Kwik Brain Quotes

Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.

Our most precious gift is our brain. It is what allows us to learn, love, think, create, and even to experience joy. It is the gateway to our emotions, to our capacity for deeply experiencing life, to our ability to have lasting intimacy. It allows us to innovate, grow, and accomplish.

Perfectionism reduces creativity and innovation,

If you’re struggling to find motivation to learn, or to accomplish anything else in your life, there is a good chance you haven’t uncovered the why of the task.

If our mindset is not aligned with our desires or goals, we will never achieve them.

New belief: There is no such thing as failure. Only failure to learn.

Give a person an idea, and you enrich their day. Teach a person how to learn, and they can enrich their entire life.

Motivation is a set of emotions (painful and pleasurable) that act as the fuel for our actions.

To remember any new piece of information, you must associate it with something you already know.

All behavior is driven by belief, so before we address how to learn, we must first address the underlying beliefs we hold about what is possible.

You can learn to unlimit and expand your mindset, your motivation, and your methods to create a limitless life. When you do what others won’t, you can live how others can’t.

Our most precious gift is our brain.

If you are struggling to reach a goal in any area, you must first ask: Where is the limit? Most likely, you’re experiencing a limit in your mindset, motivation, or methods—which means that it’s not a personal shortcoming or failure pointing to any perceived lack of ability.

you don’t rise to the level of your expectations, you fall to the level of your training.

Our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we must be accountable for who we become.

Reasons that are tied to your purpose, identity, and values will sufficiently motivate you to act, even in the face of all of the daily obstacles that life puts in your way.

What I have come to find over my years of working with people is that most everyone limits and shrinks their dreams to fit their current reality.

But being limitless is not about being perfect. It’s about progressing beyond what you currently believe is possible.

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted that, “Life is C between B and D,” meaning that the life we live is the choices we make between the “B” of birth and the “D” of death.

In a era of autonomously driven electric cars and vehicles capable of taking us to Mars, our education system is the equivalent of a horse and carriage.

Some people who claim to have twenty years of experience have one year of experience that they’ve repeated twenty times.

you make mistakes; mistakes don’t make you.

Remember that we tend to remember that which we create.

When you do what others won’t, you can live how others can’t.

Before each reading, take a few minutes to talk about or write what you remember from the previous reading.

How can I use this? Why must I use this? When will I use this?

Pain can be your teacher, if you use it and not let it use you. Use pain to drive you to make things happen.

The human brain does not learn as much by consumption as it does by creation.

Motivation comes from purpose, fully feeling and associating with the consequences of our actions (or inactions).

If we believe that it’s not possible to improve, then in reality it won’t be possible to improve. It’s extremely difficult to accomplish something when you don’t believe it can be done in the first place.

Mindset (the WHAT): deeply held beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions we create about who we are, how the world works, what we are capable of and deserve, and what is possible. Motivation (the WHY): the purpose one has for taking action. The energy required for someone to behave in a particular way. Method (the HOW): a specific process for accomplishing something, especially an orderly, logical, or systematic way of instruction.

It’s not accurate that your memory works like a container, cup, or hard drive in that once it’s full of data no more can fit. It’s more like a muscle in that the more you train it, the stronger it gets and the more you can store.

The important distinction here is that family is a means value—a means to an end. The end value is actually love or belonging. When we look at our values, we can determine whether the value we’ve stated is an end or whether it evokes something else.

Make sure you have a block of time set aside to get into flow. It’s commonly believed that, when conditions are right, it takes about 15 minutes to achieve a flow state and that you don’t really hit your peak for closer to 45 minutes. Clearing out only half an hour or so isn’t going to allow you to accomplish much. Plan to set aside at least 90 minutes, and ideally a full two hours.

Scientists have learned that animals that experience prolonged stress have less activity in the parts of their brain that handle higher-order tasks—for example, the prefrontal cortex—and more activity in the primitive parts of their brain that are focused on survival, such as the amygdala.

The purpose supersedes the discomfort.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, so it follows that if you don’t know why you do what you do, how will anyone else?

Your time is one of your greatest assets. It’s the one thing you can’t get back.

knowledge is important, but it is “the performing of some action” that is required to make it powerful.

Consider your passion, your desired identity, and your values: How can they create the basis for your reasons?

Knowledge × Action = Power

Life is the c between b and d

Whenever possible, try to do one thing at a time.

by taking breaks, you create more beginnings and endings, and you retain far more of what you’re learning.

