BookCast: Limitless by Jim Kwik

Note: Parts of this automated transcript mixed up Francis and Art 🤪, so definitely listen to the audio to note who said what.

Voiceover: Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life?

Voiceover: Then you’ve come to the right place.

Voiceover: Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity.

Voiceover: Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinault with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond: Welcome back, everybody, to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity.

Raymond: I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto: And I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis: I’m Francis Wade.

Francis: And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond: Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast.

Raymond: Today, we are going to be doing one of our book cast series.

Raymond: Basically, we’re reading and discussing books that we think are of interest to the productivity community.

Raymond: And we’re somewhat reviewing them for folks so that they can know whether or not they’d be worth picking up.

Raymond: And today, we’re going to be discussing Limitless, Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life by Jim Quick.

Raymond: And so a little bit about the author and then a little bit about the book, and then we will get into our discussion.

Raymond: So Jim Quick, from his own website’s bio, says,

Raymond: For the past three decades, Jim taught his learning techniques to students from universities such as NYU, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Singularity,

Raymond: as well as executives and employees from companies such as Nike, GE, Zappos, SpaceX, and Virgin to get the most out of work and life.

Raymond: He started out as, quote unquote, the boy with the broken brain, and over the past 30 years has been teaching all of these various methods for helping people, quote unquote, upgrade their brains.

Raymond: The book itself from the Amazon description says, quote, Jim Quick, the world’s number one brain coach, has written the owner’s manual for mental expansion and brain fitness.

Raymond: Limitless gives people the ability to accomplish more, more productivity, more transformation, more personal success and business achievement by changing their mindset, motivation, and methods.

Raymond: So those are the three M’s that he talks about in the book.

Raymond: And I won’t read the entire description here, but that’s kind of the general gist of the book in essence.

Raymond: So what I want to do today is I want to talk about kind of three different components here.

Raymond: One is covering the key points.

Raymond: What are the things that stood out for you in terms of the book?

Raymond: And then we’ll talk about the pros and cons of the book and some of the key takeaways that you had from reading the book.

Raymond: And then finally, would you recommend or not recommend this book?

Raymond: And why?

Raymond: That is to whom and why?

Raymond: So let’s start off with kind of the overview of the book.

Raymond: The book itself is broken up into four different parts.

Raymond: The free your mind.

Raymond: And this is really, I think, his opus on overcoming the reality that somehow you have a limited brain.

Raymond: You have some kind of limitations.

Raymond: How to kind of unwrap that component and think expansively.

Raymond: Then part two, which is the limitless mindset.

Raymond: Then part three, which is limitless motivation.

Raymond: And then part four, which is limitless methods.

Raymond: Basically, he goes from the what to the why to the how.

Raymond: And among amongst those pieces, he gives little tidbits along the way.

Raymond: What did you think about the book generally?

Raymond: What were those key points throughout the book that that stood out for you all?

Art: I I didn’t actually read the book.

Art: I used the audio book version of it, which made it a little bit.

Art: I don’t know if I want to say more challenging.

Art: The overall sense I got from the book is that this this is a title that if you have never done any personal exploration into improving your productivity.

Art: This is about as entry level as you get.

Art: There’s a lot of classic tropes, classic comments, classic nuggets of wisdom that are honestly every place that are consolidated into the book.

Art: I was a little put off by some of the framing of some of the content.

Art: Specifically, you know, how you can do anything.

Art: You can master anything.

Art: You can use 100 percent of your brain.

Art: Stuff that we know through, you know, tried and true testing isn’t accurate.

Art: And it actually creates.

Art: It can create a situation for somebody who’s trying to get into improving their own productivity that they feel oversold when they try when they they listen to a lot of this stuff.

Art: And there’s key things.

Art: And I know I’m fumbling with the explanation on this a little bit, but he’ll go through a chapter and then he ends the chapter with here’s the quick action.

Art: Do this.

Art: I’ll use an example one.

Art: He has a section on memory and he’s talking about, you know, improving your memory and things like that.

Art: And he ends with the quick action.

