Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.

Our most precious gift is our brain. It is what allows us to learn, love, think, create, and even to experience joy. It is the gateway to our emotions, to our capacity for deeply experiencing life, to our ability to have lasting intimacy. It allows us to innovate, grow, and accomplish.

New belief: There is no such thing as failure. Only failure to learn.

If our mindset is not aligned with our desires or goals, we will never achieve them.

If you are struggling to reach a goal in any area, you must first ask: Where is the limit? Most likely, you’re experiencing a limit in your mindset, motivation, or methods—which means that it’s not a personal shortcoming or failure pointing to any perceived lack of ability.

To remember any new piece of information, you must associate it with something you already know.

If you’re struggling to find motivation to learn, or to accomplish anything else in your life, there is a good chance you haven’t uncovered the why of the task.

Give a person an idea, and you enrich their day. Teach a person how to learn, and they can enrich their entire life.

All behavior is driven by belief, so before we address how to learn, we must first address the underlying beliefs we hold about what is possible.

You can learn to unlimit and expand your mindset, your motivation, and your methods to create a limitless life. When you do what others won’t, you can live how others can’t.

Motivation is a set of emotions (painful and pleasurable) that act as the fuel for our actions.

you make mistakes; mistakes don’t make you.

you don’t rise to the level of your expectations, you fall to the level of your training.

But being limitless is not about being perfect. It’s about progressing beyond what you currently believe is possible.

Mindset (the WHAT): deeply held beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions we create about who we are, how the world works, what we are capable of and deserve, and what is possible. Motivation (the WHY): the purpose one has for taking action. The energy required for someone to behave in a particular way. Method (the HOW): a specific process for accomplishing something, especially an orderly, logical, or systematic way of instruction.

What I have come to find over my years of working with people is that most everyone limits and shrinks their dreams to fit their current reality.

Our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we must be accountable for who we become.

Make sure you have a block of time set aside to get into flow. It’s commonly believed that, when conditions are right, it takes about 15 minutes to achieve a flow state and that you don’t really hit your peak for closer to 45 minutes. Clearing out only half an hour or so isn’t going to allow you to accomplish much. Plan to set aside at least 90 minutes, and ideally a full two hours.

Reasons that are tied to your purpose, identity, and values will sufficiently motivate you to act, even in the face of all of the daily obstacles that life puts in your way.

In a era of autonomously driven electric cars and vehicles capable of taking us to Mars, our education system is the equivalent of a horse and carriage.

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted that, “Life is C between B and D,” meaning that the life we live is the choices we make between the “B” of birth and the “D” of death.

The human brain does not learn as much by consumption as it does by creation.

When you do what others won’t, you can live how others can’t.

Some people who claim to have twenty years of experience have one year of experience that they’ve repeated twenty times.

Remember that we tend to remember that which we create.

It’s not accurate that your memory works like a container, cup, or hard drive in that once it’s full of data no more can fit. It’s more like a muscle in that the more you train it, the stronger it gets and the more you can store.

If we believe that it’s not possible to improve, then in reality it won’t be possible to improve. It’s extremely difficult to accomplish something when you don’t believe it can be done in the first place.

Before each reading, take a few minutes to talk about or write what you remember from the previous reading.