Your Limits Are Learned (And They Can Be Unlearned) with Brain Coach Jim Kwik

**Jim Kwik** (0:00)
One day, I was being teased in class, a teacher came to my defense. She said, leave that kid alone. That's the boy with the broken brain. So that label became my limit. Adults have to be very careful of their external words because they often become a child's internal words.

**Simon Sinek** (0:13)
Yeah. I'm curious what it was that broke the narrative and help you recognize that you indeed weren't broken, but in fact were quite the opposite, you're limitless. Too many of us are still walking around with a self-belief that came from our childhood. When we were young, somebody may have told us that we were bad at math or that we were lazy. Whatever it was, we still say those things about ourselves today.
That label became part of our identity. Worse, those labels become our limits.
That's why I wanted to talk to Jim Kwik, because that's exactly what happened to him. When Jim was five years old, he suffered a brain injury, and it delayed his ability to read by three years.
When he was nine years old, a well-meaning, but probably short-sighted teacher called him The Boy With the Broken Brain. The problem was that label stuck, and Jim believed it. That label became his identity, and it held him back in all kinds of places in his life, until he learned how to overcome the label.
Today, Jim is a leading expert on memory and accelerated learning. He's the best-selling author of Limitless, and his new book, Limitless Daily, offers daily upgrades to transform our lives. This is the great irony. The Boy With the Broken Brain has spent over three decades teaching people to read faster, remember more, and think better. This episode covers a lot of ground, and we come to some amazing conclusions by the end. But at a high level, what it's about is that difficult times can define us, diminish us, distract us, or develop us. We get to decide. If you like this episode, please remember to subscribe. This is A Bit of Optimism.
This episode is proudly brought to you by SAP. The best companies all have something in common. They have figured out how to build a culture in which their people feel cared for. They invest in relationships, in curiosity, and in helping their people grow. And the results speak for themselves. People want to work there for a long time, and the companies themselves become powerhouses. To learn more about SAP Grow, head to sap.com/grow. The one and only Jim Kwik. I can't believe it's been this long since we've done a podcast together. I did yours a million years ago. Yeah, we did a few. You were one of the OG podcasters.

**Jim Kwik** (2:54)
We did a few episodes.

**Simon Sinek** (2:55)
You were doing it before there was a thing called podcasting. Now everybody's got a podcast.

**Jim Kwik** (3:00)
I saw on Facebook, Memories, like it was nine years ago, somebody spliced you and I on stages, and it has 38 million views. I was talking about our devices, and how just you need to talk about having the phone.

**Simon Sinek** (3:11)
You and I were talking about that a long time ago.

**Jim Kwik** (3:13)
This was, yeah, it's timely now especially.

**Simon Sinek** (3:16)
I know, it's true. We were making some serious predictions back then. And you have no gray hair.
My hairline is definitely receding.

**Jim Kwik** (3:25)
Yeah, that was a special time.

**Simon Sinek** (3:28)
Your career, I mean, you're known for memory and learning, but I'm so curious how our career progresses. You know, when Start With Why first came out, people called me the why guy, right?

**Jim Kwik** (3:39)
The why guy.

**Simon Sinek** (3:40)
Everybody knew me as the why guy. I didn't come up with that. And I was so afraid of being stuck in one thing.
What have you learned about learning over the course of, how many years have you been doing this?

**Jim Kwik** (3:53)
I am turning 53, so it's 34 years. 34 years. Yeah. Well, that's a very meta question, you know, learning about how I learned.

**Simon Sinek** (4:02)
Yeah.

**Jim Kwik** (4:03)
I mean, can I give a little context for why I do this, or is that when I add events and I'm teaching learning, people assume that I was just kind of born with this knowledge or this ability or this talent for memory or something else, and that's definitely not the case. As you know, I had a traumatic brain injury when I was five.
I was in kindergarten, took a really bad fall, rushed the emergency room, and where it showed up was in school, where I spent most of your time. I had migraines every day, poor focus, poor memory. It took me three years long to learn how to read. You know, it's one thing to injure your brain, it's another to injure your heart and your mind, you know, because I felt like I was broken.