Thorsons
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First published in the US by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
This UK edition published 2018
FIRST EDITION
© Dave Asprey 2018
Cover layout design Sarahmay Wilkinson © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Cover illustration © Curly Pat/Shutterstock
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Dave Asprey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008318635
Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008318642
Version 2018-12-12
To Bill Harris, one of the most charitable and game-changing brain hackers I’vebeen honored to call a friend, who passed away during the writing of this book.
CONTENTS
1 FOCUSING ON YOUR WEAKNESSES MAKES YOU WEAKER
2 GET INTO THE HABIT OF GETTING SMARTER
3 GET OUTSIDE YOUR HEAD SO YOU CAN SEE INSIDE IT
7 FIND YOUR NIGHTTIME SPIRIT ANIMAL
8 THROW A ROCK AT THE RABBIT, DON’T CHASE IT
10 THE FUTURE OF HACKING YOURSELF IS NOW
11 BEING RICH WON’T MAKE YOU HAPPY, BUT BEING HAPPY MIGHT MAKE YOU RICH
12 YOUR COMMUNITY IS YOUR ENVIRONMENT
15 USE GRATITUDE TO REWIRE YOUR BRAIN
What would happen if you sat down, one on one, with 450 successful, unusually impactful people and asked each of them their secrets to performing better as a human being based on their own life experience—and then took the time to statistically analyze their replies and organize what you’d learned?
For one thing, you would be able to use the resulting data to create a word map like the one below. The bigger the word, the more times the experts said it mattered most.
For the past five years, I’ve been having those conversations with people who are unusually noteworthy in their fields, and this book is based on those interviews and that data.
It all began when I first launched my podcast, Bulletproof Radio, with the goal of learning from people who had gained mastery in their respective fields—often in fields they themselves had pioneered. Since then, it has evolved into an award-winning podcast that is consistently rated as one of the top performers in its category on iTunes with about 75 million downloads. My interest in interviewing these experts was originally born out of my now nineteen-year, multimillion-dollar personal crusade to upgrade myself using every tool in existence. This journey took me from antiaging facilities around the world to the offices of neuroscientists to remote monasteries in Tibet to Silicon Valley. I left no stone unturned in my obsessive mission to discover the simplest