Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,5
school after the weekend, armed with the books he’d given me. On my desk were now two piles: one that I had to read for school, and one that I promised to read. The scale of what I’d agreed to registered with me. How was I going to make a dent in these piles when reading was such a labor for me? I was already struggling to get through the first pile—what was I going to do? Where would I get the time? So I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t exercise, I didn’t watch television or spend time with friends. Instead, I practically lived at the library, until one night when I passed out from sheer exhaustion and fell down a flight of stairs, sustaining yet another head injury.
It wasn’t until two days later that I woke up in the hospital. I thought I had died, and maybe a part of me wished that I had. It was truly a dark and low point in life. I was wasting away, my weight was down to 117 pounds, and I was so dehydrated that I was hooked up to IV bags.
As miserable as I was, I said to myself, “There has to be a better way.” At that moment, a nurse came into my room, carrying a mug of tea with a picture of Einstein on it, the very same subject of the book report that inspired me to dig deep and study back in grade school. The quote next to his image said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
That’s when it dawned on me: Maybe I was asking the wrong question. I started to wonder, what was my real problem? I knew I was a slow learner, but I had been thinking the same way about it for years. I realized that I was trying to solve my learning problems by thinking the way I’d been taught to think—to just work harder. But what if I could teach myself a better method to learn? What if I could learn in a way that was more efficient, effective, and even enjoyable? What if I could learn how to learn faster?
I committed in that very moment to finding that way, and with that commitment, my mindset began to shift.
I asked the nurse for a course bulletin and flipped through it, page by page. After a couple hundred pages, I could find nothing but classes on what to learn—Spanish, history, math, science—but there were no classes teaching students how to learn.
LEARNING HOW TO LEARN
When I got out of the hospital, I was so intrigued by the idea of learning how to learn that I set my studies aside and focused only on the books that my mentor gave me, as well as books I found on adult learning theory, multiple intelligence theory, neuroscience, personal growth, educational psychology, speed reading, and even ancient mnemonics (I wanted to know what older cultures did to pass on knowledge before they had external storage devices like the printing press and computers). I was obsessed to solve this riddle: How does my brain work, so I can work my brain?
About a couple months of deep immersion into my new self-directed studies, a light switch flipped on. My ability to focus was stronger. I started to understand new concepts because I was able to concentrate—I was no longer easily distracted. I could better recall information that I had studied weeks before with little difficulty. I had a new level of energy and curiosity. For the first time in my life, I could read and comprehend information in a fraction of the time that it used to take. My newfound competence gave me a sense of confidence that I’d never felt before. My daily life changed too—I was clear, I knew what to do to move myself forward, and I unlocked an empowering and sustainable sense of motivation. With these results, my mindset changed and I started to believe that anything was possible.
But I was also upset. It seemed to me all of my years of self-doubt and suffering could have been avoided if this critical method of meta learning (learning how to learn) had been taught in school. I remember teachers telling me constantly to study and concentrate harder. Telling a child to do things like “concentrate” is like telling them to play the ukulele; it’s very difficult to do without ever being taught how.
And, following the hero’s journey,