Hi, this is Jim Quick and I have a quick update for you. I'm proud to announce my very first book, Limitless.

Upgrade your brain, learn anything faster, and unlock your exceptional life.

This book is not only based on the latest neuroscience, it is field tested for over 28 years of working with some of the most amazing minds on our planet.

Just go to Limitlessbook.com and enjoy this book.

Welcome to Quick Brain, bite-sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach Jim Quick.

Free your knowledge. Let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brains capacity.

I wasn't high and wasn't wired, just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it. I know Kung Fu.

Welcome back Quick Brain, your question for today. How do you decode greatness? How do you decode genius?

Have this conversation and we're really excited to bring on award-winning social psychologist and author of the brand new book, Decoding Greatness.

Ron Friedman, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to be here. Before we started to record, you and I were kind of keking out over the science of learning faster, whether it's subject or skills.

In this conversation, I want to talk about this game-changing approach to mastering new skills and really succeeding faster.

A lot of people, you hear about talent. You hear about determination. You tell your power of practice.

I enjoyed your book because it was about systems. I'm a kind of closet systems guy. Let's talk about talent and practice and how it relates to your research to this discovery of reverse engineering.

When I started doing the research for decoding greatness, what I discovered is that the stories we've been told about success are wrong.

There are two main stories we've all heard throughout our lives. The first story is the story of talent. This is the idea that we all have certain inner strengths and that the key to finding your greatness is simply finding a field that allows those strengths to shine.

The second story is the Malcolm Gladwell story. The story of 10,000 hours practice practice practice. If you have the discipline and the right practice regimen, eventually you'll succeed.

But in knowledge work, there's a third path. And that third path is one that has gone under the radar, yet it is the path that is stunningly common for inventors and entrepreneurs and artists.

And that is reverse engineering and reverse engineering simply means finding extraordinary examples, breaking them down, figuring out why they work and then applying that insight to creating something completely new.

So you're going out of your way to find people and so everyone who's listening to this, they can maybe think about something extraordinary, an extraordinary role model, if you will, or something that they want to learn.

You're saying that finding people who have done extraordinary things and then learning from them to fast track your success.

Yeah, and it's not something that requires a conversation with this master, right? So it could be an example of a website. It could be at a well written email. It could be something more complex, like a recipe.

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