Game Changers: What Leaders, Innovators and Mavericks Do to Win at Life

That was when Jim realized that his ideas could change lives and in some cases even save lives. Ever since, he’s been on a mission to help change the way people learn, help them fall in love with learning, and allow them to realize the genius they’re capable of. He focuses a lot of his work on reading, because reading is a fundamental way people learn. If an author possesses decades of experience and knowledge that he or she has put into a book and you can sit down and read that book in a day or two and directly download all of that information, that’s a powerful hack.

Unlike traditional speed-reading, which is more about skimming and getting the gist of what you read, Jim teaches how to read with greater focus and concentration so that you don’t just read faster but you also learn and remember what you read more efficiently. His method aptly breaks down into the acronym F-A-S-T:

F: FORGET

It may seem kind of weird, when talking about learning, reading, and memory, to start with forgetting, but Jim found that a lot of people fail to learn anything new when they feel as though they know the subject already. Let’s say you’re an expert in nutrition and you attend a seminar on the subject. You should be absorbing all of the latest information, but most people fail to do that because when they consider themselves experts they close themselves off to learning anything new. You have to temporarily forget what you already know about a subject so you can learn something new. It may be a cliché, but it’s true: Your mind is like a parachute; it works only when it’s open. To open yours, forget about what you already know.

You also want to forget about limitations. A lot of people have self-limiting beliefs about how good their memory is or how smart they are. As Vishen suggests, these beliefs can hold you back. Jim explains that your mind is always eavesdropping on your self-talk. If you tell yourself that you are not good at remembering people’s names, your mind won’t be open to learning at its full potential. This is exactly how your false beliefs become true.

The last thing that you need to forget is everything else that’s going on around you so that you can focus on what you are learning. Jim says that we can focus on only about seven bits of information at once. So if you’re reading a book and thinking about the kids and worrying about work and wondering if you should take the garbage out, you are left with only four bits of new information that you can focus on. Set all that aside so you can focus on the book and learn as much as possible.

A: ACTIVE

Twentieth-century education was based on the model of rote learning and repetition. A teacher stood in front of a class and stated facts for the students to repeat over and over again. The students did learn that way, but the problem with this type of learning is that it takes a lot of time. Jim compares it to working out: You can go to the gym and lift five-pound weights for an hour every day, or you can go far less frequently but dramatically increase the weight you lift. Intense learning, like intense exercise, gives you results in less time.

Jim says that in the twenty-first century, education should be based on creation, not consumption. That requires us to be active participants in our learning, grabbing for knowledge instead of letting it be spooned into our mouths. That means taking notes actively and sharing what you learn. These techniques not only help you learn, they enable you to remember what you’ve learned.

Jim recommends taking notes the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper. Put a line down the middle of the page. The left side is for “capture notes,” where you write down the thoughts and ideas you are learning; and the right side is for “creating notes,” where you write your impressions, thoughts, and questions about what you are learning. This strategy engages your whole brain so that you can learn faster and remember more.

S: STATE

All learning is state dependent. Jim defines your state as the current condition or mood of your brain and your body. A lot of people don’t realize that this is something that’s fully within their control. Most people think that if they’re bored, it’s because of their environment. If they’re down, it’s because something bad happened to them. But Jim says that we’re not thermometers, we’re thermostats, meaning that we don’t have to merely react to the environment around us. Instead, we can set a high standard for ourselves and then create and modify our environment to meet that setting.

T: TEACH

If you had to watch a video or read a book and then present it to someone else the next day, would you pay a different level of attention than you would otherwise? Would you organize or capture the information differently? If you ever have to learn a new subject or a new skill really fast, put on your professor’s cap. Ask yourself, “How would I teach this to someone else?” All of a sudden you’ll find that your retention of the information is doubled because you’re taking it in with the intention of being able to explain it to someone else.

