. I'm saying that if people aren't scheduling time to increase their abilities, then if people can't find an hour a day, then they're doing something. I feel like they need to reevaluate how they're investing their time.

1:26:52James Altucher:So it's interesting because it's not necessarily about mastery, it's about direction. So if you put in that hour a day, the direction is going to be upwards whether or not you become the Beatles or not.

1:27:03Jim Kwik:I think practice makes progress. And so I think that would be the goal. I think we're happiest when we see progress in our life, whether it's in our health, it's in our relationships, it's in our finances or anything. But it takes time, an investment of time, focus, capital. When I talk about focus, just imagine going outside and you have a magnifying glass. and when you were kids, you used to burn leaves and some people burn ants and stuff like that. But when you see that focal point... My baby sister, her eye. So when you're doing that, it becomes very bright. When light goes through a magnifying glass, you have this very bright focal point.

1:27:38Jim Kwik:And it's interesting because we use the word bright to describe people who are very intelligent and very smart. They're bright. But maybe they're not smarter than you. Maybe it's just they're better focused. Do you know what I mean? and I think that that's a lot of power. And so that's why going back to multitasking, I feel like it doesn't work. But I would say that people invest in their abilities and the last thing is the T in the BMAT, according to BJ Fogg, is trigger. That in order to enforce a habit, you need something, an external trigger to remind you to do it. And that's how memory really works.

1:28:13Jim Kwik:The idea here, like for example, common time management protocol is this is called the Pomodoro technique, which is basically saying they did studies with people and they found out their focus takes a dive after 25 to 30 minutes. That pretty much you could watch an episode of your favorite TV show and then it's pretty much your focus is not there. And so the Pomodoro technique is basically taking your smartphone and sending an alarm for 30 to 45 minutes. And when the alarm goes off, you get up and you take five minutes and you just move around, you take some deep breaths, you hydrate, you refresh yourself and you come back and you're going to be more productive.

1:28:49Jim Kwik:And the reason why you want to do this, I'll give you a couple more reasons why you want to do it, besides the fact that you lose focus after a certain amount of time, is that in memory training, we know that cramming doesn't work. That if you cram for eight hours a day without a break, eight hours straight, it's not going to be anywhere near as effective as if you took a break every 45 minutes to an hour. Because there's this phenomenon called primacy and recency. Primacy says you tend to remember things in the beginning of something. Recency means you tend to remember something at the end. So for example, James, you go to a cocktail party and you meet, maybe they're all new people at the party, you'll remember, primacy says you'll remember people in the beginning at the party recency says you'll remember the last people you met at the party, more recent, right?

1:29:28Jim Kwik:Prime meaning first, beginning. And that you tend to forget the people at the end and mean in the middle. And so there's this big dip unless somebody stands out or they're emotional, like something that stands out in meeting them. Same thing with a list. If I gave you a list of 30 words to memorize, you probably remember the beginning words and the end words unless there were some words in the middle that stood out. So there's this big gap and dip. So if you study for eight hours without a break, it's like you remember stuff in the beginning and then you remember stuff at the end, but in the middle you forget.

1:29:55James Altucher:So you want to give yourself a lot of beginnings and middles.

1:29:57Jim Kwik:Exactly, so you create these 30-minute breaks or 45-minute breaks in between, then you create a lot more beginnings and ends, primacy and recency, so you pick up a lot more content. And so that's just in terms of studying techniques, it's one of the better things you could do.

1:30:10James Altucher:So this is great, this B-Met, and this was under the topic of grit, basically.

1:30:15Jim Kwik:Of creating new habits. So I mean, everything comes down to the whole, here's the cliche quote, right? First you create your habits and then your habits create you, right? First you create your habits. I haven't heard that cliche before, but it sounds good. There you go. And so we did two dedicated episodes on how to create new habits and then how to break old habits because it's a little bit different process because planting a tree is a very specific process, but tearing that tree out is something that's different. And so I think it's important for everyone to understand their habits. but going back to the 4Gs, you have growth mindset, you have a grit mindset.

1:30:48Jim Kwik:And going back to grit specifically, what I was going to mention about dropping the names, a couple years ago, there was a big boxing match, Mayweather and Pacquiao, right? And I'm not a big boxing fan, but I like the highest level of competition because I like to learn and see what excellence is and champions and stuff. And I get this phone call from Sylvester Stallone saying, Jim, do you want to watch the boxing match at my place? And I'm like, I totally want to do that.