He held up a finger, saying, “Don’t let school interfere with your education.” I later learned he was paraphrasing a quote often attributed to Mark Twain.

In his TED talk about sleep, Dr. Jeff Iliff of Oregon Health and Science University takes the “laundry cycle” metaphor even further. He notes that, while we’re awake, the brain is so busy doing other things that it doesn’t have the capacity to clean itself of waste. The buildup of this waste, amyloid-beta, is now being linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

Do you remember what it was like when you were approaching your teens and you first started formulating thoughts and opinions independent of your parents? My guess is that this experience was extremely liberating for you and that it might have even been the first time in your life when you truly felt like your own person. What had happened to you, of course, was that your critical faculties had become refined enough to allow you to regularly employ reason to navigate through life.

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

I suggest you use the Pomodoro technique, a productivity method developed by Francesco Cirillo based on the idea that the optimal time for a task is 25 minutes, followed by a 5-minute break.2 Each 25-minute chunk is called a “Pomodoro.” As you read this book, I suggest that you read for one Pomodoro and then take a 5-minute brain break before continuing.

The purpose of my life had always been to free people from concern. . . . How will you serve the world? What do they need that your talent can provide? That’s all you have to figure out. . . . The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is. Everything you gain in life will rot and fall apart, and all that will be left of you is what was in your heart.

Perfectionism reduces creativity and innovation,” writes Hara Estroff Marano, editor at large and the former editor in chief of Psychology Today. “It is a steady source of negative emotions; rather than reaching toward something positive, those in its grip are focused on the very thing they most want to avoid—negative evaluation. Perfectionism, then, is an endless report card; it keeps people completely self-absorbed, engaged in perpetual self-evaluation—reaping relentless frustration and doomed to anxiety and depression.

Do you remember what it was like when you were approaching your teens and you first started formulating thoughts and opinions independent of your parents? My guess is that this experience was extremely liberating for you and that it might have even been the first time in your life when you truly felt like your own person. What had happened to you, of course, was that your critical faculties had become refined enough to allow you to regularly employ reason to navigate through life. Why, then, would you want to turn this liberating skill over to a device? Think about it: How do you feel when someone tries to impose their thinking on you?

A big part of self-love is being protective of your time and energy. Setting boundaries around your time, emotions, mental health, and space is incredibly vital at any time, but especially when you don’t sleep. When you lack any necessary fuel, such as sleep or food, your resources aren’t as abundant as they are at other times, so protecting what you have becomes very important.

unfinished tasks create tension in your brain.

So, listen carefully every time you find yourself using phrases like “I can’t,” “I’m not,” or “I don’t.” You’re sending messages to yourself that are affecting how you think about your life in general, even if what you’re beating yourself up over is something specific and seemingly not important to how you define yourself.

So, when you’re examining the facts behind your limiting beliefs, be sure to consider two things: whether there is in reality any evidence to prove that you are truly hampered in this area and whether even that evidence was tainted by the noise in your head.

positive emotions: (i) broaden people’s attention and thinking; (ii) undo lingering negative emotional arousal; (iii) fuel psychological resilience; (iv) build consequential personal resources; (v) trigger upward spirals towards greater well-being in the future; and (vi) seed human flourishing.

his field. He is famously quoted as having said, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

We used to think that we reached our neurological peak in late adolescence, after which our brains never changed—other than to deteriorate. We now know that this is far from the truth. Our brains have the capacity for neuroplasticity, which means that it can be changed and shaped by our actions and by our environments. Your brain is always changing and molding itself to your surroundings and to the demands you place on it.

Here’s the formula: Motivation = Purpose × Energy × S3 When you combine purpose, energy, and small simple steps (S3), you get sustainable motivation

To sum it up, passion is what lights you up inside.

vice chair of General

When it comes to learning, the Pomodoro technique works for reasons related to memory, specifically the effect of primacy and recency. The effect of primacy is that you’re more likely to remember what you learn in the beginning of a learning session, a class, a presentation, or even a social interaction. If you go to a party, you might meet 30 strangers. You’re most likely to remember the first few people that you meet (unless you’ve been trained to remember names with my method, which I’ll teach you later in this book). The effect of recency is that you’re also likely to remember the last thing you learned (more recent). At the same party, this means that you’ll remember the names of the last few people you met. We’ve all procrastinated before a test and then, the night before the exam, sat down to “cram” as much as possible without any breaks. Primacy and recency are just two of the (many) reasons cram sessions don’t work. But by taking breaks, you create more beginnings and endings, and you retain far more of what you’re learning.

