Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altiger Show on the Choose Yourself Network. Today on the James Altiger Show. Motivation is like a state. It's like a mood of our mind and body. It's always in flux. It can go from 0 to 10. The reason I bring it up is because I find that I could get results with anybody as long as they have 2 qualities, that they are motivated and that they are teachable. In order to be able to change a habit, you need the motivation to want that. Right? And I think there's certain things we could do psychologically to enhance our level of motivation. Like what? You may actually, you probably have heard of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. I call them choose yourself currencies because they don't depend on any institutions to function, and they're simply exploding in price right now. Some have jumped as high as 3000%, 21,000%, and even a rare 81,000%. If you're missing out on this boom, don't worry. You're not alone. Most people are not investing in crypto simply because they don't even know how to get started. So I decided to do something about that. I wanna help listeners like you get started in this booming market. So I'm offering a free 6 video series masterclass on cryptocurrencies, all for free. I'll walk you step by step through the entire process. If you're interested in claiming this free masterclass, please go to altiture.i0. That's altiture.i0/masterclass where you'll find all of the details. What do Uber, Slack, and Groupon have in common? They all use Zendesk to build better customer relationships. With products like a smart knowledge base, live chat, phone support, and ticketing all connected in one place, Zendesk streamlines customer conversations and engagement. Zendesk products are easy to use and implement and built for the long haul. Schedule a demo today and see for yourself. Visit zendesk.com/james. That's zendesk.com/james. Jim Kwik, super expert brain performance coach, instructor, teacher, teacher to the stars, teacher to top CEOs and entrepreneurs. Welcome to the podcast. James Upsher, thanks for having me. Thank you for everyone who's tuning in as always. Yeah. No. This is this is your second time on the podcast. And I remember the first time you taught me how to have a better memory. I encourage people to listen to that older podcast because it was great. So thank you for that. No. No. You're welcome. I think everybody who's listening, there's you know, has memory issues. It's not a matter of, good or bad memory. It's just having a trained memory or an untrained memory. But we're not taught, you know, back in school. Well, you know, it's so interesting because, on the one hand, I think school, unfortunately, is all about memorizing Mhmm. Facts rather than really understanding deeper concepts that could be useful later in life. But on the other hand, I find a typical question people ask each other is, oh, I just read this book, and I don't really remember any of it. Right. The average person reading the average nonfiction book, what percentage of the book do you think they memorize? Right. So I think, and it's always different. Remember, not memorize, but remember. Right. I mean, part of it is just not reading faster. It's actually understanding what you read. Right? And so I think there's no there's 2 parts to reading. Right? There's reading speed and then there's reading comprehension. And then if you have those and then work into your way to retention, it's important because in those sense of somebody everyone has the experience of reading a page in a book, get to the end, and just forgetting what they just read. Right. Yeah. And they go back and they reread it, and then they they still forget what they read. And so I think memory is important in that, yes, school is a lot about memorizing facts and figures and formulas and foreign languages and all that stuff. I think the things that are worth remembering the most, and I'll get to your to answer your question, is remembering things like loved ones. I think it's important to have good memory to remember those moments with the people we care about. Another one is life. Like, I think if life is worth living, it's worth remembering. In fact, a lot of people don't remember what they had for breakfast today. Right? Instead of just remembering the the things that are important to them in life. And then the last thing besides love and life is the lessons. I think a lot of people repeat the same mistakes. You know, they always say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. But maybe it's not insanity. Maybe that's just a a poor memory. Maybe a lot of people don't. They make the same mistakes over and over again because they forget the lessons in their life, meaning they But let me answer this. Like, let's take a common mistake, that people might make. Like, let's say, you go out. You you date someone who's married expecting them to leave their husband or wife, and marry you Right. Or or have a lifelong relationship with you. That seems to be this stereotypical come it's so cliched a mistake that it happens in every single soap opera and most movies. Right. Right. So so but and yet, people make that mistake over and over again expecting a different result. And, clearly, they know they've made a mistake, and the clear and all their friends say to them, that's a mistake. Right. Why do they keep doing it? It's interesting because and that could be for it could be in relationships or it could be people's health. Right? They eat the same foods over and over again, and they get Yeah. They they wind into trouble there, or it could be hiring. It could be in business. A lot of people make the same mistakes. They invest in the same kind of companies, or they hire the same kind of people, and keep them and and then don't don't manage them correctly. So those mistakes could be ubiquitous. So I would say that some people in a relationship could repeat common problems as I part of it could be memory because people don't feel they could intellectually remember it, but they don't feel the, like, the emotional memory of it, the pain that came with it. Because I find that human beings, we're not just logical, we're biological, and we're very biochemical. Right? And so you think about If you think about it, that's all we are. We're usually a sack a a sack of skin. Only chemicals. It's a big chemical soup of of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. I mean, it's just even when people do make mistakes and they have breakups, I mean, it rewires your your brain. Right? Because the things that you obsess obsess about, you get you get very connected to, right, when people get rejected and stuff like that. And it's rewiring to our brains because Well well and and I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm a little bit of an interrupter. Is that okay? Yeah. No. We know that. Something comes to me, I'll be curious. Like, some of that might be on purpose as opposed to, forgetful in the sense that, you, you know, they get into a relationship. We're we're talking about relationships, but it happens in a lot of cases. They get into a a negative relationship for all the obvious reasons. It ends, and the pain is so great. You need your cortisol level goes up because we're talking about chemicals. And there's 2 ways to relieve the cortisol. 1 is to take responsibility and ownership yourself and say, okay. Now I'm not gonna do that again, and that's one way. The other is to blame the other person and not yourself, and that also reduces the cortisol. So that's, like, a negative way of reducing the stress and the cortisol and the pain of the relationship. It's her fault or his fault. And so then your stress level automatically becomes reduced, and maybe that you maybe you start memorizing that pathway towards solving that particular stress. And that might not be the best empowering pathway for people to to take each time, but it gives them temporary, like, relief that you're talking about in terms of cortisol. Yeah. Like, when we're stressed, we have cortisol, and we have adrenaline. We go into fight or flight mode, which is, know, great if we need to be physical. It's not really good if we need to be analytical and study things and really understand things because it shuts down different parts of our brain. But I do believe that, the human brain is is more of a deletion device than anything. Right? You think about the billions of stimuli that's right here that we could pay attention to. We would go mad if we were, you know, consciously aware of all that. I think that's why I like with books as, like, a a great example. Like, one time I asked Steven Dubner who wrote Freakonomics, you know, because I read lots of books to research for this podcast all the time. And often after I interview somebody, I'll remember everything right up until the moment after the podcast is done. And then it's, like, almost of, like, this eraser has, like, wiped out everything because I put so much energy in it, like, burns out. But so I asked Steven Dubner for who wrote Freakonomics, what, how what percentage of a book do you typically, remember afterwards? And he said, typically, like, 1 or 2%. Yeah. And which I thought was a very honest and I thought he would say 15%, but 1 or 2%, I thought was a very honest answer. And I I could tell you one of the memory principles that we talk about in our courses is this thing called the Zeigarnik effect. Zeigarnik effect? Zeigarnik. It's How do you spell that? It's up. I'll send them. I'll write it down for you. But here's here's the thing. So there's this psychologist in Europe, and her last name is Zeigarnik doctor Zeigarnik. Right? And they she noticed that when she was at these cafes that the the waiter or waitress would remember everyone's order until, they would remember it completely until the actual order was delivered. And then after it was delivered, no recollection of what these people ate or drank. Uh-huh. But it was full recollection. And the Zeigarnik effect is basically this memory principle saying that, the the human mind needs, doesn't like open loops. And if it starts something, it'll hang its attention on there until it's closed and then it can move on. It's similar to what you're explaining, with your personal experience, you know, studying up, preparing for a guest, and then after you do, it's kinda like people back in school. Right? They maybe a lot of them didn't study. They, they cram the night before. And, you know, they cram for, like, 8 hours. They pull it all nighter, which is not good for your memory, obviously, because sleep is so important. But the next morning, people can't talk to you. Right? You don't want anything to spill out at breakfast, and you can't wait to take the exam or the quiz because once you're done, what happens? It's just gone because there's a huge forgetting curve. Yeah. And it's not even as if, like, in the case of a podcast, it's not as even as if I'm cramming for the guest because every guest is on here because I really was fascinated Right. By their books and wanted to talk to them and and so on. But I'll remember, like, everything then, even the acknowledgments. Like, why did you acknowledge this person or say this about this person? And then afterwards, because I put so much time preparing questions and thinking about it and thinking about that person, maybe there is a natural number. Like, find the 1 to 2% that's supposed to work. It's like you just said, there's there's billions of stimuli around us right now. You kinda only wanna remember or notice the the half a percent that's important. Exactly. Because I think, like, knowing is half the battle, but I think the other half is just knowing the most important things. Like, even when we take notes, I just did a podcast episode on this on, like, effective note taking, and I actually, it's been shown that actually taking notes, handwriting them instead of typing them is actually better for you. I agree with that completely. Yeah. It helps with their focus. It helps and one of the reasons why, besides the tactical feel of it, is, is because that nobody could write as fast as somebody talks. So whereas, you know, somebody could type and transcribe something, you know, in terms of word for word, but when you're forced to handwrite and it's a slower process, it forces you to be mentally acute to sort, to filter, to qualify information, to sort for what's most important to you also. You know, that's such a valuable technique because, you know, handwriting versus the typing of ideas or because every morning, I'll take a pad with me and write down ideas as opposed to type Mhmm. My 10 ideas of the day or whatever. But when I first started writing, what I would do is I'd had my absolute favorite author who I loved and wanted to emulate, and I would just handwrite Yeah. His story, like, word for word and think about I could've just typed it, but I it forced me more to think about why did he use that selection of words? Why did he put the period there? Why did he break paragraphs there? It just forces you to try to re do another layer of reasoning on top of what everyone is just sort of skimming through with their eyes. They they do that. They've done university studies where they have, these students. They'll have a lecture where they're listening to it, and they'll have students type some half of this class type it out and the other half handwrite it. And the bed and the people who actually took the time to handwrite them did better in terms of, higher levels of understanding and higher levels of retention. And, and so with the same thing, our what about when it comes to, reading books? Do you read off digital devices? Or I do read off of because about a year and a half ago, we we both have to catch up on so much stuff. But about a year and a half ago, I threw out about a 100% of my belongings And I also put it in, like, one small bag, and so I only read on a Kindle. So I I I imagine you talked about this in prior episodes. What was the impetus for what what what sparked you wanna do with that? I wanna be what I call and I need a better word for this. So if you could help me come up with a better word. I wanted to be a choicist, meaning, let's say every day, we make on average 10,000 choices. Probably make more. I'm just making up a number. 10,000 choices. I wanted as large a percentage as possible to be choices that I care about. So I only wanted I only want my day to be about choices I care about. So I care about what I'm reading. I care about the people I spend time with. You know, like what you said, love, life, lessons. Mhmm. Those are the three things I care about. So going through that process, what's a couple words that would describe how you feel now now that you have, like, more after the process is done? I feel it's made me, everybody likes to say, every day I wake up doing what I love. And that's sort of true, but you end up doing lots of things per day that you don't necessarily love. I would say it's brought me a lot closer to the truth of that statement. Every day, I get to do what I love. And sometimes things are difficult. Sometimes things are incredibly difficult. No matter who you are, someone could get sick. You could get sick. Something bad could happen financially. All sorts of things could happen. But every day, I get I I can say truthfully, I am getting closer and closer to doing what I love every moment. So I I filter everything through, like, the brain. Right? And so mentally, do you feel more clear or have more energy because you're not, you know, your mind's not going to other responsibilities? Absolutely. I hate wasting brainpower on decisions that I don't care at all about. I just don't go anywhere or do anything I don't wanna do. And that that sounds selfish, but you talk about it it really I really relate to what you said before, how we we could focus our memory and our learning around love, life, and lessons. So for instance, I will spend extra time with my children now just doing things that we all love doing. Right. And I spend time with my friends because I I value friendship even more now than I did before. And I think it's hard after a certain age to value friendship in certain ways like we did as kids. Yeah. So so I feel now I'm able to better value friendship because I'm not wasting time doing all these other things. So suddenly, everything I do, opportunities become much more creative and interesting for me because I'm only doing things I love. And so I'd say I'm I'm answering your questions more than you're answering No. No. No. It's all good. The reason is because I'm super resonating with this love life lessons, and I think that's critically important. Well, I think also, like, you know, we we make decisions based on what we value the most, like what's most important to us in our life. And I think, you know, when we're talking about your the human mind, when we're always deleting or we're distorting or we're generalizing, it's nice to know what's most important to us, especially in our relationships, the people that we're talking to on a regular basis and communicate the people we care about. I would say that, knowing this because you were talking about having too many choices. And we talked about in the last episode, we talked about 10 keys for unlocking your good memory. Superhero. You're her superhero brain. Ago, our last podcast. Right. And so one of them you know, we talked about, like, 1 third of people's memory is predetermined by genetics and biology, but 2 thirds are is completely in our control. And we're just talking about a good diet and getting rid of negative thoughts and exercising and brain supplements and positive peer group. But one of them was, this thing called a clean environment. Right? Just having, you know, getting rid of the clutter because it helps you focus. People know when they clean their office or they clean their desktop on their computer, they have a clarity of mind also. But you mentioned this word choice that when you got rid of furniture and books and things like that, because you were you were concerned about all the decisions you had to make, to be able to upkeep and hold everything together. And this is a real challenge. I think everyone who's listening to this, you know, we all suffer from this thing called decision fatigue. Right? This is the idea where research talks about saying we can only make a certain amount, a finite, a very limited amount of good decisions a day. And once we meet that quota, we're done. I strongly believe