Art: Memorize someone’s phone number.

Art: And that’s the takeaway from the chapter.

Art: And I listen to that.

Art: I’m like, OK, I’ve listened to for this for quite a period of time now.

Art: And you have just told me to memorize a phone number, which apparently was my problem to listen to the chapter in the first place.

Art: Because if I can do that, I wouldn’t have been listening to the chapter.

Art: So there was a there’s a lot of oversimplification that.

Art: I honestly I worry that someone who listens to this trying to come into it new is going to hear a lot of different things and a lot of I want to say high promises.

Art: But there’s nothing really that sets somebody on the right path to be able to make those incremental improvements and probably more so to me, be able to deal with the challenges and the roadblocks that come into play as you’re trying to make those incremental changes.

Art: So I I struggled with it quite a bit.

Art: I also listened to listen to it at two and a half times because there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s just not necessary.

Art: I would say it probably could be about half the length.

Art: So.

Augusto: And he mentioned on the audio book that the audio book contains elements that the book per se don’t have.

Augusto: So at the end of the chapters, you have a discussion, at least a version I had a discussion with somebody that it was really good.

Augusto: It was actually, if you could extract those discussions, that will help make the book even better.

Augusto: That said, I think it’s important to mention that it is a good beginner guide to all this information, but there was way too many information.

Francis: I agree with the summaries that it’s a it’s an introductory book.

Francis: I would.

Francis: OK, no, no, no criticism.

Francis: I I it’s a good introductory book.

Francis: If you’ve not heard these concepts before and if you’ve not been reading in the self development, personal development genre, you’ve not started any work on yourself and you haven’t been following the memes.

Francis: You’ve been ignoring cliches.

Francis: Then some of this could be like, oh, oh, oh, well, I will definitely agree with you that there is a lot, especially in the early portions of the book, where someone could relate.

Francis: To the content they could they could feel camaraderie to these ideas of being overwhelmed, not being able to remember, feeling like they’re a slow learner, which is one of the core concepts of the book, how to improve being a slow learner.

Francis: He uses some very clear, very traditional pop culture references.

Francis: He’s very big into superheroes.

Francis: So there’s a lot of referencing around that.

Francis: So it’s it’s not like other productivity books where I have found that it’s like reading a chemistry book.

Francis: I mean, this this starts off from the beginning and probably through the entire thing, I would say it’s accessible.

Francis: There’s there’s no question that I think the content is definitely accessible, especially to somebody who’s not into productivity.

Francis: You could you could get through those steps and they are they are base mechanic pieces.

Francis: I mean, if you look at the just the table of contents of the book, you start to get things like, you know, the memory challenge and the scheduling challenge and prioritization.

Francis: All of those basic problems are brought up and addressed.

Francis: He didn’t just pick one and say this will solve all your your issues, which is good.

Francis: It’s it’s definitely it’s definitely that handholded type of mindset to at least the base concepts.

Raymond: I think that what Jim Quick does in Limitless is he starts off in the the explanation of why people come up against issues with regard to understanding whether or not they have the capability to be successful.

Raymond: That is having a life of fulfillment or a life of excellence.

Raymond: And the book is for me mostly motivational.

Raymond: I hear a lot of motivational content in it.

Raymond: And I think for the individual who perhaps has been beaten down, has felt like the underdog, has felt like Jim throughout his youth and his young adulthood.

Raymond: This is actually very speaks very much to that individual.

Raymond: And I can I can see that individual embracing the material very well.

Raymond: So if you have that sense of having felt like somehow you were, you know, the boy with the broken brain, as he talks about, you know, then you you get a sense of, oh, right.

Raymond: I can I can make a turn.

Raymond: I can make a shift.

Raymond: And he talks about some of the very, I think, very fundamental aspects of what we think about in personal productivity, whether that be mindset by Carol Dweck and her material, the concepts of flow by Dr.

Raymond: Ching Sekhmihai.

Raymond: He covers a he does this overview, even gets into nutrition and some of those pieces.

Raymond: And to some extent, you know, from from my perspective, you know, it’s kind of just a little bit of dabbling.

