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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
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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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
4 DISRUPT FEAR
5 EVEN BATMAN HAS A BAT CAVE
PART II: FASTER
6 SEX IS AN ALTERED STATE
7 FIND YOUR NIGHTTIME SPIRIT ANIMAL
8 THROW A ROCK AT THE RABBIT, DON’T CHASE IT
9 YOU GET OUT WHAT YOU PUT IN
10 THE FUTURE OF HACKING YOURSELF IS NOW
PART III: HAPPIER
11 BEING RICH WON’T MAKE YOU HAPPY, BUT BEING HAPPY MIGHT MAKE YOU RICH
12 YOUR COMMUNITY IS YOUR ENVIRONMENT
13 RESET YOUR PROGRAMMING
14 GET DIRTY IN THE SUN
15 USE GRATITUDE TO REWIRE YOUR BRAIN
AFTERWORD
NOTES
LIST OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS BY
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
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 and most effective things I could do to become better at everything.
Obviously, I needed help.
So I sought advice from maverick scientists, world-class athletes, biochemists, innovative MDs, shamans, Olympic nutritionists, meditation experts, Navy SEALs, leaders in personal development, and anyone else who had an unusual ability or knowledge that I could learn from. Those people changed my life. Using their cumulative wisdom coupled with my own research and endless self-experimentation, I was finally able to lose the hundred pounds of excess weight that had plagued me for decades. My perpetual brain fog lifted, and so did my IQ. I grew a six-pack for the first time in my life—after the age of forty. I learned how to focus. I ditched the fear and shame and anger that had been hiding in plain sight (at least from me) and slowing me down. I got younger. I built a multimillion-dollar company from scratch while simultaneously writing two New York Times bestselling books and being a loving and kind husband and father to two young kids.
And I learned to do all of this while exercising less than I had when I was fat, sleeping fewer hours but more effectively, eating tons of butter on my veggies, and, for the first time, enjoying life in a way that had previously been invisible to me. I reached a