This last point about teaching is more powerful than you might imagine. At the start of my career in Silicon Valley, I sought out a side job at the University of California teaching working engineers how to build the internet. I ended up running the Web and internet engineering program at UCSC’s Silicon Valley campus during the birth of the modern internet! That put me into a situation where I delivered a two-hour lecture several nights a week to a room of smart, experienced engineers. I had to absorb the material well enough to teach it, and I did. The result was that within two years, at the ripe age of twenty-seven, I was promoted to the head of technology-strategic planning for a billion-dollar company. There is simply no way I could have assimilated the knowledge required for that job had I not taught it first. So find an excuse to teach people what you want to learn, and you’ll master it more quickly than you think. If you’re not actually teaching something, pretend that you will be!

A conversation about fluid intelligence wouldn’t be complete without talking with Dan Hurley, an award-winning science journalist who has developed a niche writing about the science of increasing intelligence. Dan is someone who has fundamentally changed the way we think about learning and intelligence. He says that when people talk about being smart, they’re often referring to the knowledge and information they already possess. But they fail to look at where they got that knowledge and information in the first place. If a group of people were to sit in a class for the exact same amount of time and then study the information presented there for the exact same amount of time, they wouldn’t all end up getting the same grades on a test. That’s because they don’t all learn as well—they have varying levels of fluid intelligence.

Your IQ is different from your fluid intelligence. Most IQ tests assess all sorts of factors, including crystallized knowledge, which speaks more to a person’s experience than their abilities. As such, most intelligence studies don’t bother with IQ tests. Scientists have known about fluid intelligence for a long time, but until recently, psychologists who study intelligence all agreed that you could not increase your fluid intelligence. They had been trying for a hundred years; they had done study after study after study. Then, in 2008, a group of scientists decided to focus on boosting working memory, a part of short-term memory.

Working memory is critical to fluid intelligence, and those scientists wanted to see if improving someone’s working memory would also boost their fluid intelligence. They asked people to practice a simple two-minute test called the Dual N-Back to improve their working memory. After five weeks of practicing for half an hour a day, the people’s fluid intelligence increased on average by 40 percent.

(#litres_trial_promo) That was an incredible finding.

There’s one downside, though. The Dual N-Back test is so irritating that it makes you want to throw your computer across the room. Think of it as CrossFit for your brain—you just have to keep pushing. When you take the test, you see something like a tic-tac-toe board on a screen. One square lights up, then another, then another. You are first asked to press a button every time a square that lit up two times ago lights up again. That’s a two-back. Then, if you master that skill, which is pretty easy, you move on to a three-back. Throughout the test you are also listening to a voice reciting letters in a specific order that you also have to remember. So you have to remember which squares lit up three times ago and which letter you heard. It forces you to narrow your focus and really concentrate.

Though the test isn’t much fun, it definitely produces results. Since that groundbreaking study in 2008, dozens of other studies have confirmed that performing working memory tasks increases not only your working memory but also all kinds of other intelligence-based skills, from reading comprehension to math ability. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; the field of intelligence research is really catching fire, and I’m excited to see what the future will hold.

I used a clunky open-source n-back training app when I started the Bulletproof blog in 2011, and when I had my IQ tested afterward, it had increased by 12 points. When I wrote about that result on my blog and shared the software I had used, it was surprising how many people insisted that my results were impossible. It’s the standard science troll argument: “That can’t be, therefore it isn’t.” All I can say is that the training worked for me then, and there is a lot more science supporting its efficacy now.

According to Dan, even though IQ tests don’t measure fluid intelligence, IQ scores commonly increase when people improve their fluid memory. Despite my results, I found that the training was so exhausting and discouraging that many people wouldn’t complete it. In the early days of Bulletproof, I flew around the world teaching hedge fund managers how to hack their brains. Even among this highly motivated crowd, very few people completed the n-back training because it makes you feel like a failure over and over before you see results.