Raymond: Right.

Raymond: It’s a little bit of a sprinkling of this and a sprinkling of that.

Raymond: And I can see why people who are very steeped in personal productivity material would be potentially put off by this book because it doesn’t go deep into one particular vein.

Raymond: I guess the deepest he goes in is into the speed reading components.

Raymond: But he even touches on Dr. Edward de Bono.

Raymond: I mean, as I was reading the book, I I knew that he was doing kind of a survey of many of the books that I’ve read and many of my favorite books in the personal productivity space.

Raymond: And I’ve read probably over 400, you know, nearing 500 books in the space now.

Raymond: And the book itself, I think, is is that it’s a it’s a survey of the of the many, many personal productivity fields that are out there.

Raymond: You know, he touches a little bit on Pomodoro technique.

Raymond: He touches a little bit on on how to break items down into their elemental steps.

Raymond: So that’s really the book in a nutshell.

Raymond: It’s these little tidbits of of they’re like productivity nuggets.

Raymond: Going back to what Art said, it was like, you know, there’s not a lot of depth in any of the particular pieces.

Raymond: It’s just kind of a little sprinkling here and a sprinkling there of those of those elements.

Raymond: So with that, I think we’ve kind of started to touch on this.

Raymond: And I’m actually really curious about what you believe the pros of the book are, what the cons of the book are and what your key takeaways from it were.

Raymond: And I’ll start us off.

Raymond: I will set the tone here because I know this can devolve.

Raymond: But from my perspective, I felt like the book had a lot of material in it that could have been just on the chopping block.

Raymond: I read both the Kindle version and I listened to the audiobook thereafter.

Raymond: I found the audiobook to be much more engaging because, as Augusto said, there were these little vignettes between the vignettes.

Raymond: There were conversations between the chapters and that allowed for you to be brought into the material in very practical ways.

Raymond: And there were these little nuggets during those conversations that were actually really good color on the material itself.

Raymond: So I found that to be actually really useful.

Raymond: And I would say that that’s my key takeaway is if you haven’t heard the audiobook, at least as of the time of this recording, there’s actually a full audiobook of it on YouTube.

Raymond: If you search on YouTube, you will find it just to listen to those conversations in between the chapters.

Raymond: And so I think that is kind of the greatest benefit of the book for me are those conversations and just hearing him talk about the material in that sense.

Raymond: And I would say that the pros of the book are that the resources, he consistently throughout the book, and I think hopefully so, references the resources on the website.

Raymond: And the website resources are fairly robust.

Raymond: And he has a lot of podcast episodes with some really great names and people that I respect and appreciate their opinions on.

Raymond: Some I don’t particularly know and some I don’t particularly care about.

Raymond: But being able to know that there was this material to go to, if you wanted to go deep in any one of the topics, you could jump off and go to that podcast episode or go to that resource on the website and get further materials on those things.

Raymond: So that was for me.

Raymond: And the only other con for me is that this is obviously a book to sell his quick learning platform, right?

Raymond: Like this is a clear sales play.

Raymond: And I’m not against that, right?

Raymond: Getting Things Done by David Allen was a clear sales play.

Raymond: He wrote the book to be able to get popularity to sell his training.

Raymond: A lot of people do that.

Raymond: I’m not against that.

Raymond: I’ll probably do that in the future.

Raymond: It’s not a bad thing.

Raymond: But the reality is that I spent most of the time in the book thinking about the various acronyms he created.

Raymond: And they just didn’t stick for me.

Raymond: Some of them were a little bit weird.

Raymond: And I thought like, okay, so you have like the three M’s.

Raymond: The book is made up about mindset, motivation, and methods.

Raymond: But then he talks about the mom method, right?

Raymond: And I was like, okay, well, pick one.

Raymond: Like if you’re going to approach things, be consistent throughout it.

Raymond: And that really caused some conflict, some dissonance for me in terms of what was the driving point behind all of these mnemonics and all this memory technique stuff.

Raymond: When in reality, the book really didn’t take me on necessarily a journey.

