Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,99

confront Gawker was born after the mag outed him as gay. But he did not act immediately. Over the course of 10 years, he and a team strategically made one move after the next based on a plan they had devised to destroy Gawker for good. Regardless of what you think about Thiel’s actions, they were definitely not the product of impulsive thinking. This is an example of second-order thinking, the ability to think strategically through a series of events.

This model is simple and yet not always easy. To use second-order thinking when considering future actions:

Always ask yourself, “And then what?”

Think in increments of time. What do the consequences look like in five days? Five months? Five years?

Draw out the possible courses of action you might take using columns to organize consequences.11

First-order thinking is easy, but it’s second-order thinking that allows us to go deeper through time and consequences. Best of all, it allows us to see what others can’t see.

TAKING GIANT LEAPS

Moving forward incrementally is a significant sign of progress. Every step you can take in the process of becoming limitless is a step in the right direction. But what if you could move your genius forward exponentially? After all, if we take 30 normal steps forward, we’ll wind up somewhere down the street. But if we took 30 exponential steps, we’d circle the Earth more than two dozen times. That’s the kind of thinking advocated by Naveen Jain, winner of the Albert Einstein Technology Medal and founder of some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Moon Express (the first private company to be authorized to land on the moon), World Innovation Institute, iNome, TalentWise, Intelius, and Infospace.

“Exponential thinking is when you start to see things from a different mindset,” Jain told me. “It’s not about thinking outside the box; it’s about thinking in a completely different box.”12 This is where normal genius begins to border on limitless genius. As Jain explains, linear thinking (the kind of thinking most of us employ) causes us to look at a problem and seek a solution. We might come at the problem from a number of angles. We might put on different hats to address the problem in ways that stretch our thinking. And we might even come up with a solution that addresses the problem effectively and moves us forward. That’s all meaningful progress.

But what if we looked at the root cause of the problem and solved that instead? This would lead to exponential progress, world-changing progress. Jain uses as an example the lack of fresh water in many parts of the world. One could attempt to tackle that problem from a number of viewpoints, including finding ways to improve filtration and creating systems for moving fresh water from places where it was abundant to places where it was scarce. But what if instead you identified that, among the various causes for fresh-water scarcity, the biggest is that so much fresh water is being used for agriculture rather than drinking? You would attempt to solve the problem in an entirely different way. What if you could use significantly less water for agriculture, perhaps through some combination of aeroponics, aquaponics, or other techniques currently being experimented with or not yet invented? This would result in such an abundance of fresh water that the original problem would become eminently solvable. That’s exponential thinking at work, and the value of it is obvious.

When Jain started his company Viome, his goal was to attack the pervasive nature of chronic illness, which he sees as underlying the world’s health crisis. Understanding that every individual’s immune system is different and therefore how each person processes the foods they consume can vary greatly, he and his team developed a tool for analyzing an individual’s gut microbiome so a person can “Get to the bottom of what foods are right for your body and discover how optimizing the activity of your gut can dramatically improve the condition of your health.”13 As I write this, they’re in the process of collecting information from a huge number of users, data that will lead to powerful recommendations for every individual who employs the tool.

Naveen Jain operates at the grandest of scales. He’s a successful entrepreneur who has never started two companies in the same industry, and one of his operating principles is that creating a billion-dollar company is simply a matter of solving a $10-billion problem. Now, most of us don’t think on such a massive scale, but you