If you’re interested in trying it, my suggestion is to first use the other tools in this book to help strengthen your brain and your willpower. The n-back is a lot less triggering when your brain is running at full power, and if you’re exercising your willpower muscle on a regular basis, you’re a lot more likely to stick with it. Then I recommend doing the training for about a month. Your brain won’t like it at first—you will get bored and frustrated and probably have strange dreams. As you get better, you may find that you have more verbal fluency (Dual N-Back radically improved my live presentation skills to the point that I regularly speak in front of millions of people with confidence and ease), better listening ability, better reading recall, and more. When you’ve completed it, you won’t know how you functioned with only half of the working memory you just gained. It’s that strong, like a RAM upgrade for your brain.

The best part about n-back training is that the effects seem to be permanent. After completing twenty sessions I did no training at all for a full eight months to see if I’d forget the skills I’d learned and have to start over. Astoundingly, the results were the exact opposite of what I had expected. After the break, I did better than ever, as if my brain had further optimized itself during those eight months off.

Action Items

Try one of Jim Kwik’s courses (https://kwiklearning.com) or another speed-reading course so you can literally learn faster.

Teach a summary of this book to a friend, colleagues, your spouse, or your kids, so you’ll remember it all!

Improve your fluid intelligence by doing Dual N-Back training. I recommend the Dual N-Back app by Mikko Tyrskeranta on the iTunes and Android stores.

Hints:Do it for at least twenty days, but forty is best.Do it at least five days a week, when you’re not tired.You may get stuck for a couple of weeks, but do it anyway.Do not subvocalize (mutter to yourself) when you’re training so that you’re only activating the right side of your brain.Push yourself to failure every time—move up a level even if you’re only at 70 to 80 percent at an existing level. The software I recommend does this for you automatically.Tell a friend or coach you’re going to do Dual N-Back so they can make fun of you when you tell them how annoying it is. It’s like going to the gym every day for a month—accountability helps.

Recommended Listening

Jim Kwik, “Speed Reading, Memory & Superlearning,” Bulletproof Radio, episode 189

Jim Kwik, “Boost Brain Power, Upgrade Your Memory,” Bulletproof Radio, episode 267

Dan Hurley, “The Science of Smart,” Bulletproof Radio, episode 104

Recommended Reading

Dan Hurley, Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power

Law 6: Remember Images, Not Words

Your brain evolved in a world of sense, sound, and images, not a world of words. Train yourself to build images from what you read and hear so you can make full use of your brain’s deeply rooted onboard visual hardware. Remembering in words will slow you down and waste energy you can put to better use.

Mattias Ribbing has a title you’ve probably never heard of: he is the leading brain trainer in Sweden and a three-time Swedish memory champion who is ranked number seventy-five in the world. Mattias has actually been awarded the title Grand Master of Memory by the World Memory Sports Council, which only 154 people have ever achieved. Mattias started hacking his memory in 2008. Before that, he says, he had an average memory; he could remember only ten or so digits at a time, while now he can memorize up to a thousand.

Mattias always loved learning, and when he discovered that his memory could be improved dramatically, he set out to train his brain. Just a few months later, he won his first Swedish memory championship. He compares brain training to learning to drive a car. It takes a few months, and then you have a new ability for the rest of your life. Even better, the skill can increase and become stronger over the years, just like (hopefully) your driving skills.

Mattias says that the basic way to hack your memory is to teach your brain how to think in images rather than words. This requires training your visualization skills. When you visualize images, information takes a shortcut in the memory-storage part of the brain, skipping over short-term memory and heading straight to long-term memory. Out of our five senses, our sight is the most important to the brain, because it is the most closely tied to our survival. Three-quarters of the neurons that work with our senses are connected to sight. (This is also why poor-quality light sources drain so much of your brain energy and why we use TrueDark glasses when brain training at the 40 Years of Zen neurofeedback program.) Some people think that they learn better through sound or through touch, but Mattias says the experts know that we learn best through visualization. Learning through doing or teaching is an even more powerful way to remember new information, but that’s because both of those approaches engage your visual senses.