that. So for instance, just as an example of what you just said, I specifically in the mornings, I call them my maker hours. So that's when, the things that I truly care about and wanna be creative about, let's say writing or podcasting or, whatever I'm doing creatively at that moment, I do it in the morning. And then in the afternoons, as much as I possibly can, that's what I call my manager hours because most most people, do don't have any maker hours. Like, they're just managing from 9 AM to 5 PM, and then their business day is over. They go home, and they're exhausted, whatever. So I'll let's say from 2 to 5 PM, that's my manager hours. I'll talk to, colleagues, partners, people I work with. Because the phone calls are easy, and just following up on decisions is easy. And, you know, most of that stuff is not creative. It's just like, okay. I gotta move the needle on 6 different projects. It that requires a phone call. Did you do this? Did you do that? Should I do this? Should I do that? The maker hours is when I'm writing, is when I'm brainstorming and coming up with ideas, you know, just thinking of everything that I love doing. That that is there's and that's prime time. Right? And if you could win that first hour, then you could win build positive momentum throughout the entire day, which is great because most people I did, I just did a podcast episode on how, like, I spend the first hour of my day to jump start my brain. But one of the worst things people could do in the morning, which most people do, is they check their phone. And I I still think when I'm working with elite mental performers, one of the things that people should not do if they wanna really win that day is to check their phone. Because a bit about when we talk about the maker hours, when you're most creative, when you're most suggestible, you know, touching your phone first thing in the morning. You're in this alpha, theta, brainwave state, where information is just going in unfiltered with our con with our conscious mind. What do you mean by alpha, theta state? So we we go through, our brain cycles, different parts of our brain through different, brainwave states. So right now, you and I are in beta state. That's where we're most awake and we're alert and conscious. On the bottom of that is delta. Delta says state wherein when we sleep. And so it basically, you're measuring the frequency of of our of our brain, and when it slows down, it goes in delta where we sleep. In between that below, beta, the waking state, is something called alpha, which is a relaxed state of awareness. That's the state we go into when we meditate. That's state we go into when we watch television. And it's this relaxed state of awareness where information just goes in, mostly unfiltered. It's like if you're if you see somebody watching TV and they're watching their favorite show or sports event or whatever, and you try talking to them, but they're, like, in a trance and they don't hear you because they're they're in that alpha state. And Oh oh my gosh, Jim. There's so many things I wanna unpack on everything you just said. I just wanna just remind everybody listening. What I really wanna do with Jim is figure out how he got to have such a dream job. Like, we're we're go hold on one second, Jim, because we're gonna I I wanna get back to your your clean environment. I wanna get back to what you just said about the alpha state. There's a couple of things that you just said that I wanna get back to, But I just wanna remind people a little bit of who your some of your clients have been in the past or the present, or maybe the future that you could talk about. Like, you really are, people pay you a lot of money to give them this sort of advice and and then some. So who who have been some of your clients? I mean, if if people look at my Instagram, I mean, I work with high percentage of the people that people see me, on Instagram and such. But I've done programs for Elon at SpaceX for his rocket for his rocket. Sure. A lot of actors like Forest Whitaker and Jim Carrey, Will Smith, I'll help them speed read their scripts, help them be focused and present on set, help them to memorize their lines in a fraction of the of the time because there's, you know, obviously, a lot of scripts, and they have to stick it, you know, word to word, which is important. But high performers, you know, in our events, we've we've had, you know, some amazing luminaries in the audience, everyone from Quincy Jones to, you know, Matt Mullenweg who, you know, found the dough. Matt's Matt's a great guy. He's been on the podcast, worked for us. Creator. So I've seen pictures of you with Richard Branson. Yeah. I've had the opportunity to do a number of things with Virgin and, but just I mean, my my goal is it doesn't, I mean, those are great names. It's my my passion doesn't matter. It's just because I grew up with this brain injury, and I grew up with learning challenge. You know, a teacher at the age of 9, you know, said that I was the boy with the broken brain. You know, I was I had that label. They actually said that to you? Not to me. It was actually, it was, an element. Had an injury. You had a bike injury or something? I I had a very bad injury when I was 5 years old, and I had learning disabilities. It took me an extra few years to learn how to read. I couldn't understand. I would I would have this impostor syndrome at this early age where I would pretend I would understand, but I really didn't understand a lot. And, and so that was a big challenge growing up. And my thing is I don't want people to suffer the way I suffered, and my whole thing is just, you know, 1,000,000,000 brains. I want them I have no brain left behind. That's why I launched the podcast because I feel like our most valuable asset nowadays, it's like none of us are paid for our muscle power. Right? We're paid for our mind power. It's not our brute strength. It's our brain strength. Right? And this knowledge economy and knowledge is not only power, it's profit. And I don't just mean financial profit. It's No. I agree with you. I've I actually, I think it was the first chapter. 1 of my books, my book, The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth, I say ideas are the currency of the 21st century. So it's and so knowledge is actual currency Yeah. In in today's economy. And I think it that's the world we live in. It's like this knowledge divides. Right? It's the people who know and people who don't know, you know, certain things. And the information is out there. Right? They're in their books, and it's online. But a lot of people don't have the ability or the skill set, the capabilities to be able to filter through it, to be able to learn it, read it, absorb it, retain it, you know, perform. The reason why memory is so important is because, I mean, you could everyone could say that, you know, they can go on Google and, you know, and this these these facts are at their meant their their fingertips. But at any given time, it's like we can only our life is a reflection of our decisions that we've made to this point. Right? I mean, that's pretty accurate. Right? The our decisions we made to this point are pretty much you know, it's reflected in in in our lifestyle and such. Well, there's kinda like a, a a funny self help quote related to that in the sense that if you're having a lot of problems and you start deciding things based on how you always decided things, you have to sort of remind yourself, well, it's all of your decisions in the past that got you here. So that's why you almost need outside help to kinda get you out of here. And it there's a there's a great book called The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Oh, yeah. That is a great book. That's like a from the that's like 4 decades old. Right? It's it's an older book, and it basically says that, that there's this incredible pattern where most of the big advancements in industries, whether it's automotive or it's computers or you name it fast, usually comes from people outside the industry because it takes somebody from the outside to look in saying, hey, guys. Why aren't you doing it this way? Well, look at rock look at rocketry and space exploration. You know, NASA is outsourcing to SpaceX. Elon Musk was you know, he made PayPal. He wasn't he didn't make he wasn't a rocket scientist. Right. And Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin going into space, and Richard Branson has Virgin Galactic. So you have a bookseller, a PayPal guy, and a music magazine guy who are leading the next revolution into outer space. Right. People outside the industry. Because if you're in the industry, by definition, you're also you've been trained the same way. You're you have the same blind spots, the same scotomas, right, that people have. Scotoma? Scotoma like a like a blind it's not like a mental in psychology, it's like a a mental blind spot to to not be able to put your focus in in a certain area because we're not trained to do so. And that's why, actually, I think one of the best things for for people to make better decisions is just, is to change their perspective. And I and very applicable. So I think everyone listening to this has, you know, a decision they've been putting off that's important in their health or relationships, where they're gonna live, what they're gonna do, who they're gonna be with, whatever. But a lot of people going back to remembering lessons, how we started this conversation, a lot of people repeat the same, issues. They go on to another relationship, but they bring themselves with them. And what I'm thinking is That's a good quote. Part of it is they're when they're in there in that relationship and they're doing that thing, they're seeing things from the same perspective. And that's why I think sometimes it's important to change place or change people you spend time with. They always say you are, you know, your environment. You are the the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with because it shapes your values. It shapes our beliefs. And I think if people wanna make better decisions, like, there's this, there's this process called 6 Thinking Hats, by, Edward de Bono. And, basically, the summary of it is basically saying that if you need if you have a problem that you need to solve, if you need to make a good better a better decision, one of the ways of doing it is to pretend that you're wearing 6 different hats. And so the idea here is if you're constantly this you know, as Einstein said, the same level of thinking that's created the problem won't solve the problem. The idea here is that if you're looking at a problem, imagine yourself, for example, putting on a white hat. And when you're wearing this imaginary white hat, you have to look at it from a scientific standpoint, a logical standpoint. And I'll give people a memory aid. Like, a white hat is kinda like a white scientist code. Right? So you have to look at it through the lens of logic and facts, this issue or this problem or this decision. But if you put on a red hat, the red hat is like red like the heart is, you have to just you you don't look at it logically. You just sort by emotion. How does this make you feel? Right? A black hat, for example, is like, is the critic, if you will. And so black is kinda like a a judge, like, a judge robe and would remind you that's the critic or the judge. So that's where you judge the idea. The o is the, necessary the the yellow hat is the optimistic point of view. Like, what could go right in this situation? What's positive about this, which is interesting way of looking at it, which is opposite of, you know, like, something that's more judgmental. And the green, finally, the green is growth. And so the green is out of the box thinking. So if you're looking to solve this problem, how do you how do you look into it? What's a solution that we haven't even thought of? You know, green like growth like, like plants or grass and stuff. So what could be a new possible solution? And, finally, the 6th hat is blue, and the blue is kind of the overseeing hat of all of them. It'll listen to your answers from the white and the red and the black and the yellow and the green. And blue, kind of like the blue sky, which overlooks everything else, will listen to all the other answers, and then it will come up with the decision after it listened to everything from all these different points of view. I have never heard of this mental model before. You ever see that book, A 100 Decision Models? It's, like, lists, like, all these different models. I can guarantee you this model is not in that book. Right. And and I've memorized that model. Why I like this is it's so simple. Right? I mean, we we Let's let's give an example though. Like, come up with an example where this works or where you've helped This this is actually actually, it'd be great for you. Like, if there's something is this your decision that you're thinking about or a problem that you wanna be able to solve yourself, and we can maybe try this out. Well, you know, the thing is this is related to the choices, is that, really, I've I've whether I realize it or not, I I did a lot of this. Yeah. And so right now, I really am so much doing everything I love doing. And I don't say this to brag. There's always room to improve. In fact, everything I'm doing, I'm very stressed about because I wanna improve on them. Like, so for instance, podcasting, I wanna have the best possible podcast. Not that I feel competitive with anybody else. Not even that I feel competitive with myself. I just wanna provide a better and better service, and I think it gives me pleasure. I going back to your love, life, and lessons Right. I love doing it, so it gives me more and more pleasure as I get better. It makes my life better as I learn more. Right. Because I feel like with podcasting, there's a lot of micro skills. Like, there's, like, maybe most people don't realize this, but there's, like, probably 500 micro skills to being a good podcaster. You probably are are realizing this as you're doing your podcast, and so it improves my life. And just the lessons is actually then concrete lessons as I pursue what I love, as I do what makes my life better, and I as I learn these lessons. So I feel like in general, not that I have an easy life because I don't, because I because I'm only doing the things I wanna do, it actually makes my life very difficult Yeah. Because it puts a lot of pressure on me to improve at them. But I don't really have the problem of making a decision because I usually know at some point when I'm ready for the next thing. I like that too. And I like that you do the difficult things because there's that whole saying that says that if you just do the easy things in life, then life is hard. Oh, oh, I'll give you an example of that. So I felt so so I've been trying as many of my listeners know, I've been trying to do, stand up comedy for the past, you know, 4 or 5 months now, really for a year and a half, but but real more intensely for the past 4 or 5 months. And so I felt like, a, I need to be a little I've always been fearless in front of a public speaking crowd, but I wanted to be a little more fearless in front of a potentially enemy crowd. And I also wanted to be tighter on my one liners. And so to overcome this fear, and to get tighter on the one liners, I went on a subway. And going from 42nd Street down to the Brooklyn Bridge and from the Brooklyn Bridge up to 42nd Street, each car each stop, I went into a new car and would do stand up comedy Really? And just to focus on one liners. And so it forced me to write down one liners, which is very difficult to do, like a a a joke in just, like, 10 words. And then, oh my god, it was so scary to just talk in front of an audience who really does not want you to talk. Like, they do not want you to open your mouth. And, so so, yeah, I I challenge myself on everything, and I try to figure where's the line where I can no longer challenge myself, and then how can I go a tiny bit past that line? That's that's that's with that idea. I mean, have you done, like, improv also? No. No. I actually specifically don't like improv. Really? Yeah. It gets recommended to me about bunch being just a public speaker. Yeah. No. I think I think improv's great. I like watching it. Like, you know, Saturday Night Live is all improv. But, I don't I like doing things in my brain. Like, I like doing things on my own. I love it. I love it. Yeah. I mean, the the what we're talking about here for just everyone who's who's listening is just we live in an age right now where there's these I always talk about superheroes and superpowers, and I think that there's some super villains, modern day super villains that generations ago didn't have they weren't here. What we're talking about in this digital world, we have digital overload, right, where we feel like there's too much information, too little time. Right? The amount of information is doubling at dizzying speeds. I think most people who are listening to this could appreciate that, you know, they have things they need to learn, but it feels like it's taking a sip of water out of a fire hose, right, with the amount. And half life of information is just you know, it's so quick. People who are graduating school, a lot of the stuff that they're learning is is not even accurate. And so there's this digital overload and overwhelm, which creates information fatigue. They call it information fatigue syndrome. Right? Higher blood pressure, compression of leisure time, more sleeplessness. Can I ask you about that real quickly? It's not just I feel like it's not just digital overload, and this is related to you suggesting earlier, in the first hour, don't check your phone. Yeah. I feel like it's not only like there's so much information that happens every morning, It's also there's a lot of annoying information. Yeah. Like, oh my god. He went to, Greece on vacation, and Right. And they're all together. Why didn't they invite me? Like, there's all this like, you see all these things your friends are doing because they because they only are giving you a filtered version of the information about their life. Right. And you're like, oh, I didn't do that. And so, it's not just digital overload. It's like digital, like, you suck. Right. You know? And everyone else is great, And that's, like, forced down your throat. And we know and we've heard these terms. Right? Like, Facebook depression and, these things where everyone's seeing, you know, the most amazing highlight reel of