Dave Asprey - Game Changers: What Leaders, Innovators, and Mavericks Do to Win at Life

Contents

Contents

Head Strong

The Bulletproof Diet

Bulletproof: The Cookbook

The Better Baby Book

To Bill Harris, one of the most charitable and game-changing brain hackers Ive been honored to call a friend, who passed away during the writing of this book.

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 experienceand then took the time to statistically analyze their replies and organize what youd 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, Ive 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 fieldsoften 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 lifeafter 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 level of performance I didnt know I was capable of, and doing big, challenging things actually became easier than doing the smaller things Id once struggled with.

When I set out on this path of self-improvement, I already had a very successful career, but it came with an enormous amount of effort and miserymore than I had the courage to admit to myself. I had no idea how much room there was for improvement until I gradually came to experience what it was like to be in the state of high performance that became the name of my company: Bulletproof. It happens when you take control of your biology and improve your body and your mind so that they work in unison, helping you execute at levels far beyond what youd expectwithout burning out, getting sick, or acting like a stressed-out jerk.

It used to take a lifetime to find fulfillment and realize your passion. But now that we have the knowledge of how to rewire the brain and body, this kind of radical change is available to us all, and new technologies provide us the ability to see results faster than ever. Its freaking awesomeso awesome that I felt obligated to share some of what Ive learned.

I started a blog in 2010, written with the idea that if someone had just told me all this stuff when I was sixteen or twenty or even thirty, it would have saved me years of struggle, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a lot of unnecessary pain. I truly believed that if only five people read it and experienced the kinds of results I did, it was worth the effort. I still believe that. In fact, the desire to offer other people the tools that have changed my life is the guiding force behind my entire company, and especially Bulletproof Radio.

On this quest, I have had the unique pleasure of interviewing nearly five hundred people who have impacted humanity with their discoveries and innovations while hundreds of thousands of listeners eavesdropped on our conversations. You may have heard of some of these experts, such as Jack Chicken Soup for the Soul Canfield, Tim 4 Hour Ferriss, Arianna HuffPo Huffington, and John Men Are from Mars Gray. But the vast majority of my guests are not household names. They are university researchers who have spearheaded new fields of study, maverick scientists who have conducted incredible experiments in their labs, innovators who have created new fields of psychology, doctors who have cured the incurable, authors, artists, and business leaders who have boiled thousands of hours of experience into books that have changed the way we think about what it means to be human.

These experts are not only pushing boundaries in their fields but also often extending them to the cutting edge of what is possible. They are game changers who are rewriting the rules, stretching the limits, and helping to change the world for the rest of us. It has been a rare honor to talk directly with so many of these originators and learn about their ideas and discoveries. As you can imagine, its incredibly satisfying to get to spend an hour learning about a game changers lifes work. But the real treasure lies at the end of each interview, when I ask them how they have managed to reach the high levels of performance that allowed them to achieve so much. The question is not what they achieved, not how they achieved it, but what were the most important things that powered their achievement.

I posed the same question to each guest: If someone came to you tomorrow wanting to perform better as a human being, what are the three most important pieces of advice youd offer, based on your own life experience? I was intentional about the phrasing of the question, asking about human performance instead of just performance because we are all human, and we all have different goals and definitions of success. You can perform better as a parent, as an artist, as a teacher, as a meditator, as a lover, as a scientist, as a friend, or as an entrepreneur. And I wanted to know what these experts thought mattered most based on their actual life experience, not just their areas of study. I had no idea what to expect.

To say that their answers have been illuminating would be a tremendous understatement. Yes, some were shocking. Others were predictable. But the real value came after I had accumulated a large-enough sample size (over 450 interviews) to conduct a statistical analysis. After all, its easy to ask one successful person what he or she does and to copy it. But the odds of that one persons favorite tool or trick working for you arent very good, because you arent that person. You have different DNA. You grew up in a different family. Your struggles arent the same. Your strengths arent the same. After asking hundreds of game changers what mattered most to their success, however, there was an incredible amount of data, and I noticed certain patterns emerging. When examined statistically, these patterns reveal a path that offers you a much better chance of getting you what you want.