فصل 11

PART IV

LIMITLESS METHODS THE HOW

method

A specific process for accomplishing something, especially an orderly, logical, or systematic way of instruction.

By this point, you’ve discovered how to unleash two of the elements necessary to become limitless. You’ve learned how to approach every day with a productive mindset, and you’ve learned how to do so with an optimal level of motivation. But there’s one more M that differentiates limitless people from those who are encumbered by their limitations: method.

Methods are the procedures or processes for accomplishing something. In this context, method is the process of learning how to learn, also called meta learning. When we go through the education system, we are taught very antiquated and inefficient ways of learning, such as sub-vocalization and rote memorization. As I mentioned at the start of this book, when I was struggling as “the boy with the broken brain,” I wasn’t incapable of learning; history has shown that. But I wasn’t succeeding at learning in the way I was being taught. It wasn’t until I mastered a new way of learning—a method you will see over the course of the coming chapters—that I could finally use my brain to excel.

In this section, you’re going to learn the science of accelerated learning and meta learning in five areas: focus, study, memory, speed reading, and thinking. These are the five flagship programs that we teach to individuals and organizations at Kwik Learning. Take special note of the lead-in questions at the start of these chapters, and make sure to try out all the exercises I’ve included. Once you start using these tools, I think you’ll find yourself using them all the time—and I think you’ll be amazed at what they unlock for you.

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FOCUS

What can I learn from what I’m like when I’m most focused?

How can I increase my ability to concentrate?

How do I limit my distractions and calm my busy mind?

What’s the difference between someone performing at superhero levels and someone failing to ever discover their superpowers? In many cases, it’s a matter of focus. I’m sure you’ve had numerous times in your life when you’ve really locked in on a task. Maybe it was writing a report that mattered a great deal to you. Maybe it was having a session with a mentor you love. Maybe it was attacking a bowl of your favorite ice cream. How did you do with these tasks? In all likelihood, you crushed them, writing one of the best reports of your life, learning huge amounts from your mentor, and devouring that ice cream like it was the last dessert in the world. This happened because you were able to train your focus on the task at hand, get right on that task, and not let anything distract you from that task. So why do most of us have only so much ability to maintain focus?

Simply, I think it’s because we were never taught to do so. Certainly, I don’t recall having a focus class when I was in elementary school.

Do you remember when you were a kid and you went outside on a sunny day with a magnifying glass? How cool was it to hover the glass over a leaf, see an intensely bright spot appear on the leaf, and then watch as the leaf started to smoke and burn? What you were able to do was focus a greater level of the sun’s intensity on that leaf. And where the bright spot appeared, things were at their hottest. Interestingly, when we talk about someone being intelligent, we often call them “bright.” Going back to our magnifying glass analogy, maybe what we’re really saying isn’t that this person is much more intelligent than most other people; maybe that person is just more focused.

Focus allows us to train our brain power on a particular task to burn through that task. It’s amazing what we can accomplish when we’re focused. Conversely, when we’re less focused, we’re less likely to accomplish what we truly want to do because we’re just not as committed —both emotionally and physically—to doing it. The primary enemy to focus is distraction.

KWIK START

Rate your current level of concentration from 0 to 10. Now rate your desire to increase this level. Your concentration is like a muscle. You can train to become stronger with practice.

PRACTICING CONCENTRATION

“Concentration is at the crux of all human success and endeavor,” Hindu priest, entrepreneur, and former monk Dandapani told me during one of my podcasts. “If you can’t concentrate, you can’t manifest.”1 What Dandapani is saying is that concentration is a critical component of anything you want to accomplish. But, like so many other things we’ve discussed already, we’ve never really been taught how to concentrate. Sure, our parents and our teachers might have implored us to concentrate harder, maybe even criticizing our lack of focus with a question such as, “Why can’t you just concentrate?” But the simple answer to that is that most of us never learned how.