everyone's life as opposed to what's what's going on, you know, on a day to day basis. So people get depressed because there's this huge FOMO and that people are missing out and they're not good enough. And, fundamentally, I think one of the big human, like, the fears that we have is that we're not good enough. Right? We're not good enough, so we're not gonna be loved. And if we're not gonna be loved, we're not gonna, you know, survive because, you know, we needed to as you know, to be loved by our parents. Otherwise, we had no protection and That that's so interesting. So you're saying kind of this this Facebook depression or or or viewing this highlight reel of everyone's else's life, it's almost and I'm gonna use the the bag of chemicals analogy again. It's almost pushing down your oxytocin, which is the neurochemical which tells you where you are in in social acceptance of the tribe. So when you see that all the tribe is having fun, but, hey, I didn't have fun last night Right. You're feeling like that the tribe is kinda kicking you, you know, pushing you towards the fringe where the lion is gonna potentially eat you first. Right. And, I mean, it's tough because we we learn through contrast and comparison through things. And so when we when we see people succeeding or having it it puts us in a place where we feel like we might not measure up. And I think that, ultimately, that's one of the deepest fears we have, whether it's, you know, the root cause of, you know, challenges where people feel vulnerable public speaking. I don't know how you have you always been natural on stage and in media? No. But but here's here's where it I have a up until the one second before I'm on stage, incredibly terrified. So I will even say to the conference organizer, I'm sorry. I'm leaving. I'm too scared. And but once the mic is in my hand and I'm looking at the audience and I start, then it's like I'm I somehow, I don't know what happens. It's like I get this boost of energy, and I'm like a different person, and I'm fearless. It it's a and I know beforehand that's probably gonna happen, but I'm still scared to death. I am scared all the time. Aren't I scared all the time? So I'm scared all the time. Yeah. I can appreciate that because when I grew up with this this brain injury and such, I would actually if a teacher in high school asked me to do and talk about my book report in front of class, I would lie and say I didn't do it, and I would throw it out on the way out because I was so terrified, you know, of public speaking. And it's interesting because my 2 biggest challenges growing up were learning in public speaking. And, you know, you could say the universe has a weird sense of humor because that's what I do pretty much every week. But I I find that it's funny. I find that with a lot of my guests that the things they were specifically challenged with, you know, it's it the overcoming those challenges make them an expert. So for instance, you know, I wrote a book called The Power of No. Sure. So why it's important to be able to say no in your life. I didn't write it because I was such a great expert at saying no. I wrote it because I'm really non confrontational and horrible at saying no. Right. So the exploration of that led to the book. And it's interesting to see when a struggle becomes could turn into a strength. Like like, my biggest mess growing up was my learning disabilities, and now my mess has become my message. Well well, that oh, I love that mess goes to message. But I wanna I wanna, repeat your story, which we we talked about before, which is you were in in college, and and I guess it was your roommate's dad asked you to write down kinda your the 10 things you were interested in. And you might have felt unconfident about them. And he said, you know, Jim, you're this close, and he he put his fingers close together. You're this close from achieving all of them. Right. And and that is a very choicest philosophy also because I feel like you then be started doing the things you love doing there and improve your life, and you started looking for the lessons that would help you with memory and brain performance and and so on. Yeah. And it's it's about responsibility. Right? Because I feel like the most successful, productive, fulfilled people, they feel like the locus of control is coming from the inside, that they are at cause, that life is, not happening to them, but it's happening them, you know, more for them in in their favor. So so so it it's the same thing we discussed earlier of, like, blaming circumstances to reduce stress as opposed to doing something to reduce stress. So what did you do? When this guy said that to you, what did you start doing that that anybody can start doing in some analogy or metaphor or whatever? What did you start doing to kind of make build the life and career that you have now? So when I was 18 years old and I met this gentleman, I was ready to quit my freshman year of school. And because I it was just not for me, I felt like that it was I wasn't smart enough. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't getting the grades, and, and I was just learning challenge. And it's funny because when you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. Right? And I was always arguing saying I'm not smart enough. I'm not good. It's the script that we have, the story that keeps us from what we, you know, should what we desire and what we deserve. And so I'm fighting for my limitations with him, and he's saying, well, why are you in school? What do you wanna do, be, have, share? And I start coming up with things, and he makes me write them down like a bucket list. And when he looks at it, like you said, he says, Jim, you're this close to everything on that list, and he spreads his index fingers about a foot apart. And he I was like, no way. Give me 10 lifetimes. I'm not gonna crack that list. And then he puts his two fingers, on the side of my, my my head, inside of my temple, meaning it's the my brain inside there that's gonna be the key, and he takes me into a room of his home that I've never seen before. It's wall to wall, ceiling to floor, covered in books. And I remember at this time, I'm learning challenged. I never read a book cover to cover. I I mean, to be equivalent of somebody who's phobic about snakes walking into a room full of snakes. I mean, that's how I felt in that library. Right? And he what makes it worse, he started grabbing snakes from the shelves and handing them to me, and I started looking at these titles and their these biographies of men and women in history and some very early personal growth books, books that you and I have read, like Thinking We're Rich, The Power of Positive Thinking, Psycho Cybernetics, How to Win Friends and Influence People, like all the classics. Right? Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill and everyone. And so, he says, Jim, I want you to read one book a week. And I'm like, are you crazy? I have all the score. I just told you I have midterms. I can't even keep up with what I already have. And he said, Jim, don't let school get in the way of your education. Right? Famous Mark Twain quote. But I didn't know that because this was 25 years ago. I'm like, that's a great quote and in saying, but I still can't read one book a week. And then very smart man, he takes out my bucket list, which he still has, and he starts reading every single one of my dreams out loud. And something about the stranger is obviously very successful hearing my dreams and my fantasies, my goals in somebody else's voice in the universe mess with my heart, my mind, something fierce. And, honestly, James, a lot of things on that list were things I wanted to do for my family that they can never afford to do for themselves. And, and with that extra leverage and we know the power of drive and having reasons and, you know, start with why and such. With those whys, I I agree to read 1 book a week on top of my schoolwork. So now I'm sitting at school, and I have a pile of books, you know, I have to read for school and then a pile of books that I wanna read that I promised. And I wanna fulfill my commitments, and I can't keep up. And that's where it goes downhill. You know? I don't eat. I don't sleep. I don't work out. I don't spend time with friends, family. I just live in the library. That's where I had another accident. I ended up passing out in the library. I fell down a flight of stairs. I hit my head again, and I woke up 2 days later in the hospital. And at this point, I mean, I'm I've lost so much weight because I wasn't eating. Were you depressed? Yeah. I was. I was I was very depressed. I was in a very dark place. It's not a even when I'm talking about it, you know, I get a little, you know, choked up, but I was I was down to a £117. I thought I died, and, you know, that would it's just it was a bad place. And when I woke up, another part of me woke up saying there has to be a better way. What I'm doing is not working for me, and that's when I started studying, like, those books and studying the brain. I wanna understand this thing where I wanna understand how my brain works so I can work my brain, and I started studying adult learning theory. I started I found a book. Like, I'm not saying it's a law of attraction, but I just I I visited one of my friends on campus, and on the book, I was, you know, his roommate's, like, you know, bed was like a book on speed reading. I've never even heard of speed reading before, and I started doing that and met the old school memory training and everything. And then about 60 days 2 months into it, a light switch just popped on, and I started to understand things for the first time. I started to have better focus, retention. I started to, do better in school. And with my grades improving, my life improved. Why why do you think why what is that light switch? Is it something that happens naturally when you put 6 months of thought and, you know, kind of responsible thought into something and reading and so on? I mean, I think when people do deep immersion, I mean, people we we can learn things lots of different ways. There's a way of you know, called space repetition where we break things down into intervals, like, you know, kind of like working out where we do some Nautilus training here. Like, we we spread things out, and consolidate from short term to long term memory. But another way of learning is through just deep immersion, right, where you have no distractions. You're putting yourself in an environment where you're feeding your mind this information for 8 plus hours. And that's what I was doing. I remember actually I don't know. I remember talking about this, but I I remember that the moment where I actually understood that there was a difference. Because sometimes you don't see your progress because you're in it, kinda like, you know, with your kids. You look at your kids and they'd see they you don't know if they've grown a lot, but even with friends who haven't seen them for 6 months or a year, they see the big growth because it's contrast. And so the time where I realized I had these superpowers was about 60 days into it. I was remember I was in a lecture center, a few hundred people there. And back then, there were no computers. It was just like you know, remember those, like, overhead projectors where you write with, like, one of those pens and stuff? They put something on the overhead projector on the screen in the lecture center and, you know, it's all these words and, you know, paragraphs. And, and then I I started laughing out loud, and I'm I'm very shy in cla*s. Right? I'm if anything, the superpower I had back in school was invisibility because I didn't wanna be noticed. I didn't wanna be heard. I mean, deep down, I I think all of us wanna be heard and seen, but I really didn't want that, any attention or spotlight on me. But I just start I started laughing out loud. I didn't even realize I was doing it because I was reading you know, I read what they put on the screen, but and then everyone looked at me. I felt very awkward. And then about 15 seconds later, everyone else started to laugh. And I realized that I read what was on the screen really quickly, right, because of these newfound powers. And, and that's where I realized, like, there was a fundamental difference. I don't even think it's, like, reading at 5, 6, 800 words a minute, where the average person reads about 200 words a minute is speed reading. I feel like it's just regular reading. We're just not taught these skills. I feel like we live in and we had this conversation last time. We live in this age of when we're talking about Elon Musk. Right? We're talking about autonomous electric cars and spaceships that are going to Mars, but our vehicle of choice when it comes to learning is like a horse and buggy. It hasn't changed a whole lot as much much as the world has changed. And I feel like if if someone's listening to this, they feel like these 3 villains is the digital overload, which is, like, too much information, and it's not even filtered. Right? There's there's more information being created, you know, every day with blogs and podcasts and, you know, YouTube and everything else. Trump's tweets. Right. Exactly. And I don't even say that as a joke. That's actual competition for Right. Within with with other information. And and going back to our original conversation about not having not checking your phone the first hour of the day. When you're in that alpha, theta state, when you're in that relaxed state of awareness, you're fully impressionable, and you're going through your phone the very first thing when you're that impressionable and suggestible, and you're looking at commenting because you're getting these dopamine fixes, right, from every time you get a like, a share, a comment, and you're you're you're literally you're frying metaphorically, you're frying your your brain. You're you're you're, you're fatiguing it. Remember, we're talking about, like, choice fatigue and and decision fatigue? We're using all those choices and those decisions to be able to scroll and look at cats and doing all these, you know, these memes and everything, and we wonder why we're tired. And going back to this idea of decision fatigue, the reason why, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or Tony Hsieh, the you know, these people, they wear the same sweatshirt or or Tony always wears the same Zappos T shirt, you know, being CEO of Zappos. You know, most of the time is they that you you you ask them and they say that they do it because they don't wanna waste one of their good decisions on what am I gonna wear Right? They wanna systemize everything and pray turn everything to processes so they don't have to you know, so they could focus on the things that matter the most to them. And so that's that's one of the challenges, digital overload. But the other 2, really quickly, are digital distraction. Right? Because every time you the other challenge with the opening of your phone so there's 2 challenges with checking your phone the first hour of the day. Number 1, it trains you, to be distracted, right, because you're looking at all this different and and, also, the other problem is it's training you to be reactive, meaning that when you're looking at text messages and emails and all these things, from people wanting something from you, right, or fires that you need to put out, then you're training yourself not only to be distracted, but you're training yourself to be reactive. And that's you're never gonna have especially the entrepreneurs are that need to take the invisible, make it visible, turn their vision into reality and such like that, is then you're not gonna have a quality of life if you're just reacting to all the things of, you know, everyone else's agenda that they have for you. And so that's why picking up the phone that stays really bad to do rather than sitting down, doing what you're doing, being a maker. Right? Planning the 3 things that you need to accomplish personally and professionally and keeping your eye on the prize. The third obstacle besides digital overload and digital distraction is digital dementia. And digital dementia is this new term used in in health care basically saying that our brains like, we're getting more and more forgetful. Everyone's feeling like senior moments are coming early even if they're, you know, in their twenties or thirties. Why is this happening? And part of it is they're saying doctors are saying it's because we're relying so much on our smart devices and it keeps our to dos, it keeps our calendars, it does simple math for us, it remembers all the phone numbers, all things that are convenient. Like, nobody wants to memorize hundreds of phone numbers. Right? But we've lost the ability to do so and that creates a lot of challenges. And they call it digital dementia, where your your mind is like a muscle. It grows stronger with use. But if Do do you think that's true? Do you think that because someone's outsourced their contacts to a phone list, they're they're not actually just saying, okay. Now my mind can do other things or more And I think that, like, the right. So nature abhors a vacuum. So if you have this extra free time that you're saving from reading faster or anything, an hour or 2 a day, then you're always gonna fill it with something else. I would hope that that, so there's 2 parts to it. I think that it's not black and white. I lie rely personally on my smart devices because I don't wanna memorize everything. It's convenient. But I also don't wanna lose the ability too if I need to. And so the challenge becomes, like so people if you ever if you lost half of your memories, like, if you forgot half the people that you know, if you forgot half the words, like, the understanding of what those words meant, if you forget you'd be you'd be at a disadvantage, obviously. Right? Right. And so the same could be said if you could potentially double your capacity to be able to remember these things. You'd be twice as effective in these ways also. You know, having information at your mental fingertips, especially in this age where, you know, we're paid for our expertise, for our knowledge bank, and our ability to make good decisions. We can only make good decisions based on the information that we remember at any given time, but if we lost that information, we're not very productive and our performance, you know, obviously hurts. The other thing I would say for digital distraction is we live in a world where people are just they're addicted to this to being busy. They start bragging that they're busy all the time. They had they wear it as a badge of honor, which is a challenge because if you are getting significance or you're meeting some of these values by by being busy. Because, basically, when someone's saying that they're busy, which is something we all have a habit of saying, is just basically we're saying is we're we're important. Like, we're so important. We have lots to do. Right? And if if people are getting rewarded through that, you know, some kind of secondary gain out of it, the challenge is they start unconsciously designing their life to be busy all the time so they could feel that, you know, that importance. And that we know busyness is not necessarily the answer. You know? The whole conversation we're having in the first half of this conversation was about putting first things first. Right? You're focusing on life, love, and lessons, the things that we value most. We're putting the first we're majoring in the major things in life. Let's stop to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Zendesk builds software to help businesses build better customer relationships. 