Hello everyone. Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I’m your host Kristin Maxwell. And in this show, we explore the process of transformation, and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life. Today we are going to be talking to Jonathan Levi about what it means to be a super learner, which is a topic right up my own alley. I love this kind of stuff. Jonathan Levi is an experienced entrepreneur and life hacker from Silicon Valley. He’s known for speed learning his way to all his achievements in life, from entrepreneurship to podcasting and even dating. He’s one of the top-performing instructors on Udemy since his course Become a SuperLearner, earned him over 60,000 students. He has snowballed the success with the launch of his own brand SuperHuman Academy, and now has recently released his third book, The Only Skill that Matters. Jonathan, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Thanks so much for having me, Kristin. It’s awesome to chat with a like-minded individual, no pun intended.
Yes. Here we are talking about the brain and the mind and what we can do with it. So my first question is always, what superpower did you uncover as the result of mastering your mind?
Yeah. Well, my book title kind of gave it away, but I would say that I discovered that I really could achieve just about anything through the skill of learning. I discovered that there is this superpower that is a gateway skill, if you will, to all kinds of other superpowers, whether that be, as you said, learning music, learning business, learning dating skills. And I just discovered that I could learn to do anything that I wanted and therefore I could learn to be anyone that I wanted to be and therefore have anything that I wanted to have. And that the only thing I had to do was learn what other people who had or could do those things knew.
Wow. There you go. You just said a lot there. How did you learn that you could learn everything? Like how did you discover this?
Yeah. Well, growing up I struggled very much as a learner. In fact, I almost got held back in mathematics. I got tested for ADD by the time I was eight years old. So I was not the obvious candidate that you would think for writing books on accelerated learning. But I got very lucky in that after years and years of having to be medicated just to sit through school. I actually bumped into, by accident, someone who had spent the last 10 years with his wife, teaching kids who have learning disabilities like me, how to learn more effectively. And I always like to say, they taught me so much that I immediately doubled down and used what they taught me to go ahead and learn more about the brain and about how it works. So I had help and it seems like everything that I’ve done well in my life has been the results of really great mentors. And I then took that skill and went deeper and it looks like I needed to see how far the rabbit hole goes as they say.
They are discovering so much about how the brain works and one of the things I love is that is how much they’re starting to prove that there are scientifically visible changes in the brain as you engage in practices like meditation or gratitude or changing your thoughts and all of that sort of stuff. And you’re on a little bit of a different path. This is how the brain takes in and retains information it sounds like.
Precisely. Yeah. It turns out that just like meditation, we can actually change our brains and change the way that they work. And I’ve been carefully making that claim for years. I’ve used vague language like you can upgrade your brain, but now thanks to some great research done in 2017 by someone who’s become a friend, Boris Nicolette Conrad. I can actually claim that studies have shown that you can rewire your brain and cause your brain to look and behave like the brain of someone who holds a world record in memory. And it’s the same as meditation. You can meditate and change your brain to look like the brain of a meditator. The same is true of learning memory techniques and changing the way that you learn.
My question then is does it take forever? Is it one of those things that you have to be a lifelong master to get this?
Absolutely not.
Or is it something that anybody can learn sort of quickly? I don’t want to say quickly because I realize it’s a muscle, but-
Yeah, absolutely. So in this study they approved that 20 to 30 minutes a day, four to five times a week for… I think it was six weeks. I was confused. One stat is four weeks and then they test it after six weeks or it was six weeks and then they test it after four months. But in any case it was a matter of weeks practicing a few minutes a day. And when they went back months later, they were able to verify that the changes were long lasting. So the article when it was published in Radboud University’s press release was titled Super-sized Memory is Learnable and Long Lasting. And so it’s this really cool thing.
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Now speed reading is a lot harder. I’ll admit, we teach speed reading and that’s something that takes months of diligent practice. Really hard to actually learn how to speed read, don’t listen to anyone who tells you they can do it in 10 minutes. They can tell you how to speed read in 10 minutes, but to actually do it with high comprehension, and that takes a couple of months at least. But these memory techniques, I mean I’ve done workshops with people where in an hour I teach them the basics and get them to do the techniques, and what takes a couple more weeks of practice is actually learning how to fish. Like how do you actually create the mnemonics yourself and how do you refine the technique and how do you most importantly apply it to anything.
Yes. Sorry I’m making some notes here. I would love it if we could dive a little bit more deeply into this, but before we do, we’re going to take a break. Where can people learn about your book and your work in this area?
Yeah, absolutely. I would love for people to check out superhumanacademy.com, and specifically if they want to learn about the book, it’s superhumanacademy.com/book
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