Dandapani points out that concentration is like a muscle that gets stronger the more you exercise it. “Concentration is something you can learn and something you can practice to get better at,” he said.2 However, what most of us practice instead is distraction. We allow our minds to jump from thought to thought, often using technology to help us practice distraction until we’re experts at it—and we should be, because we often get a dozen or more hours of practice a day. Just imagine what it would be like if we practiced concentration for even a fraction of that time.

Dandapani has a remarkably clear way of looking at this. “I define concentration as my ability to keep my awareness on one thing for an extended period of time. Every time my concentration drifts, I use my will power to bring my awareness back.”3

Most of us think of lack of concentration as a function of our mind bouncing from place to place. Dandapani has a different—and more helpful —metaphor. To him, it isn’t your mind that’s moving; it’s your awareness.

He sees awareness as a glowing ball of light that moves to different parts of your mind. In order to excel at concentration, you need to make yourself keep that ball of light trained on one spot in your mind for an extended period. This won’t be easy at first, but a conscious effort to exercise your will power in this way is likely to lead to impressive results.

You can work on this during nearly any pursuit. If you’re having a conversation with someone, make a concerted effort to pay attention to nothing other than that conversation. If you notice your awareness drifting away from the conversation, refocus your glowing ball of light. If you’re reading a report for work, train your eyes on the words as though nothing else exists. Again, if you notice the light of your awareness beginning to shine on something else, bring that ball back to the report. If you make the commitment to practice concentration an hour or so a day, it will soon become second nature.

Whenever possible, try to do one thing at a time. We’ve talked a bit about multitasking already, but for now just remember that multitasking is a grossly inefficient way to get anything done. If at all feasible, allow yourself to do whatever you’re doing to the exclusion of everything else. If you’re on the phone, don’t scroll through social media at the same time. If you’re making breakfast, don’t also work on your to-do list for the day. By doing one thing at a time, your concentration “muscle” will become incredibly strong, and your focus will reach limitless levels.

Another key to boosting your concentration is de-cluttering your environment. A Princeton University study found that, “Multiple stimuli present in the visual field at the same time compete for neural representation by mutually suppressing their evoked activity throughout the visual cortex, providing a neural correlate for the limited processing capacity of the visual system.”4 In layperson’s terms, what this means is that physical clutter in your surroundings competes for your attention, which results in decreased performance and increased anxiety and stress levels.

So, if you want to become a master at concentration, divest yourself of the potential for distraction whenever concentration is critical. If you’re working on your computer, shut down every application and every open tab other than the ones you absolutely need to perform the task at hand. Limit the number of items in your physical workspace as well. While I think many of us consider a desk piled with books, magazines, papers, pictures of our kids, and souvenirs from our vacations to be cozy or even the sign of an active mind, every single one of those items creates a pull away from your concentration. Family heirlooms are wonderful, and you already know how I feel about books. Just limit the number of these things that share residence with the place where you need to be most productive.

CALMING YOUR BUSY MIND

Unlimiting your focus requires more than just getting to the tasks at hand.

As we’ve already discussed, focus requires an ability to set aside distractions and give all your attention to what you’re doing. But is that even possible anymore? Most of us are working on multiple devices at the same time, often with multiple applications running on each of those devices. We have meetings to attend, e-mails and texts to answer, social media statuses to update, and multiple projects in play. Yet, precisely because of this, it’s more important than ever to find ways to bring calm to your mind.

You might not even realize it, but all the input you’re getting on any given day is causing you a considerable amount of stress. If you’re like many people, you might even think of this as a positive thing, because it means that you’re busy, and by being busy, you’re making a meaningful contribution to the world. While this might be true, it is in spite of this anxiety rather than because of it.

“Anxious thoughts can overwhelm you, making it difficult to make decisions and take action to deal with whatever issue bothers you” writes psychologist Melanie Greenberg, Ph.D., author of The Stress-Proof Brain.

