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more time and energy to accomplish the task than it should. In much the same way, lacking motivation or having inadequate methods will slow you down and make you feel as if learning is too hard (and we’ll show you how to address those issues later in this book).

The key is taking small, simple steps. Think about a stonecutter. The stonecutter may sit there and hammer away at his block of stone for what feels like an eternity, making only small chips and dents here and there. But in one moment, the stone will crack open. Was it the one time that did it? No—it was all the sustained effort that prepared the stone to split.

Approach your learning like a stonecutter. It will require you to cultivate patience, to have a positive attitude, and to be adaptive to your own needs. If you are the kind of learner who does best with a book in your hands, that’s fantastic. But if you already know that doesn’t work for you, why keep trying the same thing? Look for other ways to learn that do work for you.

Know that it won’t be hard, but it will require effort—though perhaps not as much as you think. The key is consistency. You must have the patience to consistently come back at it again and again. When you do, you will not only reap the rewards of your hard-earned knowledge, but you’ll be a better person for having cultivated the tenacity to keep trying.

Here’s the truth: Sometimes it is hard to learn new things. What’s more accurate is to understand that learning is a set of methods, a process that can certainly be easier when you know how to learn.

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

LIE NO. 6: THE CRITICISM OF OTHER PEOPLE MATTERS

Years ago I was a keynote speaker at an event hosted by Deepak Chopra. After my presentation, I sat down in the audience to watch the rest of the programming. To my surprise, a tall figure approached and loomed over me, and I looked up to see one of my favorite actors, Jim Carrey.

What followed was a deep conversation in the lobby about creativity. At one point he said, “Jim, I’m working on Dumb and Dumber 2, and I need to get really smart to be dumb and dumber.”

A few weeks later, we spent a day together at his home. During one of our breaks, while making guacamole (one of my favorite brain foods) in the kitchen, I asked, “Why do you do what you do? You’re such a unique actor, and you’re a little bit extreme on camera.” Jim said, “I act that way because I want to give the people who are watching permission to be themselves. The biggest travesty in the world is people preventing and limiting themselves from expressing who they really are because they’re afraid of what other people think.” This sentiment comes close to a religion for Jim; he calls it “freeing people from concern.” He elaborated on this during a commencement address at Maharishi International University:

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.26

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 of being limitless is learning to let go of the fear of criticism from other people. History is littered with examples of those who overcame the negative opinions of the people around them. The Wright brothers accomplished their incredible feat of making a machine fly through the air—and initially received virtually no acclaim for it. When they returned home from their inaugural flight on

Bruce Lee is known today as a film star, philosopher, and one of the most accomplished martial arts fighters in the history of the sport. And yet, given his background, you wouldn’t have pegged him as a future icon if you were under the assumption that genius is born.

Lee’s family moved from San Francisco to Hong Kong shortly after

he was born.29 Not long after they arrived, Hong Kong was occupied by Japan, making it a politically and socially tumultuous place to grow up. As a young man, Lee was faced with the difficulty of being the ultimate outsider. He was not purely Chinese, so the students in his classes made fun of him. He also wasn’t British like other kids in his private school, so he was frequently taunted for being “oriental.” The feeling of tension was ever-present for him—so he turned to

fighting to battle his way through.30 Fighting began to define him. His grades were low, and he fought so often in school that he transferred to a different primary school.

When Lee was 13, he met his teacher Yip Man, who taught him Wing Chun. He was accepted into this famous teacher’s school and began to learn this style of Kung Fu. Not unlike the rest of his education, he was still taunted by the Chinese children who felt he was not enough like them to be “allowed” to learn the technique. He constantly had to prove himself and his abilities, and his fighting spilled over into the streets. This internal tension, coupled with Hong Kong’s slide into gang violence, led to Lee fighting far more often than learning. He developed a reputation for being street-tough through his willingness and propensity for battle.

After one particularly bad street fight, a high-ranking police officer approached Lee’s parents and told them their son would be arrested. The boy he had beat up the night before was the son of this police officer. Lee’s father quickly arranged for Lee to go back to America; after all, he still had citizenship. So, off Lee went with $100 in his pocket. “Like most Chinese kids who had just gotten off the boat, my

first job was washing and bussing dishes,”31 said Lee in a later interview. He worked to support himself with odd jobs and eventually started teaching martial arts.

Lee wasn’t just talented—he was also willing to teach other people, and he accepted everyone who came to him as a student,

regardless of their race or background. This soon ruffled the feathers of the Chinese community in Oakland, who felt that these techniques should not be taught to anyone who wasn’t Chinese. Eventually, he was forced to defend his right to teach. The Chinese traditionalists challenged him to a fight, saying that if he won, he could keep his school. But if he lost, he would be forced to shut it down and stop teaching to people outside of their ethnic group.