1:31:11James Altucher:Okay, just time out, break. How does Sylvester Stallone say to himself, huh, I'm going to watch boxing on TV. Who should I watch it with? Should I call up Al Pacino or should I call up Jim Quick? How does he think, I'm calling Jim Quick. Screw Al.

1:31:32Jim Kwik:He was so annoying at the last boxing match. I think Al, I probably was low on the list of invitations because it was kind of interesting room. so I was sitting on the couch and we're watching the match right? I am, I am, I am so to my left on the couch was Stallone and to his left was Arnold Schwarzenegger so a lot of people did get invites so I was probably the last person on this list and honestly if you took a picture of that couch people would be like who photoshopped that Asian dude in that photo

1:31:59James Altucher:How do they think to call you at all for a boxing match that he's with Arnold Schwarzenegger and I don't know Boris Becker and whoever let's also call Jim Quick

1:32:11Jim Kwik:It's the only tennis name I can think of. We had just had dinner that week and we were talking about this match. It's just topical. People actually see on Instagram, there's an interesting photo of me and Sly. Going back to my lesson and going on grit, afterwards, seeing the match, I went to the two of them. I was like, these two champions battling it out. It's amazing. $300 million, the highest level of competition. What does it take to be a champion? I'll always remember what Arnold said because he said, Jim, this is the key. He's like, the difference between an amateur and a champion is the champion is willing to push past the pain period.

1:32:48Jim Kwik:And that for me is a great definition of grit, right? Because in order to grow a muscle, it's like you don't want to do, like the first five or six or whatever just warms up the muscle, does nothing for you. But it's the ones that you least want to do that you're going to get the most benefit from. And it's kind of like life, right? I mean, they say that the quality of our life comes down to our ability to have difficult conversations and do the hard stuff. And then our life is easier and such. And so that was very telling for me because I've noticed the parallel between that and business and that and health.

1:33:20Jim Kwik:In order to accomplish anything, you have these problems that come up. There's something else in that quote too,

1:33:25James Altucher:which is very interesting, which is that the pain period begins long before your ability ends. Because your brain, as soon as it feels a little bit of pain is like, uh-oh, what's happening? Shut everything down while we figure this out. When I had a podcast with Jesse Itzler, and this is over a year, about a year and a half ago, he wrote a book, Living with a Seal. A Seal was training him. I won't go into all the specifics of his thing. But one thing he said was, at the moment where you feel, I can't do this anymore, from that moment, you can do at least 40 % more.

1:34:02Jim Kwik:And that's just the brain and body at work. and I find the people that are involved in certain levels, I'm not just saying in Hollywood, whether it's technology and relationships and physical performance and fitness like the SEALs, they have an acute awareness, self-awareness, meaning they understand what motivates them, they understand pain and pleasure. Because I'll tell you actually, when I was talking to Stallone, I was saying, hey, I have this potential gig. I was telling him, he was like, where are you speaking next? And I was saying, oh, this thing in Dubai. And I was telling him about projects.

1:34:30Jim Kwik:And I was like, do you think I should do that? And he was like, Stallone said, He said, Jim, will the pleasure outweigh the pain? And that was interesting because that was another mark on pain, right? Because he was acutely sensitive to it. He was like, will the pleasure be worth the pain?

1:34:45James Altucher:So the pain is like sort of traveling, being away from friends, just all the annoyances, and the pleasure is whatever you decide.

1:34:53Jim Kwik:Exactly. And then, I mean, coming back to discipline, that's why I think it's so important to have routines. Like I have my morning routine and I have my evening routine for the same reason we were talking about before, about not having to suffer from decision fatigue. So the first hour, I literally don't have to put any thought into because it's so set up for me to just, you know, the light of my brain and to win all the time. But I think at the beginning, it took more discipline and willpower until it became a habit and it became unconscious. So, you know, for people listening - Building your grit muscle.

1:35:20Jim Kwik:Exactly. And putting myself in situations where you get comfortable being uncomfortable because that's ultimately where we're going to grow the most. So growth, grit, and the last two Gs for mindset, I would say a giving mindset, giving meaning that it's not just about me, it's about we, because I think the whole reason to grow is because it allows you to have more to give.