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Visit zendesk.com/james. That's zendesk.com/james. Let's say I was just focused on money, which I was for many, many years, and I was making it. I was losing it. I was making it. I was losing it. I never felt good, like, up in my chest, Meaning, I never loved what I was doing. I always thought, like, I just always felt this stress in my gut, and I would even get, like, sick in my stomach because I was just always thinking about money. And it wasn't something I necessarily and I was doing things that I didn't necessarily love doing. And it's only, like, in the past, let's say, 7 years, it started moving up. What my activities during the day started moving up my how I felt in my body. So now I can tell when something's a good decision if I feel it up here in my chest, but if I love it. You know, whether I'm good or bad at it, if I love it, you know, then I can say, oh, okay. This is something I wanna get a lesson from, or this is something I wanna improve my life with because it's me it makes me feel better up here, and that's much more pleasant than the worry I always had in my stomach. It's very biological for me, decision making. Yeah. One one of the things that, you know, there's always there's always some kind of gift that comes out of some of these challenges. And one of the themes for you and I were talking about is how struggles become strengths, that through challenge comes the level of change. Right? How the mess becomes some kind of new message for for people. We were talking before we got in the studio about, my sleep issues. And so I don't talk about this publicly ever, but I think it could help maybe when a couple people are listening to this. So I've I've suffered from sleep apnea for the past 5 years, very, very severe. Because as you get older, it gets worse and worse. And sleep apnea is this breathing disorder that where you don't get enough oxygen when you sleep, so you wake up suffocating. And, and I use a CPAP breathing, you know, device, to help me get air and, you know, dental devices that put my jaw forward and helps me to be able to breathe a little bit easier. But nothing's really hacked it. Right? And so What do you think it's related to the, I mean, and I've seen photos of you, like, in the hospital bed, like, really looking like a a wreck through this. Do you think it's related to those early brain injuries? No. The apnea is actually a structural issue. It's actually because my my tonsils were just very large and, you know, this was kind of the soft palate, and uvula in the back of my throat prevented oxygen to go through it. And, usually, it's the people who usually suffer from it. And I recommend anyone who has who wakes up still fatigued to get a sleep study done. You could do it at your local your doctor could do it and and order it for everybody, but I think more people suffer from this than they realize. And so what it is is, it's usually because somebody's overweight and they had to carry a lot of, extra extra weight around their neck and it prevents them from being able to get to to breathe. But for me, it was it was purely genetic. What made it and so I had I've had surgery and everything. I was hospitalized a number of times where I was okay. So I was getting about 90 minutes to 2 hours a night for 5 years combined. And and and, obviously and and this has come up on the podcast a lot. Essentially, most people need 8 hours. Right. I mean Not even on average. You just need 8 hours every day. You need more I mean, I don't know what the range is, but certainly more than a couple hours of sleep. And because I you know, because the sleep is people think that like, when I ask people how do they build muscles, they're like, oh, I I go to the gym. I exercise. But in actuality, that's not where you're building the muscle. That's where you're tearing literally tearing the muscle down. When you're building it is when you rest. And a lot of that is is sleep is so important. It's like one of the best life hacks there is, performance hacks. Because when you don't sleep, your you know, your ability to make good decisions, your your memory, your focus, everything is compromised the next day. Right? And so that's a big challenge. And so for me, I never got enough sleep because I couldn't breathe. I would stop breathing 200 plus times a night. Each time was more than 10 seconds. So I'd wake up the equivalent of this sleep doctor was saying is like, hey. So it's like somebody's coming in 200 times a night and suffocating you with a pillow, you know, and so it's no wonder you're waking up. Did you realize this was an issue, or did you think everybody just is just tired of yourself? I've always realized I've never slept really well, but, you know, as as we get older, it just it gets worse progressively, sleep apnea does. It my challenge the reason I bring this up though is the gift because my what I've learned to do is train myself when I go through struggle. I'm trying to think what's the gift in this. Right? Because to be able to people don't realize you. You're you're talking about all the struggles that people have and how people could grow from it, and that's actually a powerful word because we've all heard of post traumatic stress, right, disorder. And people don't realize that there's also this thing called post traumatic growth, that going through trauma, going through adversity, going through extreme difficulty, the most difficult times of your life, there's no number of people percentage of people that come through it, and they're actually thankful for that even though that, you know, they wouldn't wish it on anybody that they cared about or anybody because what they had to go through in terms of suffering, they got a certain level of meaning from that experience. They got a certain level of commitment. They got a certain level of newfound strength from it, and it changed everything. Like, for me, I struggled for a decade and a half with my learning challenges, but I wouldn't trade that for anything because it put me on this path. Right? And so I would say where what's the gift out of me not be able to sleep for 5 years and travel to Dubai and Hong Kong and do these mental feats, memorize a hundred people's names from stage when I got when I'm really, really tired? I would say part of it is certainly is willpower because, you know, I focus on gratitude. I get really scared going on stage still because I've never you know, it's more my nature. I'm more introverted, but I focus on, you know, a couple people I feel like I can help in the audience and it puts my focus off of myself. I think that's important. I focus on giving not to be able to get but giving because it's who we are. And I would say that the gift out of not sleeping is 2 things. Number number 1 is I would say that, it's forced me to double down on the things that I teach because I could be as efficient and effective as I am being, you know, getting done what a lot of people it would take 3 or 4 people to do because I I do what I teach, right, in terms of learning and performance and all these brain hacks and stuff. But number 2, besides doubling down on my capabilities and unique abilities, which I think everybody has, is, is I've gotten really good at filtering exactly what you're saying in terms of not overcommitting, saying no more often because, you know, it's this whole idea where I feel like a lot of stress that we're carrying is unconscious because we're overcommitting to so many different things. We have so many projects. We're trying to do so many things parallel. And we know that multitasking is a myth, that we can't that it's not that's not even accurate, that people who feel like they're multitasking I'm not talking about walking and and thinking and being on the phone. I'm talking about doing 2 cognitive activities or more at once where you're switching. And that's what exactly what it is. The actual term for multitasking, more accurate, is task switching. Right? You're going from task to task, but every time you switch, the researchers are saying you're gonna you're losing about 5 to 20 minutes, because it takes that much time to regain your focus, regain your flow, if you will. Also, those people are multitasking. Not only is it wasting time so their performance goes their productivity goes down, but also they're making more errors, you know, which is a big challenge also. But we live in this world where people are overcommitting and they have all these windows open on their computer metaphorically even that even if it's minimized, it's still taking up space. And I'm saying that when I was sleeping 2 hours a night now my it's up now to 3 or 4 hours now. It's because I'm just working with some some specialists. But I would say that it forced me to really analyze the things that I want to. And, you know, in the spirit of, you know, the one thing or essentialism, it's everything is hell hell yes or it's hell no. And so, like, right now, James, there's nowhere else I'd rather be. There's nowhere I'd rather be with because Well, I am certainly glad about that. Because this is because it was, like, automatic yes. Because and that's how I filter things. You remember what you're saying in your chest, you're you're like, you do the things that you love, even if they're more difficult, so they're more fulfilling for you? And I would say that it's good because you wanna go through difficulty because anyone who's been give given everything and they haven't if they have had an easy life, they don't develop pride and they don't develop strength. Right? And I feel like over the past 5 years, it's forced me to really double down again on my capabilities, the things that I teach about speed reading, memory, just things that keep me productive. And, also, it's forced me to say no 80% of the time, and only say yes to the things that really light me up. And I think So so in terms of, like, making those decisions, do you go back let let's go back to the, the hats. So the white hat, red hat, black, yellow, green, blue. Did you use let let let's put it in that context. So, you know, white hat. You know? Yeah. When when you're making a decision, what's an example of decision you've made where you've used this mental model? I mean, so this would be really good. So I had surgery. I haven't talked about this. But, one of the things I was I was being hospitalized, every single year because I would go x amount of days without sleep, and it got very, very bad, and I would have to be sedated and such. And I wanted to get the surgery done, they called a u triple p, where it's it's pretty it's pretty severe. You know, it's not like having your tonsils out when you're a kid. It's as in as adults, it's a lot more, a lot more pain associated to it. And the challenge is I found out that 80% of the time, it's, it's a fail failure. And so I'm like, why is this so why is everybody having this surgery and and 4 out of 5 times, it doesn't work? Right? Because it's a very painful process, very costly process. And a number of my celebrity clients had gone through it and just they still haven't fixed the problem with their breathing. And so I use the 6 hats as an example. I won't go through it completely. But when I'm wearing the white hat, I was going through it and looking at it analytically, like looking at the data, looking at the research. Why is it just 4 out of 5? And, also, part of it is just, you know, the red hat. I was thinking, how do I feel about this? You know what I mean? Like, what's the emotional attachment? Because I I don't like being you know, nobody wants to be under anesthesia and, like, out and everything else. Actually, I like being under anesthesia, but other than that but it's so pleasant. They say count down to 10, and then by 7, you're gone. And then you are groggy when you wake up, and it's like this new world. Anyway, I No. I mean It's like this science fiction aspect of anesthesia that I like. I think I started going through it. I I looked at it through the critical standpoint, you know, wearing the black hat, saying what could go wrong here and everything, and I started looking at the yellow and what could go right. And then when I looked at, the one that actually made a difference was the green one. The green one is what other what other options do I have? And I started to say, like, I started to ask around and, and I happened to be talking, I just did a podcast on effective listening skills. And I would love to talk to you about, like, how you become such a great listener. But I was having, breakfast with, with Larry King, and I was asking him these questions. And I was losing my voice, and I was very concerned. And he recommended this doctor in, in in Los Angeles and which led to another conversation with the head of throat at UCLA. Anyway, short story, I was like, I got a meeting with this guy, and I was looking at Green. I was like, is there any other option besides this surgery? And she's like, yes. What we do here is we actually don't do this surgery unless it's actually necessary. And what we do that other doctors don't is we actually sedate you and with anesthesia and then put a a scope up your nose down your throat to actually see where the obstruction is. Because lots of times, it's actually the tongue that's that's keeping that falls on the back of your throat that makes you snore or can't or you can't breathe, and that's why, you know, the apnea is there. And, obviously, they're not doing surgery on your tongue, but most are not effective because they're taking out parts of your your your your oral cavity that doesn't need to be taken out. Why doesn't everybody do that? That seems like, like, never obvious. So he put me to sleep, and then I said to him, give him the specific instructions that if you see that that my tonsils are actually the presenting issue, then then do so you know, take them out. And that's what he did. And it led to this new solution where I felt really good about it, and it's made a difference. It's you know, instead of getting 90 minutes, I'm getting 3 or 4 hours still, and I'm still building it up, and I'm in the middle of the process. But I think, like, again, our our lifestyle, our life, our happiness is a reflection of our decisions. I mean, nobody teaches us these things. School was a great place to learn what to learn, math, history, science, Spanish, you know, important, you know, subjects, but 0 on how to learn, how to listen, how to be creative, how to think for yourself, how to solve problems, how to focus, concentrate, how to read faster, how to remember things, how to be financially literate, you know, all the things that could really serve us. So so when you so, obviously, this became a passion for you in in part because your mess became your message. How did you first kinda get into the business of having, you know, all these clients where you would help them, you know, improve their memory, speed read, improve their brain performance hacks, and so on? Completely. And so for the and I know you have a lot of entrepreneur listeners, or people who are on that path that starts business or they're transitioning and such and or they value their freedom and they wanna so I I would say that, okay. I would say I would say a couple of things. So, when when I was growing up, I, my my parents immigrated here, and I, our family lived in the back of a laundromat, you know, in this small room and such. We had no financial means. We, you know, we didn't I had no education. Right? I had just learning challenges and disabilities, and I knew nobody. So a lot of people, when they wanna be successful, they just say, like, oh, you need money, you need education, you need contacts, connections, and network, and everything. But I feel like it's not and this is people have said this before, so I'm not the one saying this, but it's just it's not about your resources, external resources. I find it's it's these most successful people are have strong internal resourcefulness, creativity, ability to think, persistence, grit, growth, and all that stuff, discipline. And so I would say that, struggling all through my academically, when I when I had these breakthroughs, how I ended up teaching this in terms of my career and this is my this is my 25th year of teaching, well, I haven't thought about that. So, yes, 25 years, is that when I got these results, I started helping friends, and they started getting amazing results. Right? Like, what was the first friend you helped? Yeah. So I helped my my roommates and suitemates because they saw, like, a big change in my not just my grades, but just, you know, everything. Right? You have one thing that's holding you back, and you fix it, and all of a sudden, it opens up, like, you know, it primes the pump, allows us to Not only that. You you find you have a passion for what fix Well, especially because this was, like, my kryptonite. Right? And so that's the challenge. It's like every single day, a 1,000 times a day unconsciously and probably 100 of times consciously, I was thinking, like, I'm not smart enough. I'm not good enough. I can't do this, and I would make up all these stories. And so when you overcome the biggest challenge that you have, I mean, it liberates you, something fierce. Right? And so I would I would say that I started helping people and tutoring them, and then and then I, I wanted