Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,77

love you, I love you, I love you!”

Trust me that this was not a common response I received to answering a call.

“Whoa,” I said. “Who is this?”

“It’s Anne. I took your course.” She then quickly declared, “I found it!”

Okay, she had me. “What did you find?”

“I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been doing all of these exercises you’ve been teaching, and I’ve started to remember things. Even when I’m not using the strategy, I’m remembering names and conversations.”

So, she hadn’t answered that question, either. I realized I was just going to have to let her tell her story the way she wanted to tell it. Over the next few minutes, I learned that a few years earlier she’d been given a family heirloom from her grandmother. It was a necklace that had been passed down from generation to generation, and her grandmother skipped over her own daughter and her three older sisters to bequeath the necklace to her. Anne was extremely honored to receive this gift and vowed to be careful with it. There was only one problem: She’d been so concerned about keeping the necklace safe that she’d hidden it somewhere that she couldn’t remember. When she realized she didn’t know where the necklace was, she started searching, but to no avail. This led to monumental levels of angst and an enormous amount of guilt compounded by her family.

After three years, she’d come to the conclusion that she’d either misplaced the heirloom forever or that someone had stolen it. Then, at 2 A.M. the morning of this call, she woke up out of a dead sleep. She went down two flights of stairs to her basement, ran over to the boiler, moved behind it, and reached into a crevasse there. She pulled out the necklace and nearly died from the relief.

“That’s an amazing story, congratulations,” I said to her. “I’m curious, though. I didn’t teach you how to find misplaced items. That’s not one of the things we’ve covered in our classes.”

“Yes, but you did something way more valuable. I don’t know what it is, but for the past few weeks I’m just remembering all kinds of things. Not just in the present, but stuff I hadn’t thought about for years.

“Jim, thank you for giving me my brain back.”

What Anne was illustrating through her excitement is something I’ve been sharing with people for a long time. Yes, your brain is an organ. But it acts like a muscle. And it most significantly resembles a muscle in that it’s a use-it-or-lose-it device. Our brains stay fit only when we make a concerted effort to keep them fit. If we fail to keep our brains in shape—either through laziness or being overly dependent on technology to do our thinking for us or by failing to challenge ourselves with new learning—it becomes “flabby.” Think about it this way: If you have your arm in a sling for six months, you don’t come away with a stronger arm. In fact, after you take the arm out of a sling, you’re likely to have very little function at all. Your brain is the same way. If you don’t exercise it regularly, it might not be at its best when you need it the most. But if you make the effort to keep your brain in top shape, you’ll discover that it’s always ready to do superhero-level work for you, just as it did for this caller.

YOU CAN ALWAYS RELY ON MOM

Memory is arguably the most important part of the learning process. If you could not remember, then you could not learn anything. There is no knowledge without memory. But why do most people have less-than-ideal memory skills? I think it’s because of the way we were taught to memorize things, which was usually through rote memorization. To this day, most schools teach students to memorize by repeating a fact or a quote until it is temporarily burned in, even though people tend to forget this information as soon as they no longer need it and this type of memory rarely leads to mastery of the material being memorized.

Your memory is also one of your greatest assets. It supports you in every area of your life. I challenge you to do anything without utilizing your memory. If you did not have a memory, life would be extremely challenging, to say the least. Imagine waking up each day and forgetting everything you ever knew. You would have to teach yourself how to get out