1:35:41James Altucher:And this is related to what we were talking about earlier with motivation, like make sure it's about something a little bit more meaningful than, as important as money is, by the way, because I'm not saying money is not important, it's extremely important to live in this society, but to succeed, you have to have the we in there more than the me or just as much as the me. Exactly, exactly.

1:36:01Jim Kwik:Even when it comes to giving, I feel like that everything in nature grows and gives. Everything in nature is green and it grows or it's brown and it rots. And everything in nature also has to give back to the rest of the ecology. And if it's not, then it gets eliminated. And I just feel like that we don't give to get. We give because it's who we are. And I feel like... Actually, let me understand that. Does a leaf give?

1:36:23James Altucher:I'm an idiot, right? So does a leaf give to ecology?

1:36:27Jim Kwik:It does. Oxygen or photosynthesis. Okay, yeah, it does. Does a cockroach give to ecology? I'm sure like we lost all the bees or something in society like everything. There's a consequence because it's all systems. Everything, there's this whole butterfly effect. Literally, I'm using butterflies to explain the butterfly effect. But the whole butterfly effect is this idea where a butterfly flapping its wings in Los Angeles could create a tsunami across the country because everything is dynamic systems. But my point in bringing this up and giving is because we'll do more sometimes for other people than we will for ourselves.

1:36:58Jim Kwik:and I just feel like as long as we're growing, we're filling up our teacups so we have more to be able to give to somebody else. The other reason why I bring this up is from an accelerated learning standpoint, I think it's very important for people to listen to these shows, to listen to your show when they do and then think about somebody that they want to pass this knowledge on to, like teach it and coach, mentor somebody in this area because if somebody wants to learn something faster, learn it with the intention of teaching it to somebody else and that will double your effectiveness because when you learn to teach, you're paying attention differently, you're taking notes differently, you're making it your own.

1:37:31Jim Kwik:Here's the tweetable. This is mine.

1:37:33James Altucher:I like learning to teach is tweetable. Yeah.

1:37:35Jim Kwik:Here's an even better one. When I teach something, I get to learn it twice. When I teach something, I get to learn it twice. At Jim Quick, K-W-I-K-I. On Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. No, I'm going to take credit for it myself. But here's the thing. But that's the intention though. We grew up, James, hearing this phrase that said, those who can't do, teach. If you can't do business, you teach business in business school. but when I learned this stuff I was very ignorant I actually didn't think it was a negative I was like wow if I can't do something let me teach it and then if I teach it I could do it and that was my thought process but I would learn with the intention of teaching well the teaching is still doing and so going back to giving I feel like that everyone here would be able to learn even faster rate if you learn with the purpose of giving that's why I launched the podcast a few months ago is because I was thinking like how can I democratize this information and really 10, 15 minute brain hacks and make it free for everybody.

1:38:31Jim Kwik:That was our way of just giving back to our community. And then finally, the fourth G, I would say, in this kind of superhero mindset is first, you're growing, you have grit, grit mindset, you're giving, and then gratitude. And that's kind of the elusive obvious. But I feel like you can only really build on success. But I feel like we can only have the things that we're most appreciative for.

1:38:55James Altucher:But I feel like there's a lazy way to do gratitude and a more difficult way. And it's easy for someone to kind of look at it at a sunset and say, oh, I'm so happy to be here. What's real gratitude?

1:39:08Jim Kwik:What's hard gratitude? Yeah, I would say active gratitude, just like active giving, because anyone could just have the spirit of giving and not do it. I think the actual act of it. So for example, a lot of people have a vision board. A vision board is that thing, that little collage that you make on poster board where you cut out pictures out of magazines of things you want to be, do, have, share places you want to live and vacation and your car, all that stuff. Vision board, right? And you could take the invisible, make it visible. For me, I literally have a gratitude board. And a gratitude board is all the things that I've already have in my life that I'm just really grateful for all on one board that I can look at and I can feel it.

1:39:48Jim Kwik:And that's more active because it took time to put that together. And as I achieve things that are on my goal list or my bucket list, I can put those things on my gratitude board. And if anyone wants to feel instantly more wealthy, it's literally, I would just make a list and count all the things you have that money can't buy. I mean, if you're listening to the show right now and you have the capacity to hear and to process, the ability to talk, the ability to see your senses, I mean, gratitude had a most fun, if you have your health in any kind of way. Like even when I was very sick with my sleeping challenge, they have this phrase that says, a healthy person has a thousand dreams, but an unhealthy person has only one dream.