When you learn through sound by repeating information out loud over and over again, the brain can take in only a tiny amount of data at once. When we learn in images, our brains absorb more information more quickly. How does this work on an everyday, practical level? Let’s say you’re reading the newspaper. As you read, see if you can visualize the contents of a particular article as if it were a movie in your mind. Start off with something that’s relatively easy to visualize. For example, instead of using an article about the economy or international politics for this purpose, look at the local police blotter and imagine a story about a robbery.

Picture the robber fleeing, coming out from a bank, and running down the pavement. What does he look like? Picture his black hat, green jacket, and yellow pants. Imagine him running, being chased by two cops with their guns drawn. Can you really see it? Train your mind to hold that image for a little bit. Then make it bigger. Notice the robber’s eyes, his hair. What does his face look like? Start to see the pavement in greater detail.

You’ve probably done this before without even thinking about it, most likely when reading a novel. When you intentionally create such images, though, you can better remember the details because the images create a lasting imprint in our brains. The more often you do this, the more it will start to happen naturally. Images will start to pop up automatically, and learning through visualizations will become your new habit.

If you think you’re “not a visual person,” you simply need to become better at visualization. To do so, start with something simple. Close your eyes and visualize a dog. Choose a specific type of dog, the first one that comes to your mind. When visualizing, you should always use the first image that comes to your mind. See the dog in front of you. Now make that image bigger. See it in more detail, as clearly as possible. It’s important to make sure that your visualizations are in 3-D. Those images last longer in the brain than one-dimensional images do.

You can start with a dog or a newspaper article, but Mattias says that after a while you will begin to habitually translate all kinds of information into images, even numbers and crazy math formulas. He suggests practicing this skill every time you hear someone speak. As you listen, see what images pop up in your mind and hold them there. Really focus on the details so you remember them well. The images will function like clues that your brain can follow to find its way back to the original information. Eventually, with practice, your brain will work almost like a magnet, attracting new information and holding on to it.

Of course, the technique of visualization is nothing groundbreaking—it’s an ancient concept that has been practiced for millennia. When I went to Tibet to learn meditation, the monks directed me to sit for hours in a temple with my eyes closed performing incredibly detailed visualizations. Not “Visualize the Buddha.” More like, “Visualize the Buddha sitting on a throne. The throne has three steps. Each step has a painting of three flowers with six petals.” By the time they got to describing what the Buddha was wearing and in what position he was sitting, there was no possible way to remember it all without crafting the image. I didn’t realize at the time that visualizing was training my brain to paint images instead of remember words, but that was exactly the outcome.

At his level of expertise, Mattias says that he can store information indefinitely by scrolling through the images he’s created, as if he were browsing through pictures on his smartphone. He never has to reference the original information again, just the images in his mind. He practices visualizations during quiet times, such as when he’s waiting for someone or brushing his teeth. He scrolls through a few images at a time to keep them stored in his memory.

Images are useful for more than remembering lists. In fact, I still suck at remembering long lists, and memorizing things has always made my eyes cross. Yet I’m grateful for the tool of visualization, because it allows me to harness the power of images to upgrade my performance. It allows me to understand and interact with a wide variety of experts from all sorts of backgrounds as diverse as functional neuroscience, business leadership, hormone replacement, athletic performance, and antiaging without being clueless. I couldn’t keep all of the information about each of these people and their areas of expertise straight in my head to conduct a good interview if my brain were simply full of words. In fact, I wrote my last book by first drawing pictures of mitochondrial pathways for each chapter and then crafting the words. It’s all about the image: when you visualize a detailed picture of something, you gain a kind of knowledge that simply isn’t possible through rote memorization.

After all, as Mattias explained to me, language is limited. There are only so many words in any language, but there are endless images. And just like those images, if you train your brain and upgrade your hardware, your software, and your wiring, you, too, can become limitless.