Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,45
to share with the world. It’s how you use your passion. When you get down to it, we all have the same purpose: to help other people through our passion. The greatest task we have in life is to share the knowledge and skills we accumulate. It doesn’t have to be more complex than that.
Your passion might be underwater basket weaving, but your purpose is to share underwater basket weaving with other people. My passion is learning, and my purpose is to teach other people to learn. This is so deeply ingrained that I don’t have to force myself to do it—it comes naturally. I wake up ready, motivated, and excited to help people learn.
Podcast guest Jonathan Fields, founder of the Good Life Project, believes that we will naturally have many passions over the course of our lives. Because you will change, the medium through which you express your passions will change, too. He believes that if you define yourself by one very specific passion and your life changes in a way that doesn’t allow you to pursue that passion any longer, you might feel lost. The key is finding the underlying meaning in your passions to find a new way of channeling your expression.
KWIK START
Do you know your life’s purpose? Even if you don’t yet, write down a little bit about what it could be.
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
What often isn’t discussed in the quest for motivation is identity —who you are . . . and who you think you are at your core. They say the two most powerful words in the English language are the shortest: “I am.” Whatever you put after those two words determines your destiny.
Let’s say you want to stop smoking. Maybe you’ve had a few warnings from your doctor, and you’re finally coming around to the idea that you should quit. If you identify as a smoker and regularly say, “I am a smoker,” it’s going to be difficult to quit until you dismantle that identity. When you say you are defined by a particular action, you are essentially priming yourself to identify with and justify a certain behavior.
This is so integral to behavior change that it can’t be overstated. A fascinating study out of Stanford University showed the effects of priming on participants. Researcher Christopher Bryan separated participants into two groups. The first group responded to a questionnaire that included phrases like “to vote” and questions like “How important is it to you to vote?” The second group’s questionnaire had slightly altered questions, like “How important is it to you to be a voter [emphasis added]?”2 The participants were also asked whether they planned to vote in the upcoming elections. Later, researchers used public voting records to confirm whether the participants had voted or not. Bryan and his team found that the participants whose survey included personally identifying statements like “voter” were 13 percent more likely to vote than those who were simply asked about the likelihood that they would vote.3
When you consciously decide to identify with the habit or goal you want to create or achieve, or consciously un-identify with a habit you no longer want, you will experience enormous power. If you’ve been telling yourself all of your life that you are a slow learner, or that you can’t learn, you might start telling yourself “I am a fast and efficient learner” instead. The highest drive we have is to act consistently with how we perceive ourselves—it is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. Use it to your benefit.
KWIK START
Take 60 seconds and, stream of consciousness, write down some “I am” statements.
A HIERARCHY OF VALUES
Next, we need to consider our values. You can set up the most well-thought-out habits, but if your values are not in alignment with the ultimate goal, you’re not going to do it. For example, someone who wants to remember people’s names should value relationships and their connection to other people. Your behavior has to support your values in some way, or there is no drive for it.
Our values have a hierarchy to them. If I asked you what’s most important to you in life, you might tell me family is one of your core values. I would then ask what family does for you. For me, it provides love. For you, it might provide belonging. The important distinction here is that family is a means value—a means to an end. The end value is actually love or belonging. When we look