The Power of Forgetting: Six Essential Skills to Clear Out Brain Clutter and Become the Sharpest, Smartest You

The Power of Forgetting: Six Essential Skills to Clear Out Brain Clutter and Become the Sharpest, Smartest You

An uncommon guide for accomplishing more every day by engaging the unique skill of forgetting, from the creator of the award-winning memory training system Brainetics Is it possible that the answer to becoming a more efficient and effective thinker is learning how to forget? Yes! Mike Byster will show you how mastering this extraordinary technique—forgetting unnecessary information, sifting through brain clutter, and focusing on only important nuggets of data—will change the quality of your work and life balance forever. Using the six tools in  The Power of Forgetting,  you’ll learn how to be a more agile thinker and productive individual. You will overcome the staggering volume of daily distractions that lead to to brain fog, an inability to concentrate, lack of creativity, stress, anxiety, nervousness, angst, worry, dread, and even depression. By training your brain with Byster’s exclusive quizzes and games, you’ll develop the critical skills to become more successful in all that you do, each and every day.   MIKE BYSTER is the creator of the award-winning memory system Brainetics and the founder of Brainetics, LLC. CHAPTER 1 You Can Think Like a Genius How It’s Possible to Develop a Genius Mind Regardless of IQ We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn. --PETER DRUCKER Imagine squaring a three-digit number in your head (for example, 392 times 392) within seconds without a calculator . . . or spelling “whistle-blower” in alphabetical order within ten seconds or less . . . or committing a two-hundred-digit number or twenty-page speech to memory that you can recite on the spot. Can such tasks be learned by anyone? Even you? Absolutely. A more important question is this: Does being able to perform these mental stunts make you a genius? And if you could already tackle these challenges without first needing a lesson in useful strategies, does that make you a genius? We’re going to find out in this first chapter, which will provide the bedrock for the message of the entire book--that regardless of your innate talents, gifts, natural abilities, and even intelligence quotient (IQ), you can easily develop a set of skills that will make you think like a genius. The Genie in Genius If you’re like most people, the term “genius” is foreign to you because it doesn’t describe you. At least that’s what you think. But what if it could? Just what exactly is a genius? And more important, how can an “average” person become one? Is this possible? I’m going to attempt to answer these questions in this first chapter, ultimately proving that, yes, it is indeed possible for you to become a genius. I think we all can agree that a genius is someone who embodies exceptional intellectual prowess, creativity, originality, or other natural ability to a degree that is typically associated with the achievement of unprecedented insight. Often such visionary outlooks translate into new discoveries that propel society forward and change how all of us live. Without geniuses, our understanding of mathematics, literature, and music would be completely different. Concepts that we now take for granted, like gravity, planetary orbits, and black holes, might still be undiscovered. Innovations that we can’t live without, such as computers, cell phones, and antibiotics and vaccines, could still be centuries away. So there’s no arguing that geniuses are central to advancements in science, technology, and our general understanding of how the world and the human body work. But what if the definition of genius encompassed a much broader array of accomplishments? What if each one of us possesses an inner genius that’s aching to come out and contribute to the world in some way, but just needs a gentle nudge? Interestingly, the word genius, which comes from Latin, literally means “attendant spirit present from birth.” This definition implies that we have an internal spirit who guards and protects us, giving rise to our natural abilities. In fact, from this word we get genie, as in the genie in the bottle of Arabian folklore. We may never know precisely how one person ends up with the right balance of brainpower, intelligence, and supernatural creativity to become the type of genius who can keep company with Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Marie Curie (the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, for her contribution to physics), but for a moment I want you to believe that there’s a hidden genius, a special genie, within you--no matter how we define a genius. In fact, don’t even bother to define the word genius just yet. We’re going to explore the word and its many meanings in this chapter. For now, begin by simply pondering this question: what could you accomplish if you could think like a genius? What’s in a Genius? Although we can get one definition of genius from a dictionary, from a purely scientific standpoint we don’t really k