Raymond: The first part of the book really was journey oriented.

Raymond: And I felt in the story.

Raymond: I didn’t feel necessarily that way about the third, you know, the back three parts.

Raymond: That’s not to say that he wasn’t telling a story.

Raymond: He was.

Raymond: And I appreciated the comic book references.

Raymond: You know, I grew up, you know, in the comic book space.

Raymond: It was very, very, you know, kind of interesting, his relationship with Stan Lee and the folks at Marvel and that kind of thing.

Raymond: But it really wasn’t for me the rigorous material that I’m used to reading.

Raymond: But that’s, again, it’s not necessarily for me.

Raymond: This book is not for the person who was read far and wide on personal productivity.

Francis: I thought it was a book written by a speaker who was capturing some of his best thoughts, which were delivered while speaking.

Francis: You know what?

Francis: I’d concur with that because, and I’ll go to the mnemonics he used.

Francis: He has a habit of taking existing words and repurposing them.

Francis: He talks about the word lies and he repurposes it as limited ideas entertained or something like that.

Francis: That’s fine.

Francis: That’s something you do as a speaker.

Francis: That’s something you do to show that, and this is going to sound terrible, that you’re smarter than the audience because you can come up with your own terminology.

Francis: We’ve had this discussion about terminology in the past.

Francis: I struggle with that when people do that because now you’ve kind of mutated the conversation around a specific thing.

Francis: The other thing, and Ray, I took something different from the referencing within the book and everything else around his extra materials.

Francis: I’m sure they’re very good.

Francis: I didn’t dig into them, but it did feel a lot like the, hey, here’s a diet program that you’re going to lose 20 pounds if you buy our food.

Francis: After a little while, that’s what it started to feel like.

Francis: I know he probably was not intending that, but it took away from the message, and it actually distracted me from the quality content that he was trying to deliver.

Francis: I think if he had, at the beginning or at the end, and that’s fine, I get it.

Francis: You’ve got all these great resources, and I think that’s wonderful.

Francis: Constant reiteration of that really, at least for me, took away from the message.

Francis: Now, again, superhero fan, I think that’s great, but I go back to my original assessment.

Francis: I think that really sets people up to feel really bad if they aren’t able to accomplish these things.

Francis: Well, if I’m the boy with the broken brain, and I can now become a superhero, and you do these things, and it doesn’t work for you, what does that say about you?

Francis: I know that’s not the intent, but that’s the way I think a lot of this can come across.

Francis: And you see a lot of it in other venues, not in this specific book.

Francis: There is a lot of common discussion now across a lot of channels talking about things such as ADHD, where, oh, that’s your superpower.

Francis: And if you ask anybody who actually has ADHD, they’re like, stop saying that, because that’s exactly the challenge.

Francis: That’s the problem of the perception it creates.

Francis: So while I understand it’s the message he’s trying to get across, there are underlying parts of that message that I think thwart his efforts, at least for me.

Raymond: I would push back and say to anyone who has not checked out the resources page, I would highly recommend it.

Raymond: Go to www.limitlessbook.com forward slash resources.

Raymond: You don’t need to put an email address in.

Raymond: It’s all just publicly there, and they’re useful.

Raymond: I mean, he has a whole book recommendation list, and he provides some bonus chapters for raising children as well as organizations.

Raymond: For some reason, it says coming soon.

Raymond: I don’t know what that means.

Raymond: I didn’t really check those out.

Raymond: But the central materials where he references additional stuff in terms of videos and foods and other kinds of things, if those are interesting to you, you can do that.

Raymond: And then he has, in essence, the 10-day quick start plan as a program within his own system, which you can join as well.

Raymond: But, I mean, at the back of the book, you have the 10-day quick start plan outlined for you from day one to 10.

Raymond: So he has all of that given to you.

Raymond: And I felt like, again, for an absolute beginner, this is a good baseline, right?

Raymond: It gets them someplace to move forward from, and I appreciate kind of following a process and having it laid out for you, even if you choose to diverge from that, even very quickly from looking at it.

