16-05-2021-043351Limitless-Jim -Kwik

The purpose one has for taking action. The energy required for someone to behave in a particular way.

In the movie Limitless, writer Eddie Morra was completely unmotivated, unfocused, and had no energy. When he popped the pill that made him suddenly take action, his life drastically changed for the better because he was able to make things happen.

Let’s unlimit a few LIEs commonly held around motivation. Contrary to popular belief, like your mindset, motivation is not fixed. No one has a set level of motivation. And when people say they are unmotivated, it’s not completely true. They could have a high level of motivation to stay in bed and watch television.

Motivation also doesn’t mean you must enjoy something that you need to do. My friend, entrepreneur Tom Bilyeu, hates working out, but he has a clear and compelling reason to do so, so he does it every morning. I really don’t like taking cold showers, but I do it daily (I’ll explain why in Chapter 8).

Finally, motivation is not something you wake up with or not. We put ourselves in a trance when we say, “I don’t have any motivation.” Motivation is not something you have; it’s something you do. And it’s entirely sustainable. Unlike a warm bath, it’s not something that you experience for a moment and then lose unless you heat it up again. Motivation isn’t derived from a seminar that temporarily pumps you up. It’s a process. And since it’s a strategy, you have control over it and can create it consistently by following the right recipe.

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

When you combine purpose, energy, and small simple steps (S3), you get sustainable motivation. And the ultimate form of motivation is the state of flow. Think about it as energy management. Creating it, investing it, and not wasting it. A clear purpose or reason gives you energy. Practices you employ will cultivate energy for your brain and the rest of your body, and small simple steps require little energy.

In this section, we’ll talk about how to cultivate powerful sustainable motivation around learning and life that lasts. We’ll achieve this by getting clear on your purpose, fostering the mental and physical energy that will sustain you, and establishing small simple steps. And tapping flow states.

Purpose drives us to act, and our purpose must be clear enough that we know why we’re acting and what we’re hoping to gain. Generating sufficient energy is vital—if you’re tired or sleepy, or if your brain is foggy, then you won’t have the fuel to take action. Small simple steps take minimal effort and keep you from being paralyzed with overwhelm. And finally, finding flow is the ultimate boon to motivation.

7

How do certain defining phrases determine who you are? How do your values define you?

What does your sense of purpose say about who you are?

For the longest time, my kryptonite was lack of sleep. Sleep has never been easy for me. As a kid for years I was pulling regular allnighters, studying long hours trying to compensate for my learning challenges. I developed bad sleeping problems. I was always tired at school, but I would plow through the fatigue anyway because I had a strong desire to work hard and make my family proud. My purpose and reasons were super-clear, so I was plenty motivated. Even after I learned accelerated learning skills at age 18 and I no longer had to put in crazy hours, my sleeplessness continued into adulthood and has grown steadily worse—two to four hours total of very interrupted sleep for about 20 years.

The longer you go without sleep, the harder it becomes to maintain a sense of reality—or motivation, for that matter. Lack of sleep compromises all of your cognitive skills, your focus, your memory, and your overall brain health. A common contributing factor for depression and many mood disorders is lack of sleep. I can attest to the dark places I’ve found myself in as a result of lack of sleep. My intense speaking and global travel schedule certainly did not help; one year I was on the road for 235 days. Time zones, jet lag,

unfamiliar stale hotel rooms, you get the picture. And my brain was feeling it; just imagine a memory expert forgetting what city he is waking up in.

This puzzled me, because as a long-time meditation student, my mind was not ruminating or racing at night; it was as calm as could be. It was only a handful of years ago, when I ended up hospitalized from multiple nights without rest, that I participated in an overnight sleep study and was diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea, a physical disorder where evidently I stopped breathing more than 200 times each and every night.

Today, after multiple treatments, I’m happy to say my sleep is worlds better. Once I was able to fix the physical obstruction with surgery, I was then able to optimize my sleep with a number of tools I will cover in Chapter 8.

During my most difficult moments, I’ve asked myself why I continue to do what I do. Why struggle when I could easily tell myself I don’t have the energy for this? As a child, my purpose and motivation (motive for taking action) was to compensate for my lack of talent with hard work, to prove to myself I was capable. But once I’d leveled up my learning, why did I continue to work so hard— despite being exhausted, sleep-deprived, and an extreme introvert— to make speech after speech, video after video, podcast after podcast? It’s the same thing that drove me as a child: I have clear and definite purpose. I don’t want anyone to struggle and suffer the way I did. The mission that drives me is to unlock better, brighter brains.

Often our greatest struggles lead to our greatest strengths. My two biggest challenges as a child were learning and public speaking. Life has a sense of humor because I spend most of my life public speaking on learning. I couldn’t read, and now I teach people from all over the world how to read better. I struggled to understand my brain, and now I speak in front of audiences of thousands to help them understand the amazing tool they possess. I’ve learned there is a gift in most challenges. In the same way, decades of lack of sleep has given me two very important lessons.

First, it’s forced me to live everything in this book. I wouldn’t be able to perform at the level I do without the tools I’ve learned, so I’ve

doubled down on everything I teach. I rarely have to prepare for a speech, because I use these skills every single day. I live them. It’s who I am.

Second, I’ve had to become really clear on my purpose, my identity, my values, and my reasons for doing what I do every day. When you don’t sleep, and you have a very limited amount of energy and focus, you don’t waste it. You prioritize and get crystal clear about your commitments and why you are making them. All of those choices have led to inexhaustible motivation. That’s what we’ll talk about in this chapter.

