Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,23

that “magically” began appearing everywhere.

In an interview with media personality Jeannie Mai, we compared this effect to how your favorite social media platform starts showing you more posts based on past expressed interest. The site you’re on knows this because of what you clicked, liked, or watched before. Your RAS is like that site’s algorithm. It shows you more of what you express interest in, and it hides the things you don’t engage in.

So often the answers we want are there, but we’re not asking the right questions to shine a spotlight on them. Instead, we’re asking useless questions or worse, questions that are disempowering. Why am I not smart enough? Why am I not good enough? Why can’t I lose weight? Why can’t I find the person I’m meant to be with? We ask such negative questions, and then those questions give us evidence—or pugs—as answers. The human mind is always generalizing in order to make sense of the world. Here, there, and everywhere, we can find evidence to confirm our beliefs.

Thinking is a process of reasoning through something, during which we ask and answer questions. You may be asking, is that true? See, you had to ask a question. While we have tens of thousands of thoughts a day, we have one, maybe two dominant questions we ask more than others. As you can imagine, these questions direct our focus, which directs how we feel, and how we consequently spend our lives. As a thought experiment, imagine someone whose most frequent question is, “How do I get people to like me?” You don’t know their age, career, or what they look like. But you know more than you probably realize. What do you imagine their personality is like? You don’t need to know much to guess that they’re a people pleaser, they’re indirect in expressing their needs, and they’re not authentic about how they feel or think in any given moment. Someone who is constantly asking themselves how to get people to like them can never truly be their true self because they will always be molding themselves to the preferences of the people around them, even if they’re not aware of it. You know all this information, and you only know one question they ask themselves. What do you think is your dominant question?

YOUR DOMINANT QUESTION

When I felt my brain was broken, I loved to escape into the world of superheroes, comic books, Dungeons and Dragons. The world of fantasy helped me forget my pain. I decided that the superpower that would be best for me was invisibility, and my dominant question became, “How do I stay invisible?” Instead of being seen, I was always watching everyone else, wondering what everyone’s life was like. I wondered why this person was so popular, and that person was so happy, or what made another person so smart. I was suffering all the time, so as I watched people and learned from the world around me, my dominant question changed to, “How do I make this better?” I wanted to solve this riddle: “How does my mind work so I can work my mind?” The more and more I asked these new questions, the more answers I got. This book is the result of two decades of asking empowering questions.

I first met Will Smith at Quincy Jones’s 80th birthday party. After hearing about my traumatic brain injury, he invited me to be his guest at the premiere of the film Concussion, a movie about the concerns of football-related head trauma. (I’ll talk about brain protection in an upcoming chapter.) Eventually, Will booked me to come to Toronto to spend time with him for a week on set. He was shooting a superhero film, so you can imagine that I was in my glory.

What was interesting to me was the cast and crew were working each night, from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M., outside in the dead of winter. Not all Hollywood is glitz and glam; there’s a lot of hurrying up just to wait on set. During a break, Will and I discovered a few of his dominant questions, one of which is “How do I make this moment even more magical?” While we were waiting for Will’s next scene to shoot, his family and friends were huddled in tents watching the other actors work. At 3 A.M., while I’m sure everyone was cold and tired, we got to see his dominant question in action. He was bringing everyone hot