Raymond: I would diverge from it.

Raymond: People taking advice need to recognize that the person giving the advice has an ulterior motive when they sell this material in some way, shape, or form.

Raymond: And so it’s always going to color your opinion about it.

Raymond: But at the same time, I felt like it’s decent.

Raymond: It’s not – it didn’t wow me, but it’s decent for somebody who literally is just starting from ground zero.

Raymond: And I think that’s the person who’s picking up this book generally.

Raymond: It’s not going to be us, right?

Raymond: And certainly not you listeners.

Raymond: It’s going to be people who are – they’ve never picked up a book before, and they see a title like Limitless, which is, I’m presuming, playing off of the movie.

Raymond: And so, like, ooh, Limitless Pill, right?

Raymond: They pick up the book.

Raymond: It seems like candy.

Raymond: And then they get hopefully some little nugget that clues them in to just one more productive activity or one more productive behavior in their life.

Raymond: That’s kind of how I read into it.

Francis: Just to lay some context, I mean, the Limitless book I was just looking it up, published in 2011.

Francis: So for 10 years, what we consider common knowledge stuff, when this was originally written, I think some of this may have qualified as kind of new thinking.

Francis: So it’s – it may be harsh to judge it without keeping it within that context that a lot of these concepts have been rehashed.

Francis: I don’t think they were new in 2011 either, but I think a lot of these concepts have been rehashed.

Francis: And the more I think about this assessment, this would be a book that, in my mind, would be one of those once-and-done books.

Francis: You get it.

Francis: You read it.

Francis: It goes on the bookshelf.

Francis: It’s not going to become a standard reference.

Francis: It’s not like a GTD book where you’re going back constantly trying to figure out how to do this process.

Francis: There isn’t a lot of process in this.

Francis: There’s ideas, and you may go back and reference the ideas, but it’s one of those kickoff pieces.

Francis: And I agree.

Francis: I think the content is solid enough to stand on its own.

Francis: If I – you know, I hate to say it, but if I had to give it a letter grade, I’d give it like a C plus, B minus.

Francis: You know, it’s there with the rest of the class.

Raymond: Funny enough, on Amazon, it gets a 4.7 out of 5.

Raymond: And we’re not talking about just like, you know, a few reviews.

Raymond: We’re talking about 12,000, nearly 12,500 reviews at the time of recording.

Raymond: And 81% of those are 5-star.

Raymond: 11% of those are 4-star, which leaves just 7% for the rest.

Raymond: And so I’m shocked by such a great scoring system.

Raymond: And I’m curious what got him that high score.

Raymond: But at the same time, it’s clear that people who are reading it are getting value out of it.

Raymond: And I think that’s what’s so interesting here.

Francis: And looking at it and looking at those reviews and looking and listening to our own comments, there is definitely an audience for this book.

Francis: There is a grouping of people who are struggling with these problems, who have always struggled with these problems, and who are trying to make a change.

Francis: They have recognized the fact that they have memory challenges, that they have organizational challenges, and they have motivational challenges.

Francis: And I agree with your assessment earlier.

Francis: The most positive thing I got out of the entire book is the positive motivational reinforcement.

Francis: Not so much the tactical implementations and doing things.

Francis: That’s a whole different thing.

Francis: But just the positive motivational reinforcement, when you get into a funk of, I can’t get over this issue.

Francis: But you can go back and say, well, wait a minute.

Francis: Maybe I could get over this issue.

Francis: I mean, if he had these challenges and he got over it, and it’s not the classic up on a pedestal story.

Francis: There’s a lot of personal effort that he put into this.

Francis: Then maybe I can do this.

Francis: Or maybe I should just, you know, stop complaining about it and actually try it and get back to work.

Francis: So I will definitely give him credit on that.

Francis: But I don’t know.

Francis: It’s one of those things where I will, this is one of those books I will always struggle with.

Francis: I think it’s, I have a whole class of these books within this space that I will always struggle with for various reasons.

Francis: I don’t know that it would necessarily be one that I would recommend right away.