Lee’s style was different from any one form of martial arts. When he was still living in Hong Kong, he took dancing lessons, and in 1957 he was so good he won the cha-cha championship. He added the movements he learned in dance to his fighting techniques. Where other fighters took a mostly solitary stance with their feet, he kept his moving constantly, which fueled his ability to adapt to his opponent’s moves. Lee did this with everything he learned later in life. Eventually, his style incorporated not only Wing Chun, but boxing, fencing, and dancing.

It was a major turning point—the old vanguard against the new. Lee’s wife Linda was eight months pregnant at the time, and she remembers the scene vividly, almost comically. She recalls it took three minutes for Lee to get his opponent down to the ground; before this take-down, the opponent had run around the room, trying to get away from Lee.

After the fight, Linda found Lee with his head in his hands, despite his victory. He told her that his training didn’t prepare him for this kind of a battle. As she describes it, this was the beginning of the evolution to his own way of martial arts.

After this battle, Lee no longer tried to fit his knowledge and teachings into one box and discarded most of his original training. He openly took influences from areas of fighting outside of Wing Chun and Kung Fu, using them to form a philosophy of martial arts. In a later interview, he said, “I do not believe in styles anymore. I do not believe there is such a thing as the Chinese way of fighting,

Japanese way of fighting.”32 Instead, Lee’s approach focused on fighting as a way of ultimate self-expression. “When people come to me to learn, they’re not coming to me to learn to defend themselves. They want to learn to express themselves through movement, anger,

or determination.” He believed that the individual is more important than any style or system.

No one remembers Lee for his academic endeavors. Lee is remembered for his tenacity, his ability to defeat his opponents, his philosophy, and for the way he managed to break out of the box of orthodox thinking and bring different styles of fighting together to create an entirely new philosophy. So was he a natural genius, someone born to achieve outsize physical, mental, and philosophical feats?

In The Talent Code, author Daniel Coyle delves into whether talent is innate or whether it can be developed. He argues “greatness isn’t born, it’s grown.” Through deep practice, ignition, and master coaching, anyone can develop a talent so deep that it looks like

genius.33

Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon spoke at our annual conference about her father’s approach to memory and learning. She said that, by the time Lee was a film star and notable teacher, he had already achieved thousands upon thousands of hours of deep practice, at least in part because of his early days in fighting on the streets. Later in life, Lee didn’t master the famous one-inch punch in a day. That alone took years of hard repetition and practice. Lee continued to train and condition himself even with a back injury—it was a daily commitment. Ignition is the motivation, the fuel to do what you do. It seems Lee’s initial fuel was the tension he felt as a Chinese American in a place that didn’t accept him as either. Later, his ignition seems to have been his drive for ultimate self-expression. And finally, Lee had training from a master teacher, Yip Man, who himself was trained by several master teachers from the time he was a child. When Lee became his student, he had been teaching Kung Fu for decades.

Lee’s talent was born of a confluence of experiences and circumstances that served him well, although they may have defeated someone else. How many of us would look at a young child with a propensity for fighting and poor grades and predict that he would become a master teacher and philosopher?

Here’s the truth: Genius leaves clues. There is always a method behind what looks like magic.

New belief: Genius is not born; it’s made through deep practice.

KWIK START

How many of the LIEs described above did you believe in before reading this book? Are there any other ones you would add? Write them down.

BEFORE WE MOVE ON

Understanding that these commonly held limiting beliefs are nothing more than myths is an essential part of becoming limitless. When you convince yourself that any of these are true, you’re giving yourself an unnecessary burden to carry around. While these seven are among the most common, keep your radar up for any “conventional wisdom” that has the effect of putting constraints on your potential and examine that wisdom very carefully. In most cases, you’re going to find that such constraints don’t apply to anyone willing to push beyond them. Before going to the next chapter, give these things a try:

Take a good look at some of the mistakes you’ve made. Have you let these define you? How have your feelings about these mistakes changed after reading this chapter?

Find a way to put something you’ve recently learned (even today) into action. Notice the difference it makes when you turn knowledge into power.

Think about a situation where you allowed the opinions of others to sway your actions. How would you approach that same situation differently if the only opinion that mattered was yours? Get my 4Gs to a limitless mindset, including more strategies for replacing limited beliefs, at LimitlessBook.com/resources.

PART III

THE WHY

motivation mo·ti·va·tion (noun)