to help other people. Right? And then maybe to and then, someone saying, hey. Because I didn't have any money in school, and, and friends were always ordering Pizza Hut and chicken and broccoli. And I was, like, you know, £40 underweight and such, so I couldn't afford to do that. So his friend's like, how do you why don't you tutor this? And I was like, I don't know how to first think about doing that, but I noticed that there was a classroom that wasn't being used one Thursday night around 7 o'clock. And I saw, okay. Next I had this idea. Next Thursday at 7 o'clock, I'm gonna put 5 or 10 people in that room for free and just teach them for a couple hours. And then maybe afterwards, 1 of them or 2 of them wants to be tutored, you know, ongoing so I could eat. And then so I go back to my dorm room. I take out a piece of paper, and it's my very first marketing. I wrote free speed reading memory tips. Get better grades in less time, Thursday, 7 o'clock, and I put the lecture center room in there. I I love this. So, basically, it's as if you anointed yourself a professor in a university setting Right. Took over a classroom without permission, of course, from the from the gatekeeper, which was the university who decides what courses go in every classroom. You announced it as if you were, you know, a So it's really it was exact exactly that. Like, the next morning so I I wrote this down, hand wrote hand wrote it, and then the flyer. And then the next morning, I make some photocopies, and I put it on bulletin boards on the way to cla*s. Not a lot, but just on the way to cla*s. Fast forward to Thursday, the next Thursday, 7 o'clock, I'm walking into the classroom, and I'm just hoping 5, 10 people show up for this information session. And I turned the corner, and there's a crowd of people outside the room. And I honestly, James, my my first instinct is this. It's like, oh my goodness. I was like, I hope whatever's going on ends soon so I could do my thing. Right? And, and I go there. I came to get in the doorway. There's this tall guy. I was like, what's going on inside? And this guy looks at me. He's like, there's a speed reading cla*s. And I was like, no. Wow. I was like, wow. What a coincidence. Like, what are the odds there's a speed reading class? The same room, the same night, the same time. And I push my way in. This is how slow my mind is. Right? And there's a room full of people there, even people standing in the back, and there's no one teaching. That's where I realized it took my slow brain all that time to realize why they're all there. And I do a head count, and instead of 10 people, there's a 110 people in that room. Now keep in mind, like, I'm 18 years old. I'm wearing T shirt shorts. I have nothing prepared to talk about, and I'm phobic of public speaking. So my heart's beating out of my chest. I can't even breathe, so I leave. Oh my gosh. And I because I can't even I can't perform. Right? And I think we've all had these choice points, and I'm I'm embarrassed, but but I left. And, there's these fountains because I can't even go back to my dorm room because I don't my my fam my friends will just make fun of me, right, and ask me what happened and everything. But I go to these fountains, and I just meditate. You know? And I think meditation is part of my practice. It's part of my daily routine. I just like to meditate 20 minutes a day. I think it's important to slow down, get that white space. Anyway, when I'm meditating, I hear this voice inside my head and it's my mom's. And, basically, she says to me that all these you promised these 100 people that you're gonna help them, and they all came out. And you're disappointing them, and you're disappointing me kind of thing. And I'm doing this walking meditation back to my dorm room, and I don't even realize it. But I stop, and I take one step back to the classroom. And it's funny, James, because how metaphorically, how one step in another direction can completely change your destination or your destiny. Right? I I I can relate to that a lot. It's not even so in your case, a a physical step, but I think any small committal action in the right direction kind of says, well, I did that. I could do the next thing. Exactly. So so so I just wanna give an example. And it's totally not related to this. Yours is much more important and serious, and and yours is this I I've read a lot about you, and this is the first time I'm hearing this origin story. So believe me, I'm gonna make you continue it. But, when I when I described you before this subway comedy, the the first I wanted to videotape it. So, someone was with me with a video camera, and I was like, forget it. I'm not gonna do it. We're just gonna get off the subway at the next stop and and go home. But then I said, why don't you just turn on the video? And I still was not planning on doing anything, but that led to a series of mental actions that said, you know, ladies and gentlemen. And, you know, but okay. Go ahead. It does. And I I I just did, I I I have this podcast. Right? And it's a solo podcast, but I did one on procrastination. And I think that a lot of times, people don't take on things because they have no momentum. And I think just taking one step, even going back to that Zeikarnik effect, makes it a little bit easier. This researcher out of Stanford, his name is doctor BJ Fogg. He's a habits expert, and one of his students cofounded, Instagram. You know, think about you wanna make those addictive and, you know, habitual for people to check. And I think they say that the average person checks in on Instagram, like, 54 times a day or something. Certainly my kids do. This is extraordinary. And if you're doing less, then that means there's somebody out there doing a lot more. But when you're talking about, habits, he has this idea of tiny habits where, for example, like, everyone knows they should floss, but a lot of people don't floss their teeth. And he's saying, okay. Just floss one tooth because nobody is are you gonna stop at 1 tooth? Of course not. You're gonna end doing all your teeth, but it's just doing something. Even when I get people to do speed reading and I do these drills with them, I just say, hey. Don't worry about reading for 20, 30 minutes. Just read one word. Right? Just get the book open, and then from there, people could build positive momentum. And that's often, very good, writing advice. Like, okay. Don't write a chapter of your novel. Mhmm. Write a 100 words of what happened to you this morning, and that kind of, you know Exactly. Loosens the or greases the whatever, the pipes or whatever the analogy is. Is that how you got got you through your your books? Probably. Yeah. Because, you experience writer's block all the time. But, okay, so you you you take a step back. So I I I, basically, I take a step back to the classroom. I don't even realize it's unconscious, and I go back to the classroom. Same 100 people are there, and, I end up doing a talk for 2 hours. And, honestly What was the first thing you said? You get up into the front. This is so sweet. You must have said Yeah. Okay. So thank you. Everyone for coming. But after that And I I apologized, for for for starting late and everything. And, but I, honestly, as a memory coach, as memory expert, I don't remember what I talked about for 2 hours because I don't know how you are on stage, but it just this is my very first public speaking experience. Right? And it just flowed right through me. And, and I don't know. Some speakers I know Wayne Dyer did that. He never prepared. He just he just trusted that, you know, that he'd be be able to present and such. But I don't remember I did for 2 hours, but I remember exactly when I came out of trans at the end. I was just like, well, I don't know what to do. Like, how am I gonna and I was just like I remember I said I was like, look. I don't know if I could help all of you, but I need about 10 hours to teach you what I know to get better grades in less time, speed reading, studying, memorize all this stuff. You know, I was like, I get $30 an hour to tutor. And I made this up because I used to get $30 an hour teaching tennis, back in high school. And that was my only reference. Right? I'm making this up as I go. And I said, you know, I'm not sure how to do this, but maybe meet a couple hours a week for 5 weeks. And if you're interested, I'll be in the student center tomorrow at noon to answer your questions. And I swear to you, James, a 100 people just get up, and they just leave. Nobody talks to me. Like, I'm totally confused. I feel completely 2 things. I feel completely exhausted and spent because when you face your biggest fear, I mean, afterwards, I was wiped out. I mean, mentally, physically, emotionally, I was just spent. And I was also confused. Like, I was like, like, did anyone like me? Did I just totally mess this up? And I end up falling. I was so spent. I actually and exhausted. I actually fell asleep on the carpet in that classroom, and I got woken up. And that was the best sleep of my life to this day. I got woken up the next morning from the class coming in the next morning, and I freaked out. I I went back to my dorm room, showered, went to breakfast, going to cla*s. 12 o'clock comes, and I was like, oh, shoot. I've I have to go and meet people. Hopefully, 1 or 2 of them shows up and are interested in tutoring. When I get to the students here at 12, I'm hoping 1 or 2 people are there. That same crowd of people are there. And I swear, after 2 hours, 71 of the 100 kids signed up for a program that didn't even exist. And, How did you have the time, actually? And so here's the thing. That's a 140 hours a week. So I put I put those those individuals. I put them into classes, 3 different classes of 25, right, or 2025. And I didn't realize it because I didn't do the math that $30 an hour was, for 10 hours was $300 because all these kids in the student center, there's the ATM machine was right there. They all went to the ATM machine, took out $300 cash. And I didn't realize they could do that because I I didn't even have an ATM card. I didn't even know what that was because I didn't have that, you know, that resource. And so I'm not even 19 years old, and I have $21,000 cash, in my backpack. And going back to my original mentor that says who said don't let school get in the way of your education, I actually use all the money. Part of it, I used to feed my body because I was so underweight, and I ordered food and, you know, Chinese food and pizza and all that good stuff. But I actually use the majority of it to feed my mind. I travel around the country, go in every event, seminar, audio program just to learn my craft. Because, suddenly, also, it seems like you're you you it it's like in stages. It's like, oh, you did this for 6 months, and now suddenly you're getting better grades. And your roommates who you who you loved and trusted noticed this difference, and you felt, hey. This is a way for me to be higher up in the tribe. So you were getting this this mental reward for it. So then you give this give this class, and then the next stage, which is like, oh my gosh. People I don't even know are rewarding me for it and giving me money. And so, of course, you're gonna double down on Right. Exactly what it is that's giving you such a pleasure. And I and I take all that that that revenue, if you will, and I I reinvest it back into myself, into my skill set, in terms of my own learning. And the reason why I'm still teaching it to this day is that, is one of the students, she is remarkable. She read 30 books in 30 days. I I remember reading the story and because she wanted to read about, battling cancer. Yeah. And so all the books were health and wellness, maybe by a lot of our mutual friends. And, her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, was only given 60 days to live by doctors, and the books she was reading were helps was books to help save her mom's life, and she ended up doing so. And, By the way, credit to her mom for listening to her daughter over doctors. Yeah. And the thing is is and I'm not, again, knowing that people should talk to qualified health practitioners and stuff and get, you know, good good information to make good decisions. It's just the doctors end up calling it a miracle, but her mother attributed it a 100% to the great advice she got from her daughter and learned it from all these books. And that's the thing. That's where I realized the fundamental belief that I have is that if knowledge is power, learning is your superpower. That if knowledge is power, learning is your superpower. And the challenge is we're just not taught how to learn. That's all. Well, we're not taught how to learn, and we're also not taught what to learn. Exactly. And I think, like you said, we can all sit around and read math textbooks, but that might not be something we love. It might not be something that improves my life, and it might not be something a lesson that I'm gonna be able to kinda take into other areas of my life. So how would you suggest so someone listening to this Mhmm. They're listening to all this, and they're like, well, I could read books any day, or I could Yeah. You know, listen to podcasts or whatever. What should I you know, how do I find what what I love? What's gonna improve my life? And what and how do I find the lessons that will contribute to that? Yeah. And I don't think that that's necessarily an easy, like, you know, one one line sentence to be able to solve that. But I would Because, you know, I mean, you look at your example, it took this series of challenges. It was like the the guy bringing you to his library. So he gave you he kind of became this, weird Yoda like example. And then the next thing was your roommates sort of rewarding you. And then the next wave was these hundreds of people rewarding you, and then money rewarding you, and then, the the extra knowledge you were gaining from all these conferences. So there's, like, a series of stages. Like, people sort of think success happens at the end, but you kinda have to reward yourself and celebrate the little successes all along the way. You obviously celebrated the little success of reading that first book, then the little success of your roommate saying, hey. What happened to you? Then the little success of a hundred people showing up for a classroom and so on. Right. I mean, we've all seen the memes and the graphics on on social media where success is not a straight line. This is really weird, you know, sweet squiggly line. And but I think that there's it's cliche, but I I really feel like that we only fail when we fail to learn. Right? That, you know, when then when we when we when we when we win, then we feel we feel happy. Right? But when we when we when we when we lose, then we get instead of happiness, we have wisdom, hopefully. You You know, that feedback feed feedback if you will. It is. It is. Because it's hard not to get depressed. If you wanna get better at tennis and you lose a game of tennis, you might say, oh, I hate this. I hate this feeling of loss so much. I am not going through it again. Right. And that's why I think, like, if I was to boil down the characteristics of, like, that mindset, if you will, success mindset or whatever, I would say 4 g's. I would say that, growth, which, you know, I mean, we we know that we're grossly underestimating, like, our capacity, that that our intelligence, our potential, our memory is not fixed like our shoe size. Right? So this growth mindset. Right? When we're green, we we grow, and when we're brown, we rot. But besides growth, I would say, I would say grit is important. And this is the idea where a lot of a lot of success shows up when we show up, And the challenge is is when we reach this pain point, a lot of us pull back because we don't wanna feel we don't wanna be disappointed. We don't wanna get our hopes up, or maybe just we don't still have the grit muscles, meaning that like, yesterday, I hurt my back a little bit, working out, and I went to a chiropractor. And while I was going in the office, there was a cryotherapy place right next door. And I was like, wow. That's neat. You know, have you seen have you done this before? Like No. So there's this idea of cold therapy where that if you if you bang your knee on on a table, you put ice on it, right, to reduce swelling, to reduce inflammation. And we know a lot of athletes and performers, they the answer is they they take ice baths like like Michael Phelps because it lowers inflammation, helps them recover better. So there's these cryo chambers or I mean, in most major cities at spas where you could go into this nitrogen chamber, and it go brings it down to negative 200, negative 240 degrees, and you're in there in your underwear, basically. So won't that kill you right away? No. You're you're you're safe. It's it's safe. I mean, I get But if I go into a water that's 200 degrees, I'm gonna go into I feel like my body's gonna go into shock within 40 seconds. Right. Well, that'd be pretty yeah. I mean, it'll be ice, but it so what I'm saying is, like, there's people like Wim Hof, right, who go in regularly in these in these ice, you know, in the Arctic and stuff like that, and they go swimming under it's crazy. It's insane. But, anyway, there's there's these closely monitored, spas that they have these cryo chambers. And you go in, and you're in there for 90 seconds to 3 minutes max, and it's cold. It's negative 200, negative 240 degrees. But the idea here is it's like a nerve nervous system reset. It helps you lower inflammation and recover better and all these other benefits. The reason why I I'm bringing this up is because the last 30 seconds for me is very it's it's difficult, and I wanna leave. And you obviously have the option to leave at any time, but I push myself because for me, grit is like a muscle. And, that because when you because how we do anything is how we do everything, generally. And I wanna build that muscle because that will show up in other areas of my life. And so whenever you push yourself in certain ways, to get more out of yourself, you tend to do that in other areas when you need it the most. And so growth, grit. But by the way, just on just on that point, I noticed and and and I'm saying this in a positive way. You use, a lot of really great cliches. Mhmm. So, like, how we do everything is how we do anything, or or how we do anything is how we do everything. That's something that's been said, you know, a million before. It's in lots of books. And I'm not criticizing you saying that. I