1:40:29Jim Kwik:That's why I think self-care, I just put that on Twitter, self-love and self-care is not selfish. I just feel like self-care is so important nowadays because we're under an immense amount of stress and a lot of us, in what ways are people really nurturing themselves and gaining the right sleep, gaining the right food? And that helps to build grit, helps to build resilience by investing in our own physical and emotional health.

1:40:55James Altucher:It's really true. And there's a line from the Yoga Sutras written in 350 BC that it's one line and it's the nine reasons why somebody might have difficulty getting enlightenment. So whether or not you believe enlightenment, that's what was believed in 350 BC. But the first thing on this list is sickness. Yes. Like, so you have to basically focus. People don't think, oh, what's health related to, you know, spirituality or religion or mental health or whatever. You have to be physically healthy to have the energy to do all these other great things in life. You only have one life and it's fueled only by your energy,

1:41:37Jim Kwik:the energy of your body. Yeah. And I noticed that when it comes to gratitude in terms of that vibration, it helps, it's helped me through a lot of when I, so active gratitude is, so how I get on my stage fright is doing that process before I go on stage, I'll actually focus on a handful of people and reassociate myself to thinking like success stories, people that I've helped. Because when I put my focus on them, then I can't be focused on myself being scared.

1:42:03James Altucher:I see. So let's say you're about to go out and speak in front of a thousand people and you're thinking, oh my God, I might not do well. They might not respond to what I'm saying. What do you think of maybe the woman who read the 30 books?

1:42:15Jim Kwik:You think of those first two.

1:42:16James Altucher:And those are the things.

1:42:17Jim Kwik:and I literally changed and I also just put this on Instagram. Are you digital shaming me? This is one of the great brain gratitude hacks there were. For me, I changed my I got to to I get to. So instead of saying I got to give this presentation, I got to work out, I got to pick up the kids, I got to read this book or whatever, I just change it to I get to. I get to pick up the kids, I get to speak on stage, I get to work out and it changes. It's so subtle. It's changing the O in got to the E in get. And it just changes the meaning and it changes the feelings I have. If we talked about before that people aren't logical, they're biological and they're emotional, and all learning is state-dependent.

1:43:02Jim Kwik:And that's one of the reasons why we don't learn a lot. We have that inherent motivation and those feelings. I think that success, I call it HQ, goes from your head to your heart to your hands. That you could affirm things in your head, you could visualize things in your head, you could set goals in your head, but if you're not acting with your hands, nothing changes, right? But usually what's missing is that second H, which is your heart, the emotion, right?

1:43:21James Altucher:I think that's really true. You asked me earlier what changed after I started giving things away and really this process started much earlier than that. That was sort of the end of the process. What really changed for me was that I started feeling a lot more things in my heart on my daily activities and decisions. Much like you would say, Tony Hsieh, because he's only wearing the same shirt, he can focus more on the things that affect his heart as opposed to what shirt he should wear doesn't really affect his heart.

1:43:48Jim Kwik:Right, and people could declutter all that and it gives you more in terms of what's most essential.

1:43:54James Altucher:So we've covered a lot and I kind of want to piece it together. There's the six hats, the four Gs, B mats. There's all these things. I do think everything kind of stems from what I'm now going to call the three Ls, love, life, and lessons. You're only given one life and this is what you should do with it is growth, grit, giving gratitude. Here's how you get grit. Here's how you get gratitude. Here's how you build the growth mindset. All of these things are kind of connected all to this love, life, and lessons. Your heart, how can you improve your life, and the lessons that you can either learn or, as you say, teach because you'll learn twice as you teach.

1:44:34Jim Kwik:Very much so. I like frameworks because once people have those distinctions, they could start carving out the world or their model of the world into it and start filtering by it. Even when I talked about in the prior episode about the 10 keys for locking your superior brain, it allows you to see the areas that you're neglecting by putting a name to it. I think that's important.