Francis: But it would probably be in my listing of books in the productivity space that you should read, for better or worse.

Augusto: Again, for the people who are the beginner, may not be most of our listeners, maybe not us.

Augusto: But for the person who is beginning this, discover a series of extensive concepts.

Augusto: And if that gives you to an author and then brings you to his podcast, where now you can see the interviews.

Augusto: The interviews are really interesting.

Augusto: Plus, he’s been doing it for a significant amount of time.

Augusto: So I think those two things really make the discovery of the book good enough.

Augusto: Because if you start there and follow that, even that he don’t give you a methodology or a way to implement it, he gives you a lot of information.

Augusto: And he gives you, with the podcast, a lot of perspective.

Augusto: So as a way to enter into personal improvement, there is enough made on the book.

Augusto: Will I recommend that book to a person who is more medium to advance here?

Augusto: Probably not.

Augusto: They have already, there’s a probability that they have read much more depth text than this.

Augusto: But it wasn’t, it may have not been a complete waste of time.

Augusto: And again, we have been joking internally and on the chat, you know, with this book for weeks.

Augusto: But it is good to look back at what the beginnings were.

Augusto: And honestly, where we were, where we were in that path, in that journey, where this book will have been useful.

Augusto: And when you look into your own path, and the four of us, each one has a path, and our listeners have their own.

Augusto: When you read to this book, this book will allow you to go back into, you know, if I will have grabbed this book in 2000, 1990 something, this book will have been life change, will have allowed me to open to all these concepts.

Augusto: The thing is, after you pass them, it’s a beginner’s book.

Augusto: It’s, you know, but as a beginner book, it’s not a bad book.

Francis: I agree.

Francis: And in the context of 2011, when the world was just exiting the recession, I think a message, a simple message, a simple hopeful message was really useful back then.

Francis: And it was a recession, you know, it was, and the personal improvement genre was less developed than it is today.

Francis: I think where we are today, however, it strikes me as odd in today’s context.

Francis: That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be useful for someone who’s a beginner, but even beginner content nowadays tends to be pretty scientific.

Francis: There’s certain things you have to say in order to be taken credibly because anyone can check to see what, if what you’re saying has any legs.

Francis: And in today’s world, you know, we’re, we’re inundated with memes.

Francis: And a lot of them maybe came from that book because back in 2011, there was no, there was no Instagram.

Francis: I don’t think there was Instagram.

Francis: There was barely Facebook.

Francis: There was no TikTok, certainly.

Francis: There weren’t these memes that we see floating around with kind of bits of, bits of deep wisdom.

Francis: You know, today we look at them and we’re like, good grief.

Francis: But back in 2011, these things weren’t floating around and they weren’t widely known or seen.

Francis: So I could see someone picking up this book in 2011 and 12.

Francis: And when something like Instagram comes along, they say, oh, this is great.

Francis: I get to share all this stuff from the, from the Limitless book.

Francis: And I get to share it in all these bite-sized formats with my entire audience.

Francis: And I could see it filling in the gap between 2011 and 2022.

Francis: Very nicely because it’s kind of where our headspace was at the time.

Francis: But I think where we are now coming out of the pandemic, I think we’re more sober.

Francis: We’re more demanding.

Francis: There are things we’re not accepting now that we accepted 10 years ago.

Francis: We’re very skeptical around claims that, you know, vaccines will cure you.

Francis: And, you know, we’re, we want evidence for statements that we didn’t need back in 2011.

Francis: So I’m willing to give the book a pass and say that it was, it was a win for its time,

Francis: which may explain the positive reviews and the timing of it.

Francis: If it had come out today, however, I think it would have had a much rougher time.

Raymond: So as we wrap up our discussion for today, the book cast for Limitless, I wanted to cover why you would recommend or not recommend this book and to whom.

Raymond: So I will start, which is somewhat of a reiteration of what I was saying earlier, which is that I think this book is for beginners.

Raymond: And I think the reason to bring this book to our audience originally for me was that one, if you need a refresher or if you need motivation, this is a decent book for it.