actually think, actually, it's a great way. There's a reason something's a cliche. It actually be it's a great way to learn a valuable life lesson. Because there's a there's, like, all cliches. There's a truth to it. And so I'm I'm stating it more that so that we don't see, I think there's a difference between dabbling in something and really be becoming more on this path to, for lack of better word, mastery. Right? I feel like a lot of lots of times, people have listened to this show, other shows, and they could repeat a lot of what the expert could say because they've heard it somewhere before. But I feel like we don't really that that so we do our a disservice to ourselves if we kind of kind of overlook the fundamentals. And for for me, in terms of high performance and when it comes to accelerating people's learning and learning things in a fraction of time, I feel like it comes back to the real to the basics in terms of the things that are gonna move the needle the most, with the kind of results we wanna be able to get. But a lot of times, people always wanna know the new thing, the new thing, the new thing. And for me, the old thing is always the new thing. I I agree with that. So so so so growth So we have the 4 g's I'm I'm talking about. So my my my my main point in bringing this up is people could listen to podcast even if they've heard it before. Maybe they listen to it in a different way or deeper way and really think because I feel like if people aren't doing it, they they don't they don't or if they if they can't do it, that they can't they don't really understand unless they're doing it. Well well, I think that's really true, and it's it's so interesting. So I did give a a a talk related to this once. I was at a conference, and everybody was talking about content marketing, which is this idea that, oh, you shouldn't just put up an ad. You should write about what your brand means and what your company's motivation and vision is. And I said, that doesn't actually work. Like, you have to actually do things that show you're living the example of what you're of what you believe in. You can't just write about it because then it's just theory, then it's just words. So so and that's related to the grit. Like, you can't say you you, Jim Quicks, can't say, being in cold helps your life unless you have the grit to go through this. And the the 2 things I'll I'll bring up because, I I dropped these names for the purpose of if I mentioned John Smith, a lot of people wouldn't necessarily doesn't put a picture in people's minds, but a lot of memory has to do with triggers And that that's a lot of what my memory training is based on, controlling triggers. And triggers is a very important element in creating new habits because there's 3 parts to creating new habits or breaking habits. You're talking about you have this behavior that you wanna create, and this new habit. Let's say you wanna read 20 minutes a day or you wanna journal or you wanna meditate or whatever it is. According to doctor BJ Fogg, ATS does 3 parts. They call it BMAT. So b is behavior, m is motivation, a is the ability, and then t is the trigger. And so so motivation, ability, the trigger. And so in order to be able to change a habit, you need the motivation to want that. Right? Because if you're not motivated to do it if your motivation is 0, 0 times anything is gonna be 0, so there's not gonna be a big change. And, again, I think motivation just just to kinda relate it back, I think that's gonna be a lot related a lot to does this kind of, satisfy some of this life, love, lessons Right. Idea. If it's relevant to us or to a problem that we are suffering from or to a value that we have, because a lot of things going back to school, sine, cosine, x, tangent, hypotenuse, y, most people aren't gonna remember that or the periodic table or anything because it had no relevance to them. And and I I would've just encouraged people listening to this because I I think motivation for a lot of people, particularly young people, and I know this was a motivation for me, is simply money. I need money to afford things that I wanna buy or to or to not worry or to protect my family. I think the motivation's gotta be one level higher than that at least, and it's worth thinking about at least. Even if your motivation is money, at least think about what motivations might exist higher for you. And I think there's certain things we could do psychologically to enhance our level of motivation. But like what? So even putting a number to it, like I just happen to do unconsciously and saying if your motivation happens to be 0, we could always do it in a self assessment. Like, what's my motivation to read this book today? And it happens to be a 4. You know? And I I could think about, well, what would I need to do inside my mind or outside in the world, either my perception of it or my procedure on the outside to be able to make it a 6? Just jump it up 2 points. I would say, okay. Maybe I'll give myself this reward if I read this book, or maybe if I read this book, I'll be able to do this and really feeling it, and it increases my inherent motivation. When I the reason I bring up motivation is because it's motivation is like a state. It's like a mood, right, of our mind and body. It's like a little snapshot because it's always in flux. It could go from 0 to 10 or whatever. The reason I bring it up is because I find that I could get results with anybody as long as they have 2 qualities, that they are motivated and that they are teachable. Meaning that, and this is whether you're a parent or you're a teacher or you're a coach, the same thing applies because you can't you can't help somebody teach them how to speed read or do learn a language, whatever it is, if they're not motivated to do so. And but even if their motivation was 10 out of 10, if their teachability or their open mindedness was 0, right, they're not willing to learn new things because they feel like they already know it. Oh, I've been in sales for 40 years and, you know, so what am I gonna learn from you kind of thing? Then teachability, if it happens to be 0, 0 times 10 is still 0. Right? But on the opposite, it happens to be if someone's very teachable, maybe 10 out of 10, but their motivation is 0, then they're not gonna get the results. So I can't make someone more teachable. I can't motivate somebody inherently because they they need some kind something more intrinsic. But if to the people who have those those qualities, I feel like I could grow them. But going back to the 4 g's, so we talk about growth mindset Oh, no. Go back to BMAT. We're we're we're in the middle of, like, 16, acronyms. But but BMAT, And the whole thing with a lot of teaching styles in terms of parables and open loops, we open loops so people wanna know what the answer is. But so the last so m is motivation. A is ability. So let's say you want the new habit to be flossing your teeth. You need the ability to know how to floss your teeth. Right? If you're able to read, you need to be literate. Oh, let me ask you about this, though. Let's say I wanna be in better shape, and the the sport I love the most is tennis. I'm just making this up. And so I'm motivated to play a lot of tennis to get in better shape. But I'm 50 years old, so I'm not gonna have the ability that a 18 year old would have. Right. And and that's that then that's true for any kind of skill development. Am I too late to do BMAT? So BMAT is is universal. It's it's like gravity. It it applies for anything. So if you have the ability obviously, everyone's abilities range because of different ages, different genetics, different, you know, abilities, nature and nurture and such. But, I mean so everybody I have a belief when we're going back to growth that everyone has the ability. Like, if you take anybody regardless of their age or whatever, you put them on a wellness program and they're they're moving and such, they're gonna make growth. Right? They're gonna make progress. But let let me do a counterexample, which is like The Beatles. So The Beatles were teenagers. They they, played music. So they they they wanted to be better musicians, and they were motivated by music. They loved it. The re they they may or may not have had the ability, but they had the time to put in those so called 10000 hours, which many adults, after they get kids and jobs and mortgages, don't have that time. Right. I mean, that and that's one of the reasons why they say children are such fast learners. You know, they become in languages or musical instruments faster. But in actuality, the new part of it is besides them having a natural wonder and not being filled in terms of their teacup, you know, not knowing what they, you know, and what they know is, is they have a lot of time, children do, compared to an adult. Right. So now so now someone listening to this is thinking, well, I have a mortgage. I have kids. Yeah. I gotta pick them up after school. I gotta do this. I gotta do that. How am I gonna work on my ability? Right. Okay. So not everyone is equal in terms of their income. Not everyone's equal in their network. Not everyone's equal, you know, with their education level and everything else like that. But what we all are equal to is we all have 24 hours in a day and our how people spend, invest their time people's time in terms of where they put their attention expresses their their values. Right? Because we can be very creative going back to I don't believe that there's time management as much as it is managing our priorities. What's most important to us. Like, for you, we're talking about love and we're talking about life and we're talking about learning, right, our lessons and such. I'm saying that if people aren't scheduling time to increase their abilities, then if they if people can't find an hour a day, then they're doing something. I feel like they're they need to reevaluate how they're investing their time. So so it's interesting because it's not necessarily about mastery. It's about direction. So if you put in that hour a day, you're gonna the direction is gonna be upwards whether or not you become the Beatles or not. I think practice I think practice makes progress. Right. And so I think that would be the goal. I think we're happiest when we see progress in our life, whether it's in our health, it's in our relationships, it's in our finances, or anything. And so but it takes time and investment of time, focus, capital. When I talk about focus, I mean, just imagine going outside and you have a magnifying glass and, you know, what you know, when you were kids, you used to burn, like, leaves and some people burn ants and stuff like that. But when you when you when you see that you see that focal point. Sister and eye. So you when you're doing that, it becomes very bright. Right? When light goes through a magnifying glass, you have this very bright focal point. But and it's interesting because the we use the word bright to describe people who are very intelligent and very smart. Right? They're bright. But maybe they're not smarter than you. Maybe it's just they're better focused. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And I think that that's a lot of power. And so that's why going back to multitasking, I feel like it doesn't work. But I would say that the people invest in their abilities. And the last thing is the t in the BMAT, according to BJ Fogg, is trigger. That in order to, enforce a habit, you need something, an external trigger, to remind you to do it. And that's how memory really works. Right? The idea here like, for example, a common time management protocol is is is called the the Pomodoro technique, which is basically saying they did studies with people and found out their focus takes a dive after 25 to 30 minutes. That pretty much you could watch an episode of, you know, your favorite TV show and then it's pretty much your focus is not there. And so the Pomodoro Technique is basically taking your your your smartphone and sending an alarm for 30 to 45 minutes, and when the alarm goes off, you get up and you take 5 minutes and you just, you know, you move around, you take some deep breaths, you get some you hydrate, you know, you you refresh yourself and you come back, and you're gonna be more productive. And the reason why you wanna do this I'll give you a couple couple more reasons why you want to do it besides the fact that you lose focus after a certain amount of time, is that in in memory training, we know that cramming doesn't work. That if you cram for 8 hours a day without a break, 8 hours straight, it's not gonna be anywhere near as effective as if you took a break every 45 minutes to an hour because, there's this this phenomenon called primacy and recency. Primacy says you tend to remember things in the beginning of something. Recency means you tend to remember something at the end. So, for example, James, you go to a c**ktail party. Right? And you meet maybe they're all new people at the party. You'll remember primacy says you'll remember people in the beginning at the party. Recency says you'll remember the last people you met at the party, more recent. Right? Prime meaning first beginning. And that you tend to forget the people at the end and mean in the middle. And so there's this big dip unless somebody stands out or they're emotional, like, something that stands out in in meeting them. Same thing with a list. If I give you a list of 30 words to memorize, you'll probably remember the beginning words and the end words unless there were some words in the middle that stood out. So there's this big gap, and dip. So, like, if you study for 8 hours without a break, it's like you remember stuff in the beginning, and then you remember stuff at the end. But in the middle, you forget. So you wanna give yourself a lot of beginnings and memories? So you do you create these 30 minute breaks or 45 minute breaks in between, then you create a lot of more beginnings and ends, primacy and recency, so you pick up a lot more content. And so that's just in terms of studying techniques, you know, it's one of the one of the better things you could do. So so this is great, this this BIMA, and this was under the topic of of of grit, basically. Of creating new habits. So, I mean, everything comes down to the the whole here's the cliche quote. Right? First first, you create your habits and then your habits create you. Right? First, you create your habits and then I haven't heard that cliche before, but it sounds good. There you go. And so, I I we did, we did 2 dedicated episodes on how to create new habits and then how to break old habits because it's a little bit different process because planting a tree is a very specific process, but tearing that tree out is something that's different. And so I think it's it's important for everyone to understand their habits. But going back to the 4 g's, you have growth mindset, you have a grit mindset. And going back to to grit specifically, what I was gonna mention about dropping the names, a couple of years ago, there was a big, boxing match, Mayweather and Pacquiao. Right? And I'm not a big boxing fan, but I like the highest level of competition because I like to learn and see what excellence is and champions and stuff. And I get this phone call from Sylvester Stallone saying, Jim, do you wanna watch the the boxing match at my place? And I'm like, I totally wanna do that. How okay. Just time out, break. How does Sylvester Stallone say to himself, I'm gonna have a, I'm gonna watch boxing on TV. Who should I watch it with? Should I call up Al Pacino, or should I call up Jim Kwik? How does he think I'm calling Jim Kwik. Screw Al. So He was so annoying at the last boxing match. So I think Al, he made my I probably was low on the on the list of invitations because there are a lot of it was kinda interesting room. So I was sitting on the couch, and we're watching the the the match. Right? You're not answering the couch. I am. I am. I am. So to my left on the couch was Stallone, and to his left was, sorry, was was Stallone. And to his left was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Right? So the last people did get invites. I was probably the last person on on this list. And if you honestly, if you took a picture of that couch, people would be like, who photoshopped that Asian dude in that photo? Well, how do they think to call you at all for a boxing match that he's called? He's with Arnold Schwarzenegger and, I don't know, Boris Becker and whoever. Let's also call Jim Kwik. Boris Becker is Of course. That's the only tennis name I could think of. Right. So, we had we had just had dinner that week, and we were talking about this match. So it just it was it was topical. But, and people actually see it. On Instagram, there's a picture of of there's an interesting photo of of me and Sly. But going back to my lesson and going on grit, afterwards seeing the match, right, I I went to the 2 of them. I was like, these 2 champions battling it out. It's amazing. $300,000,000. I mean, the highest level of competition. What does it take to be a champion? And, I always remember what Arnold said because he said, Jim, this is the key. He's like, the difference between an amateur and a champion is the champion is willing to push past the pain period. And that for me is, like, a great definition of grit. Right? Because in order to grow a muscle, it's like you don't wanna do like, the first 5 or 6 or whatever just warms up the muscle, does nothing for you, but it's the ones that you least wanna do that you're gonna get the most benefit from. And it's kind of like life. Right? I mean, they say that that the quality of our life is comes down to our ability to have difficult conversations and do the hard stuff, you know, so then our life is easier and such. And so that was that was very that was very telling for me because I've noticed the parallel between that in business and that in health. In order to accomplish anything, you have these problems that come up and and There's there's something else in that quote too, which is very interesting, which is that the pain period begins long before your ability ends because your brain, as soon as it feels a little bit of pain, is like, uh-oh. What's happening? Shut everything down while we figure this out. And so, when I had a podcast with Jesse Itzler, and this is over a year about a year and a half ago, he wrote a book Living with a Seal. A Seal was training him. You know, I won't go into the all the specifics of of his thing. But one thing he said was, at