1:44:57James Altucher:Absolutely, which is why, again, I wasn't critical of the cliches. I think actually if all you did out of this episode was to take any one of these cliches and just think about it for a couple of hours, it would be immensely valuable. Because I've used the I got to change it to I get to. I've used that and it's incredibly valuable.

1:45:18Jim Kwik:Yeah, and it's so simple. And that's the thing going back to dabblers. People could listen to something and what I would love for people is to hear something because we know that common sense is not always common practice, that the little things can make the biggest difference. But I would encourage everyone who's listening to this is to take one or two ideas out of this conversation, just employ it because knowledge is not power. Knowledge is only potential power. It only becomes useful when we're actually applying and taking action on it.

1:45:44James Altucher:So let me ask you this. You deal with so many peak performers. Like you've mentioned a couple of celebrity clients or friends or whatever. They already have gone through all of this. That's why everybody in the country knows their name. So everybody knows who Jim Carrey is, for instance. By the time you've met him, by the time you've mentioned him, what do you see in someone like that or like you mentioned the story about Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone but what do you see as that kind of final leg of peak performance that keeps them at a high level is it a persona that they keep

1:46:20Jim Kwik:feeding or what is it okay so I like to reverse engineer this a lot because I get a lot of feedback and so for example with Jim Carrey I was coaching him he had called me up and said Jim I'm going to be in Dumb and Dumber, I want to get smart. I want to get super smart before Dumb and Dumber. We're in his kitchen and we're making guacamole. It was me and him and it was Eckhart Tolle. Are you kidding me?

1:46:48James Altucher:What the hell is Eckhart Tolle

1:46:49Jim Kwik:doing in there? Jim Carrey is very interested in a lot of his transformation work. It just happens to be there.

1:46:56James Altucher:He called up Eckhart Tolle who lived in Vancouver and Eckhart Tolle flew down.

1:47:01Jim Kwik:I didn't call up Eckhart Tolle.

1:47:02James Altucher:He calls up Eckhart Tolle who sold 7 million copies of The Power of Now and Jim Quick and you guys are both in this kitchen.

1:47:10Jim Kwik:And we're making guacamole. Is Eckhart Tolle a great guy? He's a good guy. Power of Now. Excellent book. I love the book. Right. And I talk a lot about presence and we had a great conversation about presence and how to remember names. And I think people, I think the art of memory actually is the art of presence and the art of attention. And that's what a lot of my training is based on. Anyway, but in terms of my takeaway, you're asking like, how do these people get to this level and what do they value and what's the difference? And I would say for him, his motivation, I wanted to know what his motivation was on Jim Carrey specifically.

1:47:43Jim Kwik:Why is he acting like a fool in all his movies and doing that? And does he concern how people look at him and everything? And he actually says, he said, Jim, it's the exact opposite. He's like, I could be an Ace Ventura pet detective and I can act like a complete spaz because I feel like that if I could act like that or in living color and I could be totally extreme, unconsciously I'm giving other people who are watching, the audience that's watching, giving them permission to just be themselves. And he said his driving force, he thinks the biggest challenge that we all have as a community in this world is that we're so concerned about the feelings and how people perceive us, our peers and everything, and we tend to fall to the level of other people's expectations of us.

1:48:28Jim Kwik:And he says, my goal, my mission, has always been to help, these exact words, free people from concern. That's his religion. He wants to free people from concern. And he does it through his art of stand-up and television and movies and stuff like that where he could play an extreme character and act completely crazy or dumb and dumber or a liar or whatever happens to be in the movie. And by doing so, he gives people permission just to be themselves.

1:48:55James Altucher:So it's interesting because sometimes it's scripted where he's playing an actor, he's playing a role where it gives that permission. And sometimes it's his own act where he's writing and being a comedian where he has to figure out what those concerns are so he can play the role of someone who is maybe blindly unconcerned and still surviving and so the audience can see and laugh. The laugh is sort of the release of that tension of concern.

1:49:22Jim Kwik:It's very, very much so. And I'd be interested just, you know, I don't know if what I'd be doing, this is the only thing that I've been doing my whole career. But it's interesting to see actors play these different roles. When I was on set with Will Smith, he was filming from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. every night. And I was like, how do you do that? In the entertainment industry, it's always hurry up to wait. That's the catchphrase. It's like you have to hurry up to get on set and you just sit there and wait all the time. I was like, how do you just wait there until 3 o 'clock in the morning until they call you when it's your turn?