Raymond: In the space of like an Anthony Robbins or Stephen Covey, where there is just a sense of some personalities that click with you.

Raymond: And if one of those, like if a Dr. Brene Brown doesn’t speak to you, then maybe a Jim Quick will.

Raymond: There is, there is a motivational component here that I think is potentially useful to people.

Raymond: And so that might speak to you, especially if you just need a little oomph, right?

Raymond: Like pick up the audio book, listen to it, listen to the first part at least, and see if that doesn’t re-energize you.

Raymond: Two is that if you have someone in your life who has no background in personal productivity, they’re just, you know, they’re lacking in excellence, lacking in fulfillment.

Raymond: This is a good book to give to them and say, hey, this is an entry point.

Raymond: And then from there, you have many more opportunities to go down one of those tributaries with them, whether that be speed reading or that be logical thinking and overcoming logical fallacies and talking about six thinking hats and those kinds of things.

Raymond: Like there’s lots of food for thought in the book in that sense.

Raymond: I feel like those are the two reasons for the book.

Raymond: And I feel like the book as a whole is probably not as useful as some of the parts.

Raymond: Like part one for me is really the most useful part of the book.

Raymond: And then, like I said, the audio versions conversations.

Raymond: And then I would immediately jump to the resources and to the podcast.

Raymond: It’s called Quick Brain with Jim Quick.

Raymond: And I would just listen to many of the podcast episodes who have some really great guests.

Raymond: You know, Dr. Michael Bruce.

Raymond: He has Mel Robbins on the podcast.

Raymond: I mean, some really great names and great minds in the space.

Raymond: And so that ends up being something that, for me, I would never have listened to his podcast.

Raymond: And the book this time around, reading it, triggered me to go jump over there and listen to some of those episodes, which was kind of useful.

Raymond: So I found that to be a benefit.

Augusto: For me, the book is, again, for a beginner.

Augusto: Somebody who comes and says, hey, I really have where to begin.

Augusto: Give me five books.

Augusto: I know nothing about this.

Augusto: Give me five books.

Augusto: This may be one of those five books for those people.

Augusto: But as you said, more importantly, I think, is the podcast.

Augusto: After you get to that, if I get somebody who is not the beginner, you know, about talking about the book, my recommendation is go to the podcast.

Augusto: You have then hours of really interesting conversations where probably you are going to get a lot more than if you are not a beginner from reading this book.

Augusto: I wouldn’t recommend it to today’s audience.

Francis: I think they’re they’ve already had an overview just by being alive and being on social media.

Francis: For those who are alive and on social media, I wouldn’t recommend this book because I think they’re getting they’re getting fed the tropes.

Francis: As Art said, they’re getting fed these tropes on a regular basis.

Francis: The diet is strong.

Francis: At least among the people who are in my social media network, the diet of of cliches and memes and pity sayings is constant and it covers much of what he says in the book.

Francis: So they don’t need the book to hear those entry level ideas because they’re already hearing them in the social media circles that they’re in.

Francis: So I wouldn’t recommend it today.

Francis: I would have recommended it perhaps back in 2011.

Francis: But today, I think that the ideas are already out there and they’re already being repeated.

Francis: They’re already being you know, I’m amazed at what people are liking and sharing.

Francis: I think it’s it’s amazed in the good sense in the sense that I’m like, well, I saw one.

Francis: I saw one the other day that said life is meaningless and it depends on the meaning that you put into it.

Francis: And people who were liking it and sharing it.

Francis: I went, wow.

Francis: I first heard this 30 years ago and it was it was completely revolutionary and rocket science and and totally rejected by anyone who had a right mind.

Francis: But here it is being shared around social media as if, you know, it’s just this nice thing.

Francis: So things have changed and I think they’ve evolved past the book had its sweet spot.

Francis: And I think it’s past the sweet spot.

Francis: Yeah.

Francis: The the audio book is 12 hours long.

Francis: I would say skip the audio book.

Francis: Dedicate 12 hours to listening to episodes of his podcast because there’s plenty of them.