the moment where you feel, I can't do this anymore, from that moment, you can do at least 40% more. And that's just the brain and body at work. And I find the people that are involved in certain levels I'm not just saying in Hollywood and whether it's technology and relationships and physical performance and fitness like the seals, they have an acute awareness, self awareness, meaning they understand what motivates them. They understand pain and pleasure. Because I'll tell you, actually, when I was talking to Stallone, I was saying, hey. I have this potential gig. I was telling him he was like, where are you speaking next? And I was saying, oh, this thing in Dubai, and that you know, I was telling him about projects. And I was like, do you think I should do that? And, and he was like and this is what what Stallone said. He said he said, Jim, will the, will the pleasure outweigh the the pain? And, and that was interesting because that was another, like, mark on pain. Right? Because he was acutely sensitive to it. He's like, will the will the pleasure be worth the pain? So so the pain is like sort of traveling, being away with friends, away from friends, just all the annoyances, and the pleasure is whatever you decide. Exactly. And then, I mean, coming back to discipline and and I that's why I think it's so important to have routines. Like, I have my morning routine and I have my evening routine for the same reason we were talking about before about not having to suffer from decision fatigue. So the first hour, I literally don't have to put any thought into because it's so set up for me to just, you know, to light up my brain and to win all the time. But I think that this at the beginning, it took more discipline and willpower until it became a habit and it became unconscious. So, you know, for people listening Building your grip muscle. Exactly. And putting myself in situations where you you get comfortable being uncomfortable because that's ultimately where we're gonna grow the most. So growth, grit, and last 2 g's, for mindset, I would say, a giving mindset. Giving meaning that it's not just about me. It's about we Because I think the whole reason to grow is because you have allows you to have more to give. And this is related to what we were talking about earlier with motivation. Like, make sure it's about something a little bit more meaningful than as important as money is, by the way. Because I'm I'm not saying money is not important. It's extremely important to live in this society. But to succeed, you have to have the we in there more than the me or just as much the pain. Even even even when it comes to giving, I feel like that everything in nature grows and gives. Right? Everything in nature is green and it grows, or it's brown and it rots. And everything in nature also has to give back to the rest of the ecology. And if it's not, then it gets eliminated. Right? And I just feel like that we don't give to get. We give because it's who we are. And I feel like Actually, let me understand that. Like, is it does a leaf give I I'm an idiot. Right? So so does a leaf give to ecology? It does. Oxygen through photosynthesis. Okay. Does a a c**kroach give to ecology? I'm I'm sure, like, we lost all the bees or something in society, like, everything. There's a consequence because it's all systems. Everything is this whole butterfly effect literally, I'm using butterflies to explain the butterfly effect, but the whole butterfly effect is this idea where a butterfly flapping its wings in Los Angeles could create a tsunami, you know, across the country because everything is is dynamic systems. But my my point in bringing this up and giving is because we'll do more sometimes for other people than we will for ourselves. And I just feel like as long as we're growing, we're filling up our teacups so we have more to be able to give to somebody else. The other reason why I bring this up is from an accelerated learning standpoint. I think it's very important for people to listen to these shows, to listen to your show when they do, and then think about somebody that they wanna pass this knowledge on to, like teach it and coach, mentor somebody in this area. Because if somebody wants to learn something faster, learn it with the intention of teaching it to somebody else, and that will double your your effectiveness. Because when you learn to teach, you're paying attention differently. You're taking notes differently. You're making it your own. And, here's the tweetable. This is mine. When you went I like going to teach is tweetable. Yeah. I mean, when oh, well, here's an even better one. When I teach something, I get to learn it twice. When I teach something, I get to learn it twice at jimquick, k w I k, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm gonna take credit for myself. But here's the thing. But the but that's the intention, though. Like, we learn like, let me we, you know, we grow up, James, hearing this phrase that said, those who can't do, teach. Right? And if you can't do business, you teach business in business school. But when I learned this stuff, I I I was very ignorant. I actually didn't think it was a negative. I was like, wow. If I can't do something, let me teach it. And then if I teach it, I could do it. And that was my I that's my thought process. But I would learn with the intention of teaching. Is still doing. Right. And and so going back to giving, I feel like that everyone here would be able to learn even faster rate if you learn with the purpose of giving. That's why I launched the podcast a few months ago is because I was thinking, like, oh, how can I democratize this information in really 10, 15 minute, you know, brain hacks and make it free for everybody? Right? That was our way of just giving back to our community. And then finally, the 4th g, I would say, in, like, this kind of superhero mindset is first, you know, you're growing. You have grit grit mindset. You're giving, and then gratitude. Right? And that's kind of the elusive obvious. But I feel like that we can success you can only really build on success. And so but I feel like we can only have the things that we're most appreciative for. And if anyone really But I feel like there's, like, a lazy way to do gratitude and, more difficult way. And, like, it's easy for someone to kinda look out at the sunset and say, oh, I'm so happy to be here. Like, what's what's real gratitude? What's hard gratitude? Yeah. I mean, I would say active gratitude, just like active giving because anyone could just have the spirit of giving and not do it. I think the actual act of it so for example, a lot of people have a vision board. Right? You know, vision board is that thing with that little collage that you make on on poster board where you cut out, you know, pictures out of magazines of things you wanna be, do, have, share places you wanna live and vacation and clean your car, all that stuff. Vision board. Right? And you could take the invisible, make it visible. For me, I have I literally have a gratitude board, and a gratitude board is this all the things that I've already have in my life that I'm just really grateful for all in one board that I could look at and I could feel it, and that's more active because it took time to put that together. And as I achieve things that are on my goal list or my bucket list, I could put those things on my gratitude board. And if anyone wants to feel instantly more wealthy, it's literally I would just make a list and count all the things you have that money can't buy. I mean, if you're listening to the show right now and you have the capacity to hear and the process, you know, the ability to talk, the ability to see your senses, I mean, gratitude had a most if you if you have your health in any kind of way like, even when I was very sick with my sleeping challenge, they they they have this phrase that says, a healthy person has a 1,000 dreams, but an unhealthy person has only one dream. You know, that's why I think self care I just put that on Twitter. It's like self self love and self care is not selfish. I just feel like self care is so important nowadays because we're under an immense amount of stress, and a lot of us you know, in in what in what ways are people really nurturing themselves and taking getting the right sleep, getting the right food? Because it's you know, and that helps to build grit. Right? It helps to build resilience by, you know, investing in our own physical and emotional health. It it's really true. And this is, you know, there's, there's a line from the Yoga Sutras written in 350 BC that the it's it's one line, and it's the nine reasons why somebody might have, difficulty getting enlightenment. So whether or not you believe enlightenment, that's what was believed in 350 BC. But the first thing that on this list is sickness. Like, so you have to basically focus. People don't think, oh, how what's health related to, you know, spirituality, religion, or mental health, or whatever? You have to be physically healthy to have the energy to do all these other great things in life. You only have one life, and it's fueled only by your energy, the energy of your body. Yeah. And I noticed that when it comes to gratitude in terms of that vibration, it helps it's helped me through a lot of when I so active gratitude is so how I get on my stage fright is doing that process before I go on stage. I'll actually focus on a handful of people and reassociate myself to thinking like success stories, people that I've helped, and just like that because when I put my focus on them, then I can't be focused on myself being scared. I see. So let's say you're about to go out and speak in front of a 1000 people, and you're thinking, oh my god. I might not do well. I might not, respond to what I'm saying. Or do what do you you think of maybe the woman with the who read the 30 books? Do you think of those first And those are the things. And I and I literally changed and I also just, put this on Instagram, you know, yesterday was, that one of the one of the greatest Are you digital shaming me? This is one of the, one of the great, like, brain gratitude hacks there were. Like, for me, it's just I changed my I got to to I get to. So instead of saying I got to give this presentation, I got to work out, I got to pick up the kids, I got to read this book, or whatever, I just change it to I get to. Right? I get to pick up the kids. I get to speak on stage. I get to work out. I get to and it changes. It's, like, so subtle. It's changing the the o in got to the, you know, the e in get, and it just changes the meaning, and it changes the feelings I have. And if if we talked about before that people aren't logical, they're biological, and they're emotional, it changes, you know, and all learning is state dependent. And that's one of the reasons why we don't learn a lot. You know, we have to have that inherent motivation and those feelings. That I think that success, I called h cube, goes from your head to your heart to your hands, that you could affirm things in your head. You could visualize things in your head. You set goals in your head. But if you're not acting with your hands, nothing changes. Right? But, usually, what's missing is that second h, which is your heart, the emotion. Right? I think that's really true. I think, again, what I've noticed you you asked me earlier what changed after I started giving things away. And and, really, this process started much earlier than that. That was sort of the end of the process. But what really changed for me was that I started feeling a lot more things in my heart Mhmm. On my daily activities and decisions. Much like you would say, Tony Hsieh, because he's only wearing the same shirt, he can focus more on the things that affect his heart as opposed to, like, what shirt he should wear doesn't really affect, for him, his heart. Right. And people could declutter all that, and and it gives you more in terms of what's most essential. So so we've we've we've covered a lot, and I kinda wanna piece it together. You know, there's the 6 hats, the 4 g's, BMAT. There's there's there's all these things. I do think, everything kind of stems from what I'm now gonna call the 3 l's, love, life, and lessons. And, basically, you know, you're only given one life, and this is what you should do with it is growth, grit, giving gratitude. Here's how you get grit. Here's how you get gratitude. Here's how you build the growth mindset. You know, all of these things are are kind of connected all to this love, life, and lessons. Your your heart, how can you improve your life, and the lessons that you can either learn or, as you say, teach because you'll learn twice as you teach. Very much so. I I think if, you know, for parting on the like, I like frameworks. Right? Because once people have those distinctions, they could start kinda carving out the world or their model of the world into it and start filtering by it saying, like, how much even when I talked about in the prior episode about the 10 keys for, you know, locking your superior brain, it allows you to see the areas that you're neglecting by putting a name to it, and I think that's important. But, ultimately Absolutely. Which is why, which is why, again, I wasn't critical of the cliches. I think I think, actually, if all you did out of this episode was to take any one of these cliches and just think about it for a couple of hours, it would be immensely valuable. Because I've used the I I I, the I got to change it to I get to. I've used that, and it's incredibly valuable. Yeah. And it's so simple. And that's the thing going back to dabblers. Like, people could listen to something, and what I would love for people is to hear something because we know that common sense is not always common practice, that the little things can make the biggest difference. But I would I would encourage everyone who's listening to this is to take one or 2 ideas, you know, out of this conversation. Just employ it because knowledge is not power. Knowledge is only potential power. It only becomes useful when we're actually applying and taking action on it. So let me ask you this. You deal with so many peak performers. Like, you've mentioned a couple of Mhmm. You know, celebrity clients or friends or whatever. What do you they they already have gone through all of this. That's why we know that's why everybody in the country knows their name. Right. So everybody knows who, Jim Carrey is, for instance. By the time you've met him, by the time you've mentioned him, what do you see in someone like that? Or or like you mentioned the story about Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. But what do you see as that kind of final leg of peak performance that keeps them at a high level? Is it is it a persona that they they keep feeding? Or what is it? Okay. So I I like to reverse engineer this a lot, you know, because I get, a lot of feedback. And so when I'm so, for example, with Jim Carrey, I was coaching him. He had called me up and said, Jim, I am I'm I'm gonna be in Dumb and Dumber. I wanna get smart. I wanna get super smart before Dumb and Dumber. And we're in his kitchen, and we're making guacamole. And it was me and him, and it was, Eckhart Tolle, which is a real Are you kidding me? Interesting mix. What the hell is Eckhart Tolle doing in there? Jim Carrey is very interested in a lot of his transformation work, and and so it just happens to be there. And, and I'm talking to him. Called up Eckhart Tolle who lived in Vancouver, and Eckhart Tolle flew down. I didn't call up Eckhart Tolle. No. He did. He called Eckhart Tolle and Jim quick. This is I when's Dumb and Dumber? 1994? He called or no. No. No. It must have been a little later. This was the second Dumb and Dumber. Okay. So so he calls up Eckertolli, who sold 7,000,000 copies of The Power of Now, and and Jim Kwik, and you both guys are both in his kitchen. And we're making guacamole. Is Eckertolli a great guy? He's he's a good he's a good guy. The Power Power of Now. So just Excellent book. I love the book. Right. And so and I I talk a lot about presence, and we had a concrete conversation about presence and how to remember names. And I think people I think the art of memory actually is the art of presence and the art of attention, and that's what a lot of, you know, my training is based on. Anyway, but in terms of my takeaway, you know, you're you're asking, like, what is how do these people get to this level and what are the you know, what they value and what's the difference? And I would say for him, his motivation, I wanted to know what his motivation was on Jim Carrey specifically. Like, why is he acting like a fool in all his movies and doing that? Like, and does any concern how people look at him and everything? And he's actually says he said, Jim, it's the exact opposite. He's like, I could be, you know, an ace Ventura pet detective, and I can act like a complete spaz because I feel like that if I could act like that or in living color and I could be totally extreme, unconsciously, I'm giving other people who are watching, you know, the audience that's watching and giving them them the permission to just be themselves. And he said his driving force he thinks the biggest challenge that we all have as a community is, just, you know, in this world is that we have to, we're so concerned about the feelings and how people perceived us, you know, our peers and everything, and we tend to fall to the level of other people's expectations, you know, of us. And he says, my my goal, my mission has always been to help, and his exact words, free people from concern. That that's his religion. He wants to free people from concern, and he does it through his art of stand up and television and, you know, movies and stuff like that where he could play an extreme character and act completely crazy or dumb and dumber or a liar or whatever it happens to the movie in the movie. And by doing so, he gives people permission just to be themselves. So it's interesting because sometimes it's scripted where he's playing an actor, you know, he's playing a role, where where it gives that permission. And sometimes it's his own act where he's writing and being a comedian, where he has to figure out what those concerns are so he can play the role of someone who is maybe blindly unconcerned and still surviving, and so the audience can see and laugh. The laugh is sort of the release of that tension of concern. It's very, very much so. And I'd be interested just, you know, as a I don't know