Most of us feel tired and fatigued these days. I believe that’s because we feel like we need to say “yes” to every opportunity, invite, or request that comes our way. While it’s great to be open-minded and consider options, when you say yes to something, you need to be careful that you’re not inadvertently saying no to yourself and your own needs.

Here’s the truth: Knowledge is not power. It only has the potential to be power. You can read this book and learn everything in it, but if you don’t take it and apply the knowledge, it will be useless. All the books, podcasts, seminars, online programs, and inspiring social media posts in the world won’t work until you put your knowledge into action.

Don't let school interfere with your education

The next villain is digital dementia. Memory is a muscle that we have allowed to atrophy. While there are benefits to having a supercomputer in your pocket, think of it like an electric bicycle. It’s fun and easy but doesn’t get you in shape. Research on dementia proves that the greater our capacity to learn—the more mental “brainercise” we perform—the lower our risk of dementia. In many cases, we have outsourced our memory to our detriment.

positive people from the general population were 13 percent less likely than their negative counterparts to have a heart attack or other coronary event.

And effective stress management is associated with many health benefits.

negative emotions drive us to narrow the range of what we are capable of doing.

We’re not born with pre-installed mindsets about what we’re capable of achieving—we learn these fixed and limited ways of thinking from the people in our lives and the culture we experience growing up.

When we take responsibility for something, we are imbued with great power to make things better.

All we have to do is upgrade your brain the same way you upgrade your phone. How do you install new software into your brain? One of my favorite ways is what you’re doing right now. It’s called reading.

Research suggests that our natural ability to concentrate wanes between 10 to 40 minutes. If we spend any longer on a given task, we get diminishing returns on our investment of time because our attention starts to wander.

When you read any book, you have the opportunity to stretch the range of your mind, and it will never be the same.

Set a timer for 25 minutes right now and concentrate on what you’re reading in this book for that amount of time. When your alarm goes off, bookmark this book and close it. Then write down what you learned within that 25-minute period.

brain doesn’t multitask

As you are reading this book, when your mind inevitably wanders into something else—and that something else is important but not urgent—don’t try to not think of it. What you resist persists. Instead, keep a notebook close by to capture that thought or idea by writing it down. You can thus release it temporarily, to be addressed after the task at hand is complete

If you know you have to give a presentation on what you learn, you will approach how you learn the topic with the intention of mastering it well enough to explain it to someone else.

it didn’t measure creativity or emotional intelligence.

Your intelligence is not only malleable but dependent on your ability to cultivate a growth mindset.

Lack of sleep compromises all of your cognitive skills, your focus, your memory, and your overall brain health.

to help other people through our passion.

when you say yes to something, you need to be careful that you’re not inadvertently saying no to yourself and your own needs.

Here’s the formula: Motivation = Purpose × Energy × S3

SMART goals.

To get your goals out of your head and into your hands, make sure they fit with your emotions—with your HEART:

How important is it to you to vote?” The second group’s questionnaire had slightly altered questions, like “How important is it to you to be a voter

Your reasons should be concrete, like: “I want to learn Spanish so that I can finally speak to my father-in-law,

When you learn new ways how to learn, the challenge of learning new things can be fun, easier, and more enjoyable.

One day we will take our final breaths and not one of other people’s opinions or your fears will matter.

Lee continued to train and condition himself even with a back injury—it was a daily commitment

And lastly the tasks must be bite-size, small steps that lead to success.

was told I could do anything by my mother, that I was smart, capable, and could be the best at anything I tried. That deeply held belief allowed me to succeed beyond my wildest dreams.

The fastest learners on the planet are children, and that’s partly because they don’t care what others think of them. They have no shame around failing. They will fall 300 times and get up 300 times in the course of learning to walk, and don’t feel embarrassed; they just know they want to walk. As we get older, we have a harder time staying this open. We might take a singing lesson, or maybe a coding class, and if we hit a flat note or make a mistake as we learn, we shrink or stop. Part

bad,

There’s research that says our brains are more like a muscle, rather than a hard drive that fills up. That the more you use it, the stronger it gets, and the more it can store. The question is: Are we making those choices consciously, or are we acting out of unconscious habit?

if you don’t know why you do what you do, how will anyone else?

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” — ALBERT EINSTEIN

To employ active recall, do this: Review the material you are studying. Then close the book, turn off the video or lecture, and write down or recite everything you remember from what you just reviewed. Now, look at the material again. How much did you remember?