Game Changers - Dave Asprey

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in this book, I was able to finally stop wasting my energy on those mitochondrial imperatives and start putting it toward the things that really mattered. And I’ve seen that when you manage to do this, success comes as a side effect of setting your ego aside and pursuing your true purpose.

      That purpose is unique to each person. This book is not going to tell you what to do. Rather, it is meant to provide you with a road map to setting your own priorities and then following techniques that will be noticeably effective in helping you kick more ass at whatever it is you love. This order of operations is important. If you try to implement tools and techniques before setting your priorities, you’ll do it wrong. But studying the priorities of game changers, identifying your own priorities, and then choosing from the menus of options throughout the book will help you make the biggest difference in the areas that matter most.

      To make it simple, you’ll find these options broken down into laws summarizing the most important advice from my high-performing guests, concentrated and distilled, along with some things you may want to try if they resonate with you. This style and structure was inspired by that of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, one of the luminaires I interviewed on the show whose books have made an enormous difference to millions of people, myself included. These laws fall into three main categories, which are the areas to focus on when you want to transcend your limits and learn to like your life while performing at your peak: becoming smarter, faster, and happier.

      Smarter comes first because everything else is easier when your brain reaches peak performance. Just a decade ago, most people believed that you couldn’t actually get smarter. If you’d talked about taking nootropics—aka “smart drugs”—or upgrading your memory, people would have thought you were crazy. Trust me, I know. I included my use of smart drugs in my LinkedIn profile starting in 2000, and people literally laughed at me. But times have changed, and now it’s almost mainstream to talk about microdosing LSD for cognitive enhancement. Whether you choose to experiment with pharmaceuticals or upgrade your head by learning visualization techniques, it’s okay to want to maximize your brainpower so you can perform at your best. That will free up energy for you to do other things you care about. This part of the book will show you how.

      Next up is faster, a goal that humans have been striving for since the beginning of time. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, if you could light a fire in your cave faster, you won because you survived, and we haven’t stopped working to be faster ever since. The laws in this part of the book will help you make your body more efficient so that you have as much mental and physical energy as possible for the things you want to do. It’s difficult to change the game if you’re sluggish and weak, but when you maximize your physical output using all of the tools at your disposal, you can do more than you ever imagined you could.

      It is only after you gain some control over your mind and body that you can become happier, and that’s why this section comes last. It was amazing to learn how many game changers had some sort of practice to help them become more aware, centered, and grounded and how those practices led to a higher level of happiness. In huge numbers, they talked about meditating and using breathing techniques to find a state of peace and calm. I didn’t draw that answer out of them in the interviews—it’s what they actually do.

      Remember, these people could have answered the question by saying literally anything. One person said that coffee enemas were one of the most important things! Yet the vast majority credited one of these ancient practices for helping them find true happiness. I have no doubt that these practices have also played a huge role in helping these game changers become so successful in the first place. The people who are moving the needle prioritize their own peace and happiness because they know that at the end of the day it doesn’t matter how smart or fast you are; if you’re miserable, you will be stuck in mediocrity. This is why happiness plays such a big role in this book.

      Of course, all the sections and all the laws in this book are interconnected. If you do one thing to become faster, for example, you will also gain more energy to focus at work, and you will feel happier because life is less of a struggle when you’re faster. Likewise, if you practice breathing exercises that increase the amount of oxygen flowing to your brain and muscles, you’ll recover from both mental and physical stress more quickly. This will change the way you feel and experience the world and make you happier.

      Ultimately, when you change the environment inside of and around you, you can finally gain control of your biology instead of being jerked around by your base instincts. Your biology is everything—your body, mind, and even spirit. This is the core definition of biohacking, and it turns out that professors, scientists, and Buddhist monks were doing it long before I defined the term and created a movement around it. To become the best human you can be, you have a responsibility to design your environment so that you are in control. This book will give you forty-six life-changing “laws” about where to start. Each interview I do takes about eight hours of preparation. That’s 3,600 hours of study when you multiply it by 450 interviews distilled into the laws in this book, or about two full years of working full-time.

      I wish I’d had access to the information in this book (and that I had been wise enough to listen) twenty years ago, when I was unhappy, fat, and slow and life was a constant struggle because I was chasing the wrong things and wondering why I wasn’t happy when I got them. It would have saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of wasted effort. Yet I’m grateful for every bit of struggle, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to share what I’ve learned along the way with you.

      Now you have the opportunity to pay it forward. The wisdom in these pages represents hundreds of thousands of man- and woman-hours of study, experiment, and results. These are the things that no one taught you in school, the real secrets straight from the people who have succeeded in the fields they’ve mastered. How different would your life be if you were even just a little smarter, faster, and happier? You would gain the power not just to change your own life but to move the needle forward for the rest of humanity. The more of us who do this, the more we can redefine what it means to be human. I invite you to join me in this ultimate game changer.

       SMARTER

       FOCUSING ON YOUR WEAKNESSES MAKES YOU WEAKER

      When you consider the idea of energy in relation to your biology, you probably think of it as the fuel you use to complete physical tasks. Your legs use energy to run, and your arms use energy to lift weights. But you might be surprised to know that your brain actually uses more energy per pound than almost any other part of your body. Your brain requires a lot of energy to think, focus, make decisions, and generally kick ass at whatever you set your mind to doing.

      As I learned from researching my last book, Head Strong, there are lots of ways to increase your brain’s energy supply. But by far the easiest way is to simply stop wasting the brain energy you already have so you can reserve more of it for the things that matter most to you. This boils down to prioritization: focusing your brain energy on highly impactful things you love and getting rid of the things that drain you, no matter what they are; in other words, removing the things that are making you weak and adding more of the things that will make you strong. Some of these things are biological, but many are based on your choices or beliefs, both conscious and unconscious.

      It may seem obvious, but there is a reason that more than one hundred high performers mentioned prioritizing their actions and focusing on their strengths as two of their most potent tools for success. The laws in this chapter are built on the ideas of preserving brain energy and maximizing productivity. Incorporating these principles into my life has made a huge difference and has clearly done the same for many people who are at the forefronts of their fields. When you focus on your strengths and stop wasting energy on things that don’t matter, you can spend more time on the things

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