if I what I what I'd be doing. This is the only thing that I've, you know, been doing my whole, like, kinda career, but it's interesting to see actors play these different roles. Like, when I was on set with Will Smith, he he was filming from 6 PM to 6 AM, you know, every night. And I was like, how do you how do you do that? Like, how do you just, like you know, like, in the entertainment industry, it's always hurry up to wait. You know, that's the catchphrase. It's like you have to hurry up to get on set, and you just sit there and wait all the time. I was like, you know, how do you just wait there until 3 o'clock in the morning till they call you when it's your turn? And how do you get prepared, and how do you, you know, get ready? He's like, Jim these exact words. He's like, Jim, I don't have to get ready. I stay ready. I'm like, oh, shoot. That's that's really bada*s. Like, is that So so break it down. What does that mean? So for him like, for me, you could wake me up at 4 o'clock in the morning and just ask me about my morning routine, my sleep because I live I live what I what I teach. Right? Because there's a level of congruency, and I find that it's really the people that have prepared the most. Because I feel like a lot of success is preparation like you. Like, you have guests on, but you you study their work. You are online watching my other interviews and reading the books and all that. You know, that homework makes a big difference, and it shows up. And I feel like Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I feel like for him, he's just he's so determined. Right? He has this thing where I was like, how do you keep yourself active? He was like, what? And he's like, Jim, he was like, physically and mentally active? He's like, every day, I run and I read. I'm like, that's interesting. Like, it makes, like metaphorically, it's not just running. You know? It's just something physical, something mental every single day to keep me myself in shape. That's why I think it's a difference because, you know, people attribute me to helping boost their mental intelligence. People have facts figured, like, all that stuff at at their mental fingertips. But I think more important than what I do than help people become mentally intelligent is become mentally fit. Like, I've had students that I've seen that And that's the stay ready part. That that's the like, this this woman, she called me up at the office. She said, I love you. I love you. I love you. I'm like, woah. I'm like, who's this? She was like, I went through your your online memory course, and I was just like and we thought I'd have a quick story for you. I was like and I found out she told me a story where her grandmother gave her this family heirloom as a necklace, and it was given to her. Not her mother, not her 3 sisters. It was given to her, and she was entrusted with it to protect and and, you know, for the family. And she hid it in her home. And, have you ever hid something so well, you come with a password that's so clever and you just you it's so clever you don't even remember what it is. So she hid it, and she couldn't find it. For a year goes by, 2 years go by, 3 years go by, and she thought it was stolen. It was lost forever. She got so much grief from her family, and she felt so bad holding on to all his angst. A few a couple weeks after going through our program, she woke up in the middle of the night, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning. She ran down 2 flights of stairs. She goes behind the boiler into this little crevice cake. Like, it pulls out, like, the necklace. And I was like, well, in that program, we don't teach you how to find misplaced objects. She was like, Jim, I don't know what it is. It's just going through this. I'm starting to remember names. I'm learning this language. I'm learning this. It's like So she's waking up parts of her brain. She just because it's the difference like, you have a personal trainer. Right? And what is a personal trainer's job? It's to make you physically sharper, faster, stronger, more energized, flexible, and everything. But that's that's what I do. I'm a personal fitness coach for your, you know, for your brain. Right. It's not like you're just, it's not like the per the personal trainer is just making you lift a £100. It's actually making you stronger for every area of your life. Exactly. And that's how I describe, like, people ask all the time, what do I do? You know, and our mutual friend, Clay Baer, who talks about Who? Who? Clay? Who? Clay? Hey Baer? He's in the room, so we're we're making fun of him. So he, so he has this, you know, 6 word process that I think is genius. He keynoted at one of our events, our superhero brain event, and his superpower was talking about clarity. And he's like, this makes so much sense. Like, you introduce yourself how many times a day, and he says, like, how many of you actually have a design process for, you know, creating something that's interesting and fascinating to, you know, keep the conversation going as opposed to just kinda going off and spending a minute and using buzzwords and everything. And so for me, my my six word intro is just something simple. It's like, you know, I I I build better brains. You know? I build better, brighter brains. And it's just like, oh, well, what's that? And then they start talking about it's a nice intro. And so for for me, that's what I feel like I am. I I just like people wanna be physically sharper, faster, energized, flexible. That's what I do for your brains. I make your brains sharper, faster, more fit, stronger, more powerful, more energized, clear the brain fog, have clarity, flexibility, agility, and that's what I that's my passion. Going back to whether it's, the Will Smiths or Jim Carreyes or whatever, I I'll tell you the highest performers, whether it's Branson or anybody. They have a a superpower of self awareness, and I would I would end with this that if we are too abstract and go at a meta level, then I find that the most successful people and the most fulfilled people, they it's funny, James, because I'm just talking to you. I'm just kinda processing it. I feel like they have 2 things, that it takes you wanna know who you are, and you wanna be who you are. And this maybe wraps up our whole conversation here where you need you need to have the curiosity to know yourself, really be fascinated with yourself, like, know yourself, and then have the courage to really be yourself. And, you know, I feel like, gosh, Jim, I kinda wanna do another 2 hour podcast just about those 2 things because I feel like it took me a really long time. And I and it's a process, so I can't say I know who I am. It's a process. It's it's it's, practice makes progress as opposed to practicing as perfect. Knowing who you are is really hard. It is. And and then being who you are is harder. It is. Because it's scary. You can't nobody really is who they are. Because in every setting, you you put on a slightly different persona, but you're trying to make each persona as close as possible to who you really are. And I noticed also it takes up energy too. Right? Like, we have this energy body of, like, who we wanna project in the world, and this kinda brings everything we've talked about in this conversation together. When we're talking about, Facebook depression, everyone who puts a highlight reel, a trailer of what's amazing, and they have we have all that we put a lot of energy in terms of how we wanna be perceived. And I feel like we put energy into a place where it's our insecurities. So we have this ideal self that we put energy in and how we want the world to see us, and we have this another energy body of of our insecurities and our fears and what we're scared of, like, who we are afraid of being, or people seeing. And then there's our real self. And I feel like if people feel depleted and they feel like they're are don't have the energy, anymore, they're exhausted, maybe just trying to carry around those bodies, and using you know, because it takes a charge and energy. But knowing yourself is kind of like what you were talking about. It's like our truth. It's like when we were kids, like, who do who determined who we are? Like, even when people set goals, I think a lot of people set goals for things they don't really want, you know, because it's goals that are set unconsciously by, you know, their parents or their family or their or the Joneses or their colleague. You know what I mean? They're they're pursuing things that's not their truth. But that's true. And at the same time, and this is what I always tell people, list the things you really enjoyed from the ages of 6 to 14. Mhmm. Because often those things will age in their own way with you. So for instance, you might have loved comic books between the ages of 6 to 14 among many other things. You love tennis. You love comic books, all other things, but that's on your list. And so now when you are older, it's like your whole story almost could be described in terms of, like, a comic book analogy, and you work with, you know, on those types of, you know, actor with those types of actors and movies and so on. So it's really that it's not like you're a superhero. It's like but your your interest and passions and loves now as a much older person have are are just an evolution of what you loved as a 6 year old. I love that. So it's very interesting. So the last so for before I ask the last question, which might even be a meaningless question for most people. But before I ask the last question, a, I just wanna mention there's gonna be a great excuse to have you on the podcast again because I know you mentioned earlier you're writing an un an as yet untitled book. So when do you think that book will finally come out? Next year. 20. Next year. So we're we're we're looking towards next year having you back on. And, how can people find you right now? Because I wanna I wanna I appreciate it. Find you. Well, I would I would welcome everyone to listen to my new podcast. I I wanna learn everything that you're doing because you're one of the most admired people, you know, in the space, And so congratulations on that. Thank you. It's called Kwikbrain, k w I k brain. People who go to quickbrain.com, or find it on Stitcher or Itunes or whatever. Every podcast is only 10 or 15 minutes long. It's basically brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. So there's an episode on how to read a book a week without speed reading. There's a book an episode on how to remember everyone's name. There's an episode on learning languages. There's an episode on my top ten favorite brain foods, an episode on how to change your habits and how to break old habits. And it's, it's a it's a fun show. It's just me riffing on one thing that's gonna make a measurable difference in people's lives. So that's, that's the podcast. I am definitely gonna start listening to it. And then social media. No social media shaming, but I would I'm just very active on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and it's all at Jim Kwik, kitty boy. K. And I would love, actually, if people could, get share their big ahas and tag, James and myself on social media. I would love love to know, like, your big from this conversation, if there was something that was there, that just was stood out for you. And I would also love, I'm traveling a lot. I would love any good book recommendations. So if anyone who's listening to this wants to share, like, your favorite reads right now, I'm very curious. That's actually how I bonded with Elon Musk. And I never talk about this, but we we bonded over sci fi books. And I'm a big advocate. I I never used to read fiction books, for a long time because I didn't have time read, you know, the nonfiction books I had to for school and personal growth. But I find that, I was reading a lot the past few years on the power of reading fiction. It builds your imagination. Is is fiction's great, and I'll tell you why from my perspective, and I'd love to hear a lot of us favorite science fiction books. Fiction's great because it's written by the best writers. Mhmm. So nonfiction, almost by definition, is not written by the best writers. It's written by the best of what they're writing about. So, Andre Gasset is not gonna be the best writer about tennis. He's the best tennis player writing. So so there's a big difference. The the fiction is actually by people who've mastered the craft of writing. Yeah. That's very true. His biography, by the way, is amazing. Yeah. And so I would say that from for me, fiction reading is enjoyable. It improves your imagination, but it also has been shown to increase emotional intelligence, especially in the area of empathy. And when you're reading books with, stories and characters, it it gives you a level of empathy and that, higher degree of emotional intelligence. What what was what was Elon Musk's favorite science fiction book? We weren't talking about favorite. Well, except we were talking we we were bonding over, at the time, going deep in in a book called Ender's Game. Oh, yeah. Ender's Game is great. And Or Boris and Scott Card. Yeah. And they were talking about this is before the film Much better than the movie. Right. Exactly. But it so I I would encourage people to but, going back to the social media, I would love to get some really good book recommendations. And if you could tag both of us in there, that would be amazing. And, finally, I don't know how people how much you will care about this, but what give me one Eckhart Tolle story Tolle story because I I just think he's such an interesting character. Okay. So I okay. This is a little bit skewed, because we we really spend most of the time. He didn't really talk a whole lot when we were together. He doesn't seem like a talker. No. But, ironically, like, listen to Eckhart. I list does you listen to, like, Audible? Like, I've I've listened to his, some of his seminars that he's So I I listen to books on on I was gonna say cassette. I was kinda dating myself. You know, books, audiobooks, and people ask all the time. I prefer reading when I can because I feel like that's more active, but I I do listen to audiobooks and, obviously, podcasts. I do happen to listen to them at 1.5 or 2 2 x or something like that because I think we can all learn at that speed and train ourselves to do that just like we do with reading. Eckhart Tolle, interesting enough, like, you know, going over the sleep issues and stuff. I can't listen to there's like, sleep, learning is a myth. You can't listen to an audio while you're sleeping and expect to learn anything brand new. It just it's been debunked. If you are learning anything, it's only because those are the times when you're awake and you're picking up, you know, bits and pieces and everything. Now you can do it through a dream, and I did a whole episode on how to remember your dreams. Like, I have this whole how to start my day, and the first thing I do when I wake up is remember my dreams. And because this is interesting. I don't know if you know this, James, but a lot of incredible works of art, literature, movies, science, actually came through, dream recollection. Sure. I forget the there's a classic Keith Richards story where, like, one of the most famous Rolling Stones songs, and I forget which one it is. Yeah. He the lyric, he just he he woke up, wrote down the the first few words, went back to sleep, and then woke up again and wrote the whole song. Very much so. And that Paul McCartney did that with Yesterday. Mary Shelley came out with Frankenstein in a dream. I mean, Elias Howes, who created a sewing machine, created that in a dream. The the periodic table was in a chemist's dream. It's pretty crazy. But the challenge is most people man, I'm going to kill. Right. But it's challenged because when most people wake up so what happens is you're learning all day and you're trying to solve problems all day as an entrepreneur, as a student, or whatever. And then but when you dream, your subconscious doesn't stop. It actually keeps on working on it. So often in in those times, you come up with these revelations and these insights. But what often happens when you wake up the next morning, you forget. Right? So I did this 6 ways on how to remember your dreams episode, and that's the first thing I do when I wake up. And the second thing is make my bed, but everything is for my brain. Right? Anyway, with Eckhart, I didn't have a lot of interaction with him because he was there for a little bit. He didn't talk a lot. But I actually for me, to help me sleep, it's the only audiobook I could listen to is Eckhart. He actually his monies the way he talks, it just puts me to sleep. Yeah. And he has, like, huge silences, because he kinda wants people to think while he's talking, but his his voice is so boring. His humor is so, like, droll. Like, he's not he's only, like, mildly funny. Like, he's not very funny. Right. But he laughs at his own jokes very quietly, and then there's silence. And, but anyway, okay. Well, Jim Kwik, quick brain dot com, your podcast, your book that's gonna come out next year, and we'll definitely have you on the podcast again because at the very least, we could do it entirely about how to know who you are and how to be who you are. But this has been so interesting. I'm I really have to spend a lot of time thinking about this. I think that there's a lot to unpack in this, and and I really appreciate you doing this podcast. I we we've met a couple times. We did that first podcast over Skype. First time we're doing a podcast in person, and I hope it's the the first of many. James. So thanks, Jim. Thank you. And I appreciate everyone who's listening, and I appreciate all the capes that you wear. For more from James, check out the James Altiger Show on the choose yourself network atjamesalticere.com, and get yourself on the free insiders list today. Hey. Thanks for listening. Listen. I have a big favor to ask you, and it will only take 30 seconds or less, and it would mean a huge amount to me. If you like this podcast, please let me know. Please let the team I work with know. Please let my guests know, and you can do this easily by subscribing to the podcast. It's probably the biggest favor you could do for me right now, and it's really simple. Just go to Itunes, search for the James Altucher show, and click subscribe. Again, it will only take you 30 seconds or less. And if you subscribe now, it will really help me out a lot. Thanks again.
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