1:49:55Jim Kwik:And how do you get prepared and how do you get ready? and he's like, Jim, those exact words, he's like, Jim, I don't have to get ready, I stay ready. I'm like, oh shoot, that's really badass.

1:50:07James Altucher:So break that down, what does that mean?

1:50:08Jim Kwik:So for him, like for me, you could wake me up at four o 'clock in the morning and just ask me about my morning routine, my sleep, because I live what I teach, right? Because there's a level of congruency and I find that it's really the people that have prepared the most, because I feel like a lot of success is preparation, like you. You have guests on, but you study their work. You were online watching my other interviews and reading the books and all that. That homework makes a big difference and it shows up. I feel like for him, he's so determined. He has this thing where I was like, how do you keep yourself active?

1:50:40Jim Kwik:He was like, what? He was like, Jim is physically and mentally active. He's like, every day I run and I read. I'm like, that's interesting. Metaphorically, it's not just running. It's just something physical, something mental every single day to keep myself in shape. That's why I think it's a difference because people attribute me to helping boost their mental intelligence. People have facts, figures, all that stuff at their mental fingertips. But I think more important than what I do than help people become mentally intelligent is become mentally fit. I've had students that I've seen that... And that's the stay ready part.

1:51:13Jim Kwik:This woman, she called me up at the office. She's like, I love you, I love you, I love you. I'm like, whoa, who's this? She was like, I went through your online memory course and I was just like, let me tell you a quick story for you. and I found out, she told me a story where her grandmother gave her this family heirloom as a necklace and it was given to her not her mother, not her three sisters it was given to her and she was entrusted with it to protect it and for the family and she hid it in her home and if you ever hid something so well you come up with a password that's so clever and it's so clever you don't even remember what it is so she hid it and she couldn't find it for a year goes by, two years goes by, three years goes by and she thought it was stolen, it was lost forever she got so much grief from her family and she felt so bad holding on to all his angst.

1:51:54Jim Kwik:A couple weeks after going through our program, she woke up in the middle of the night, two, three o 'clock in the morning. She ran down two flights of stairs. She goes behind the boiler into this little crevice cake and pulls out the necklace. And I was like, well, in that program, we don't teach you how to find misplaced objects. She was like, Jim, I don't know what it is. It's just going through this. I'm starting to remember names. I'm learning this language. So she's waking up parts of her brain. Because it's the difference. You have a personal trainer, right? And what is a personal trainer's job?

1:52:21Jim Kwik:It's to make you physically sharper, faster, stronger, more energized, flexible, and everything. But that's what I do. I'm a personal fitness coach for your brain.

1:52:31James Altucher:Right, it's not like the personal trainer is just making you lift 100 pounds. It's actually making you stronger for every area of your life.

1:52:41Jim Kwik:Exactly, and that's how I describe, people ask all the time, what do I do? And our mutual friend, Clay Bear, so he has this six-word process that I think is genius. He keynoted at one of our events, our superhero brain event, and his superpower was talking about clarity. And he's like, this makes so much sense. You introduce yourself how many times a day, and how many of you actually have a design process for creating something that's interesting and fascinating to keep the conversation going, as opposed to just going off and spending a minute and using buzzwords and everything. And so for me, my six-word intro is just something simple.

1:53:14Jim Kwik:It's like, I build better brains. I build better, brighter brains. and it's just like, oh, well, what's that? And then they start talking about, and it's a nice intro. And so for me, that's what I feel like I am. Just like people want to be physically sharper, faster, energized, flexible. That's what I do for your brains. I make your brains sharper, faster, more fit, stronger, more powerful, more energized, clear the brain fog, have clarity, flexibility, agility. And that's my passion. Going back to whether it's the Will Smiths or Jim Carrey's or whatever, I'll tell you the highest performers, whether it's Branson or anybody, They have a superpower of self-awareness.

1:53:51Jim Kwik:And I would end with this, that if we are to abstract and go at a meta level, that I find that the most successful people and the most fulfilled people, it's funny, James, because I'm just talking to you. I'm just kind of processing it. I feel like they have two things. You want to know who you are and you want to be who you are. And this maybe wraps up our whole conversation here where you need to have the curiosity to know yourself, really be fascinated with yourself, like know yourself, and then have the courage to really be yourself.

