way of being, and eventually face their trials. When they return back to the ordinary world (like Dorothy going back to Kansas), they take with them the ultimate boon—the treasure, emotions, strength, clarity, and wisdom they discovered from their adventure. They then share their lessons and gifts with others.
The Hero’s Journey is the perfect structure to lend power and purpose to your personal story. In Limitless, you are the superhero.
One of my core beliefs is that human potential is one of the only infinite resources we have in the world. Most everything else is finite, but the human mind is the ultimate superpower—there is no limit to our creativity, imagination, determination, or ability to think, reason, or learn. Yet this resource is also among the least tapped. All of us can be the heroes of our own story, dipping into the well of our potential every single day and never having that well run dry. But so few of us approach our lives this way. That’s why I wrote this book—to help you realize that no matter where you are, or where you’ve been, you absolutely can free yourself and go from limits to liberation. That might be the only “extra” you need to transition from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world.
This book is going to provide you with that extra. What you’ll get within these pages is a series of tools that will help you cast off your perceived restrictions. You’re going to learn how to unlimit your brain. You’re going to learn how to unlimit your drive. You’re going to learn how to unlimit your memory, your focus, and your habits. If I am your mentor in your hero’s journey, then this book is your map to master your mind, motivation, and methods to learn how to learn. And once you’ve done that, you will be limitless.
Here’s the door; you know what’s waiting on the other side. Walk through it.
PART I
FREE YOUR MIND
1
BECOMING LIMITLESS
“I’m so stupid.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m too dumb to learn.”
These were my mantras growing up. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t tell myself that I was slow, dumb, and that I would never learn to read, much less amount to anything later in life. If a pill existed that could supercharge my brain and make me smarter in one swallow (as there was in the 2011 movie Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper), I would have given anything to take it.
I wasn’t the only one who felt the way I did about myself. If you’d asked my teachers when I was a kid, many would have said that I was the last person they’d expect to be writing this book for you. Back then, they would have been surprised to know that I was reading a book, let alone writing one.
This all stems from an incident in kindergarten that completely altered the course of my life. I was in class one day, and there were sirens outside the window. Everyone in the classroom took notice, and the teacher looked out and said she saw fire trucks. The entire class responded to this information the way kindergarteners do: We immediately rushed to the windows. I was particularly excited because, by that point, I was already obsessed with superheroes (I still am). To me, firefighters were the closest thing to real-life superheroes I knew. I bolted to the window with everyone else.
The only problem was that I wasn’t tall enough to be able to look down at the fire trucks. One kid went to grab his chair to stand on, and that inspired the rest of us to do the same. I ran back to my desk to get mine, pushing it right up against the huge iron radiator that ran along the bottom of the windows. I got up on my chair, saw the firefighters, and completely lit up. This was so exciting! My eyes stared and mouth gasped as I watched these courageous heroes in action with their seemingly impenetrable uniforms and their bright red vehicle.
But then one of the other kids grabbed my chair from beneath me, which caused me to lose balance and go flying head-first into the radiator. I hit the metal heater extremely hard and I started losing blood. The school rushed me to the hospital, where doctors tended to my wounds. But they were candid with my mother afterward; the injury to my brain was not mild.
My mother said I was never quite the same after that. Where