Limitless – “The boy with the broken brain”

I try to get involved in extracurricular activities at work, whenever possible.

I’ve volunteered to be part of a team handing out free school supplies to children in need, all organized by my company. Isn’t that wonderful?

There are things going on all the time… one of them is a seasonal book club.

It seemed like a no-brainer when I heard the choice for the summer discussion was Limitless by Jim Kwik. It’s a self-help book! Woo hoo!

I ordered it and as soon as it arrived, began to read… a quote on page 6 got my attention:

“Often when you put a label on someone or something, you create a limit – the label becomes the limitation.” – Jim Kwik

That, my friends and readers, could have come right out of my mother’s mouth! She’s been all over me about this very thing lately! “Don’t call it ‘my depression,'” she says, “or your body will believe it!”

But I digress, except to say, this is why my mom gets mentioned so much in this blog space… she knows stuff.

Kwik knows stuff, too! He comes by it naturally, if being learning disabled (LD) and bullied at school which caused him to sustain a traumatic brain injury (TBI) is “natural”. (A chair was pulled out from under him and he went head-first into a radiator.)

As you may have guessed, Kwik was called, “The boy with the broken brain” by a teacher at school. Wonderful, right?

It stuck.

Also, it sucks. It hit me in the gut when I read it.

I think of my son, now an adult, who had a brain injury at birth (lack of oxygen). Somewhere along the line, probably very early on given what I know about his school and church experiences, he learned to believe his life wasn’t worth living. While his dad and I loved him to pieces, and no matter how hard we fought against the school and church systems which labeled him (too many to list), it simply wasn’t enough. He was labeled all over the place… often incorrectly… usually in a cruel way. He’s in his 30s and still carries the scars.

While my own TBI is questionable (and by that, I mean I fell on my head doing the dead-man’s drop off the very top of the swingset at home when I was about 8 years old. Don’t know what that is? Here, I’ll try to explain: You crawl on the top bar, the one that holds the swings. You sit on it, then swing back, flip off, twist like an in-air sumersault and land on your feet. If you land on your head, as I did, you haven’t done it right. I’d done it right a million times. Until that day. I “woke up” in the hospital waiting room and had no idea what happened. Never remembered the hours leading up or the act itself. I had a concussion. Did it affect me? I *think* so, but can’t be sure. And yes, I digress. Again.)

There is no question I had *something* going on at school, even before that accident. I was precocious and cute or annoying and ugly… and I remember being called all of it. I had (sometimes severe) asthma and have learned that the inhaler I was taking hyped me up to something akin to ADHD. Doctors said I didn’t have actual ADHD. I was -however- diagnosed ADHD and LD with in my 30s.

It’s a long story about going back to college and is not the point of this post, except to say that Kwik, like me, learned who he *really was* in college after being labeled (again, incorrectly) for years before.

In Kwik’s case, he was just beginning to understand himself when, exhausted, he fell down a flight of stairs. Enter TBI #2.

And so, the real meat of this book begins.

This isn’t a book with one model and “here’s how you do it”. It is instead a book of models, exercises, quotes, steps, charts and frankly, too much good stuff to list. Kwik is an excellent writer, there are lots of relateable personal stories, the font is larger than many books (which I *always appreciate*) and the book is set up nicely with lots of breaks to sit back and ponder.

I’d like to share one word that anchors everything… and then one quote I love… and I’d like you to buy the book if what I share gets you excited about making changes in your own life. Deal?

The word FASTER is an acronym stands for Forget, Act, State, Teach, Enter, and Review.

It’s part of a contract you sign when you begin the process – and it explains what you’ll be doing throughout this process.