1:54:29James Altucher:And you know, I feel like, gosh, Jim, I kind of want to do another two-hour podcast just about those two things because I feel like it took me a really long time. And it's a process, so I can't say I know who I am. It's a process. it's practice makes progress as opposed to practice makes perfect. Knowing who you are is really hard. It is. And then being who you are is harder. It is. Because it's scary. You can't, nobody really is who they are because in every setting, you put on a slightly different persona, but you're trying to make each persona as close as possible to who you really are.

1:55:07Jim Kwik:And I notice also it takes up energy too, right? Like we have this energy body of like who we want to project in the world. And this kind of brings everything we've talked about in this conversation together. When we're talking about Facebook depression, everyone puts a highlight reel, a trailer of what's amazing. We put a lot of energy in terms of how we want to be perceived. I feel like we put energy into a place where it's our insecurities. We have this ideal self that we put energy in and how we want the world to see us. We have this another energy body of our insecurities and our fears and what we're scared of, like who we're afraid of being or people seeing.

1:55:40Jim Kwik:Then there's our real self. I feel like if people feel depleted and they feel like they don't have the energy anymore, they're exhausted, maybe just trying to carry around those bodies because it takes a charge and energy. But knowing yourself is kind of like what you were talking about. It's like our truth. It's like when we were kids, who determined who we are? Even when people set goals, I think a lot of people set goals for things they don't really want because it's goals that are set unconsciously by their parents or their family or the Joneses or their colleagues. You know what I mean? They're pursuing things that's not their truth.

1:56:12James Altucher:But that's true. and at the same time, and this is what I always tell people, list the things you really enjoyed from the ages of 6 to 14 because often those things will age in their own way with you. So for instance, you might have loved comic books between the ages of 6 to 14, among many other things. You love tennis, you love comic books, all those other things, but that's on your list. And so now when you are older, it's like your whole story almost could be described in terms of like a comic book analogy and you work with those types of actors and movies and so on. So it's not like you're a superhero.

1:56:51James Altucher:It's like, but your interests and passions and loves now as a much older person are just an evolution of what you loved as a six-year-old. I love that. So it's very interesting. Before I ask the last question, which it might even be a meaningless question for most people, but before I ask the last question, how can people find you right now? Because I want everybody to find you.

1:57:10Jim Kwik:Well, I would welcome everyone to listen to my podcast. I want to learn everything that you're doing because you're one of the most admired people in this space. And so congratulations on that. Thank you. It's called QuickBrain, K-W-I-K-Brain. People can go to quickbrain.com. Every podcast is only 10 or 15 minutes long. It's basically brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. So there's an episode on how to read a book a week without speed reading. There's an episode on how to remember everyone's name. There's an episode on learning languages. There's an episode on my top 10 favorite brain foods.

1:57:41Jim Kwik:an episode on how to change your habits and how to break old habits. And it's a fun show. It's just me riffing on one thing that's going to make a measurable difference in people's lives. That's the podcast.

1:57:50James Altucher:I am definitely going to start listening to it.

1:57:53Jim Kwik:And then social media. No social media shaming, but I'm just very active on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And it's all at Jim Quick, KDWK. And I would love, actually, if people could share their big ahas and tag James and myself on social media. I would love to know your big aha from this conversation, if there was something that was there that just stood out for you. And I would also love, I'm traveling a lot, I would love any good book recommendations. So if anyone who's listening to this wants to share your favorite reads right now, I'm very curious. That's actually how I bonded with Elon Musk.

1:58:23Jim Kwik:I don't ever talk about this, but we bonded over sci-fi books. And I'm a big advocate. I never used to read fiction books for a long time because I didn't even have time to read the nonfiction books I had to for school and personal growth. But I find that reading a lot the past few years on the power of reading fiction, it builds your imagination.

1:58:42James Altucher:Fiction's great and I'll tell you why from my perspective and I'd love to hear a lot of my favorite science fiction books. Fiction's great because it's written by the best writers. So non-fiction almost by definition is not written by the best writers. It's written by the best of what they're writing about. Andre Agassi is not going to be the best writer about tennis. He's the best tennis player writing. So there's a big difference. The fiction is actually by people who've mastered the craft of writing.