Francis: There’s like 246 odd episodes and there’s a lot of content there.

Francis: And look at his other content, because I think based contextually on the content of the book itself, it’s kind of superfluous right now.

Francis: I mean, when we look, if you want the same content that’s in the book, follow a hashtag, go find follow hashtag productivity or hashtag memory tricks or whatever.

Francis: You’re going to get the same high level stuff.

Francis: And I don’t think it’s a good representation of some of the other depth of content that he provides.

Francis: So the book’s not necessary, but Jim Quick is a good place to start.

Francis: I would say look at his other stuff.

Francis: Don’t use this as a representation of what he’s offering.

Raymond: I would push back just a little bit on both of your arguments that somehow people are getting this material and that somehow because it’s available online, it’s not worth putting into a book.

Raymond: There are so many ways in which people do not get access to things and a book is the primary vehicle for them being able to digest it.

Raymond: So I would just I would give the counterpoint to that, which is that there are a lot of people whereby you think they are getting that information because it’s, you know, quote unquote on, you know, online.

Raymond: It’s on social media and whatever.

Raymond: And people are social networks, that is, and it’s the people are not absorbing that material.

Raymond: Plus, social networks are a horrible place to absorb content and to learn.

Raymond: And so I think that it’s important and imperative for us to be able to recognize where where people are.

Raymond: Right.

Raymond: Like if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re leagues ahead of many other people in a way.

Raymond: But we also have to propagate information to the people beyond us for us to be productive.

Raymond: We have to help the people around us be productive.

Raymond: And I know my mom is not on TikTok.

Raymond: So if I want to get her to absorb something, the best way for me to do that is to give her a book.

Raymond: Right.

Raymond: She’s a I grew up a reader because of her.

Raymond: Right.

Raymond: She’s a reader.

Raymond: And she made her son a reader.

Raymond: And I’m I was blessed in that way.

Raymond: The reality, though, is there’s so many people out there who are who are not connected and on the pulse of things.

Raymond: And because of that, we can really help them by giving them access to this material.

Raymond: Maybe not this book.

Raymond: You know, we can set aside limitless in this in this argument here.

Raymond: And we can still say that there are a lot of people out there who need a book like Work Clean by Dan Charnas, Getting Things Done by David Allen, Eighth Habit by Dr. Stephen Covey.

Raymond: There are Mindset by Carol Dweck.

Raymond: There are a lot of really good books out there that can help people kind of entree into the personal productivity space.

Raymond: And I appreciate everybody’s thoughts and feelings about the book today.

Raymond: This is the this is a good one for a discussion.

Raymond: And I hope that you all got something out of our discussion today in terms of helping to mediate sometimes your rejection or acceptance of of books based on people’s recommendations.

Raymond: You know, sometimes these things can be a little bit flighty and potentially misleading.

Raymond: You know, you have a book, as we noted before, that has really high ratings, but high ratings, particularly maybe for a time.

Raymond: Right. It was it was for a place in time and maybe has has dated, as Francis had noted earlier.

Raymond: So thank you all for the discussion, gentlemen.

Raymond: While we are at the end of our discussion, the conversation doesn’t stop here.

Raymond: If you have a question or comment about what we’ve discussed during this cast, please visit our episode page on productivitycast.net.

Raymond: They’re on the podcast website at the bottom of the page.

Raymond: Feel free to leave a comment or a question.

Raymond: We read and respond to comments and questions there.

Raymond: As well, you are invited to join our listeners group inside Personal Productivity Club, a digital community for personal productivity enthusiasts that I host, where you can interact with the Productivity Cast team directly.

Raymond: To join for free, visit productivitycast.net forward slash community.

Raymond: And you can get started there.

Raymond: I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud, Francis Wade and Art Gelwix for joining me here on Productivity Cast each week.

Raymond: You can learn more about them and their work by visiting productivitycast.net and visiting the about page.

Raymond: I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Raymond: And on behalf of all of us here at Productivity Cast, here’s to your productive life.

Voiceover: That’s it for this episode of Productivity Cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinaud, with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.