“Anxiety can also lead to overthinking, which makes you more anxious, which leads to more overthinking, and so on. How can you get out of this vicious cycle? Repressing anxious thoughts won’t work; they will just pop up again, sometimes with more intensity.”5

Juliet Funt is the CEO of the consulting firm WhiteSpace at Work. She describes whitespace as “the thinking time, the strategic pause that’s in between the busyness.”6 When she was on my podcast, Juliet called whitespace “the oxygen that allows everything else to catch fire.”

What both Greenberg and Funt are identifying is the need for all of us to have more time when our minds aren’t cluttered. It’s obvious how doing this will positively affect our mental health. But what’s less obvious is how it will also dramatically improve our focus and our productivity. Some interesting studies in neuroscience underscore this, showing us how distraction is actually changing our brains. One, from University College London, compared the brains of heavy media multitaskers with those of light media multitaskers and found that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which is involved in focus, was smaller among the former group.

Conversely, a study at the Max Planck Institute found that, among people going through training exercises to increase attention, their ACCs grew thicker.7

And distractions can be a serious time sink. A study from University of California, Irvine, shows how distractions can really disrupt your day. “You have to completely shift your thinking, it takes you a while to get into it and it takes you a while to get back and remember where you were,” said Gloria Mark, lead author of the study. “We found about 82 percent of all interrupted work is resumed on the same day. But here’s the bad news—it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.”8 That’s more than 20 minutes every time you’re distracted—and how often are you distracted every day?

Tools like meditation, yoga, and certain martial arts can be tremendously valuable in helping you calm your busy mind. But if you’re in the middle of the day and can’t afford to get away for more than a few minutes, there are still some things you can do. Three important ones are:

1. Breathe

We’ve already talked about the value of taking deep cleansing breaths as part of your morning routine. But doing the same thing is valuable whenever you need to re-center yourself. Holistic health expert Andrew Weil, M.D., developed a breathing tool that he calls the 4–7–8 Method. It works like this:

Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound.

Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of 4.

Hold your breath for a count of 7.

Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound to a count of 8.

This is one breath. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three more times for a total of four breaths.9

1. Do Something That Has Been Causing You Stress

This goes back to what we talked about earlier regarding procrastination.

As we now all know (thanks to Bluma Zeigarnik), things weighing on our minds are going to continue weighing on our minds until we deal with them. If you’re having trouble focusing or if your mind is operating on a dozen planes at the same time, it’s very possible the reason this is happening is because there’s something that you need to do that you’ve been avoiding doing. If that’s the case, do a little 4–7–8 breathing, deal with the stressful task, and then you can get back to everything else you want to do with increased focus.

KWIK START

What is that one important thing that you’re avoiding that is affecting your focus?

1. Schedule Time for Distractions

It might be a challenge for you to turn off your phone and your e-mail when you need to focus, but if you can convince yourself to do these things, great.

They’re relatively easy to do. What’s likely to be considerably harder is to avoid letting worries and obligations get in the way of whatever you’re trying to accomplish in that moment. There’s a reason you’re seeing these things as worries or obligations, and that makes them much harder to push out of your mind. Addressing one of your concerns head-on, as we just discussed, is one way to deal with this, but there are going to be situations where that’s simply not possible. Instead, what if you set aside a specific time in your schedule to move these worries and obligations to the forefront of your mind? Simply saying, “I’ll worry about that later” isn’t likely to keep that worry from creeping back 20 minutes from now. But saying, “I’ll worry about that at 4:15” very well might.

KWIK START

Schedule your next distraction time.

BEFORE WE MOVE ON

Unlimiting your focus is a key to unleashing your superpowers. When your mind is truly focused, when you’re completely throwing yourself at a task, you achieve at levels that are impossible when you’re distracted or divided in your thoughts. Before we move on from this chapter, let’s try a few things:

Take a good look at your to-do list and identify the thing (or things) on it that is likely to invade your thoughts until you get it done. Formulate a plan for dealing with that task using some of the antiprocrastination tools you now have.

Do something right now that changes your productivity environment so you can do a better job of staying on task.

Practice a technique for calming your busy mind. Does it work for you? If so, commit to using it regularly.