1:59:12Jim Kwik:Yeah, that's very true. His biography, by the way, is amazing. And so I would say that for me, fiction reading is enjoyable. It improves your imagination. But it also has been shown to increase emotional intelligence, especially in the area of empathy. And when you're reading books with stories and characters, it gives you a level of empathy, that higher degree of emotional intelligence. What was Elon Musk's favorite science fiction book? We weren't talking about necessarily favorite. We were bonding over at the time, going deep in a book called Ender's Game. Oh, yeah. Ender's Game is great. Or us and Scott Card.

1:59:46Jim Kwik:Yeah. And they were talking about this is before the film came out. Much better than the movie. Right. Exactly. Going back to the social media, I would love to get some really good book recommendations. And if you could tag both of us in there, that would be amazing. And finally,

2:00:00James Altucher:I don't know how much people care about this, but give me one Eckhart Tolle story, Tolle story, because I just think he's such an interesting character.

2:00:11Jim Kwik:Okay, this is a little bit skewed because we really spend most of the time. He didn't really talk a whole lot when we were together. He doesn't seem like a talker. No, but ironically, listen to Eckhart. Do you listen to Audible? I've listened to some of his seminars. I listen to books on, I was going to say cassette. This is kind of dating myself. Books, audiobooks, and people ask all the time. I prefer reading when I can because I feel like that's more active. but I do listen to audiobooks and obviously podcasts. I do have been to listen to them at 1.5 or 2x or something like that because I think we can all learn at that speed and train ourselves to do that just like we do with reading.

2:00:45Jim Kwik:Eckhart Tolle, interesting enough, going over the sleep issues and stuff, I can't listen to... Sleep learning is a myth. You can't listen to an audio while you're sleeping and expect to learn anything brand new. It's been debunked. If you are learning anything, it's only because those are the times when you're awake and you're picking up bits and pieces and everything. Now you can do it through dream. And I did a whole episode on how to remember your dreams. Like I have this whole how to start my day. And the first thing I do when I wake up is remember my dreams. Because this is interesting. I don't know if you know this, James.

2:01:15Jim Kwik:But a lot of incredible works of art, literature, movies, science, actually came through dream recollection.

2:01:22James Altucher:Sure. I forget the, there's a classic Keith Richards story where like one of the most famous Rolling Stones songs, and I forget which one it is. Yeah. The lyric, he woke up, wrote down the first few words, went back to sleep, and then woke up again and wrote the whole song.

2:01:38Jim Kwik:Very much so. Paul McCartney did that with yesterday. Mary Shelley came out with Frankenstein in a dream. Elias Howes, who created the sewing machine, created that in a dream. The periodic table was in a chemist's dream. It's pretty crazy. Back, man, I'm going to kill. It's a challenge because when most people wake up, what happens is you're learning all day and you're trying to solve problems all day as an entrepreneur or as a student or whatever. But when you dream, your subconscious doesn't stop. It actually keeps on working on it. So often in those times, you come up with these revelations and these insights, but what often happens when you wake up the next morning, you forget.

2:02:11Jim Kwik:So I did this six ways on how to remember your dreams episode and that's the first thing I do when I wake up. And the second thing is make my bed, but everything is for my brain. Anyway, with Eckhart, I didn't have a lot of interaction with him because he was there for a little bit and he didn't talk a lot. But I actually, for me, to help me sleep, The only audio book I could listen to is Eckhart. He actually, his modest, the way he talks, it just puts me to sleep.

2:02:32James Altucher:Yeah, and he has huge silences because he kind of wants people to think while he's talking, but his voice is so boring. His humor is so droll. He's only mildly funny. He's not very funny, but he laughs at his own jokes very quietly, and then there's silence. But anyway, okay, well, Jim Quick, quickbrain.com, your podcast, your book that's going to come out next year. And we'll definitely have you on the podcast again because at the very least, we could do it entirely about how to know who you are and how to be who you are. But this has been so interesting. I really have to spend a lot of time thinking about this.

2:03:10I think that there's a lot to unpack in this.

2:03:13James Altucher:And I really appreciate you doing this podcast. We've met a couple of times. We did that first podcast over Skype. This time we're doing a podcast in person. I hope it's the first of many.

2:03:22Jim Kwik:So thanks, Jim. Thank you and I appreciate everyone who's listening and I appreciate all the capes that you wear.

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