Innercise – by John Assaraf – book review
When you enter the phrase ‘unlock your brain’ in Amazon.com’s search bar, one book that will always come up very high in the results page is ‘Innercise’ by John Assaraf. According to his ‘About’ page he has built 5 multimillion dollar companies and is now a CEO and founder of NeuroGym.
What struck me most about the author is that he was not born with the silver spoon in his mouth. In fact, he was far from success at the beginning of his career. With help of a friend who then became his mentor, he changed his life and achieved the success he always dreamed of.
John uses his experiences and the studies from newest cognitive science to create the book, a guide to overcome our minds’ limitations. The contents of this easy-to-read work are divided into 3 parts. Author begins with a description of the Brain and how it works. Although the brain is not a muscle, it needs to be trained to become and function better. Training of the brain is the primary motive of the book, and even the book’s title relates to this. John Assaraf emphasises, not only our body requires training but also our mind. Yet the exercise is of another form and nature, it is directed to the inside, hence the name Innercise.
Gorilla inside of us
Through our experiences, uprising and interactions with other people, our brains have been hard wired in a unique way. This wiring enables automaticity and causes our brain to work more effectively. Therefore, we can drive a car without focusing on all activities as it was the case when we first learned it. In fact, most of our actions and behaviours are being controlled by the subconscious mind, which the author compares to a gorilla living inside of us.
Gorilla stands guard over our safety and efficient functioning of the brain. Once it notices some of our actions might be a potential threat, it steps into action. Have you ever heard this voice in your head, dissuading you from doing some kind of new thing. After you’ve came up with a brilliant idea, there is a phase when you are bombarded with doubts. It’s the gorilla speaking with our voice. This mechanism exists to keep us in safety and away from dangers. However, it also might block us from progressing with our dreams.
Tame the gorilla
The advances in neuroscience show neuroplasticity is a fact and thus we can rewire and change some automations that are ingrained in our brains. The second part of the book shows how to do it. We should direct our focus inside of us. What are the reasons for setting goals and not reaching them? There might be several reasons, and this part is revealing them step by step and providing solutions. Fears, habits, excess stress and false beliefs might have steered you in the direction where you are. But encouraging is that we are not a fixed product and we can change with a bit of help. We don’t know what we don’t know so the first step would be to read this part of the book to check what has blocked us from achieving our potential, and while we know what options are there, we can become aware. Awareness is, as I think, already a partial success.
Effective goal setting
Backed up with the discoveries of neuroscientists, we can set up goals which will not fade out. With the help of innercises we can keep them alive and what’s more we can finally take actions and succeed.
“Innercise” is useful to uncover why despite the efforts we take, we don’t achieve our goals. Following sentence is often attributed to Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. By reading and learning things described in the book, you can expand your thinking, gain new insights and create an alternative approach to changing unuseful habits or thoughts and finally maybe changing your life.