START WITH WHY

Among my favorite books is Start with Why by Simon Sinek, who I’ve interviewed multiple times on my show. He often stresses the importance of being able to convey to others why you do what you do. If, Sinek explains, you can articulate the belief that is driving you (your why), people will want what you are offering. Or, as he so often says: “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?”

There’s a reason why the second of the magic questions is, “Why must I use this?” (Do you recall the other two questions?) For most children, their favorite word is why, which they’re asking all the time. Do you know why it was important to memorize the periodic table or historic dates? If you don’t, you probably don’t remember them. We hear the words purpose and goals used frequently in business, but do we really know what they mean and how they are the same or different? A goal is the point one wishes to achieve. A purpose is the reason one aims at to achieve a goal.

Whether your goal is to read a book a week, learn another language, get in shape, or just leave the office on time to see your family, these are all things that you need to achieve. But how do you do this? One of the popular ways is setting SMART goals. Yes, this is an acronym:

goal isn’t true to you, you’re far more likely to procrastinate and sabotage yourself.

ON PURPOSE AND PASSION

Knowing your purpose in life helps you live with integrity. People who know their purpose in life know who they are, what they are, and why they are. And when you know yourself, it becomes easier to live a life that’s true to your core values.

Your life purpose consists of the central motivating aims of your life —the reasons you get up in the morning. Purpose can guide life decisions, influence behavior, shape goals, offer a sense of direction, and create meaning. For me, my life purpose is to create a world of better, brighter brains.

The English language is rife with words that get used interchangeably, as if they mean the same thing. Let’s take the words nice and kind, for example. These two words are often used in the same way, but their roots reveal a different story. The origin of nice comes from the Latin word nescius, which means “ignorant.” Kind, on the other hand, is of Germanic origin and is related to the word kin. The original sense of the word was “nature, the natural order,” and “innate character, form, or condition.” It morphed from the sense of “feeling of relatives with one another,” and became a word

that meant “friendly, deliberately doing good to others.”1

Passion and purpose are in the same camp—they’re often confused with one another. Both concepts are discussed all over the Internet, in motivational books, in TED talks. It’s easy to feel as if you must be lacking if you don’t feel a burning passion or purpose in your life. In my experience, however, passion and purpose are not the same thing; instead, one leads to the other.

Finding your passion is not about choosing the right path or finding the perfect professional destiny. It’s about experimenting to see what ignites your joy. Passion comes when we rediscover our authentic, alive self, the one who has been muted and buried beneath a pile of other people’s expectations. There is not a single right path to be discovered or revealed. Instead, I believe that when we exchange a

fixed mindset for a growth mindset, as we discussed in Chapter 6 in the section on myths, we learn that interests can be developed through experience, investment, and struggle.

Furthermore, different passions can be cultivated simultaneously. You don’t have to choose one over the other when you’re exploring. Finding your passion is like finding true love, in that you have to go out on many dates to get to the perfect match. Once you find that special person, it doesn’t just magically “work,” because it takes effort to build a relationship. Finding your passion is no different—it takes experimentation to see what clicks for you, and it takes effort.

To sum it up, passion is what lights you up inside. My passion to learn was born out of such a struggle that it became a major part of my life’s identity.

KWIK START

What are your current passions? List three.

Purpose, however, is about how you relate to other people. Purpose is what you’re here to share with the world. It’s how you use your passion. When you get down to it, we all have the same purpose: to help other people through our passion. The greatest task we have in life is to share the knowledge and skills we accumulate. It doesn’t have to be more complex than that.

Your passion might be underwater basket weaving, but your purpose is to share underwater basket weaving with other people. My passion is learning, and my purpose is to teach other people to learn. This is so deeply ingrained that I don’t have to force myself to do it—it comes naturally. I wake up ready, motivated, and excited to help people learn.

Podcast guest Jonathan Fields, founder of the Good Life Project, believes that we will naturally have many passions over the course of our lives. Because you will change, the medium through which you express your passions will change, too. He believes that if you define yourself by one very specific passion and your life changes in

a way that doesn’t allow you to pursue that passion any longer, you might feel lost. The key is finding the underlying meaning in your passions to find a new way of channeling your expression.

KWIK START

Do you know your life’s purpose? Even if you don’t yet, write down a little bit about what it could be.

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

What often isn’t discussed in the quest for motivation is identity — who you are . . . and who you think you are at your core. They say the two most powerful words in the English language are the shortest: “I am.” Whatever you put after those two words determines your destiny.

Let’s say you want to stop smoking. Maybe you’ve had a few warnings from your doctor, and you’re finally coming around to the idea that you should quit. If you identify as a smoker and regularly say, “I am a smoker,” it’s going to be difficult to quit until you dismantle that identity. When you say you are defined by a particular action, you are essentially priming yourself to identify with and justify a certain behavior.

This is so integral to behavior change that it can’t be overstated. A fascinating study out of Stanford University showed the effects of priming on participants. Researcher Christopher Bryan separated participants into two groups. The first group responded to a questionnaire that included phrases like “to vote” and questions like “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 [emphasis added]?”2 The participants were also asked whether they planned to vote in the upcoming elections. Later, researchers used public voting records to confirm whether the participants had voted or not. Bryan and his team found that the participants whose survey included personally identifying statements