How to READ Faster and RETAIN More 🧠📚

the challenge is is if you have a book and it's been sitting in your home or on the shelf for so long that most people who don't get past the first chapter then it becomes shelf help instead of self-help it turns out that people have these things called chronotypes now folks out there might not have understood what a chronotype is or might not have heard that word before but you've probably heard of somebody being called an early bird or a night owl those are chronotypes if you have to say the words inside your mind in order to understand what you're reading you can only read as fast as you could speak let me say that another way if you have to say all the words to yourself inside your mind your reading speed is limited to your talking speed but not your thinking speed because there's two parts to reading right there's reading speed and reading comprehension it doesn't make sense to have the speed if you don't understand what you read what if you could read one book a week one book a week that's 52 Books A Year Without speed reading would that give you an Advantage a little bit or a lot one of the reasons why I love the topic of reading we've all heard the phrase leaders or readers is because as many of you know I grew up with learning challenges from a brain injury and it actually took me an extra few years to learn how to read and it was one of my biggest challenges I remember when they would pass around the book in elementary school and you'd have to read out loud and I couldn't do it and I think that's where a lot of Fear public speaking actually comes from and maybe that's where I got my if you're a public speaking but I know that leaders are readers and you know it too that if you're listening to this you know the power of reading and that if somebody could read 52 books a year they have a huge advantage over somebody who only reads two books a year in fact I've read before that the average person only reads a few books a year while the other average CEO actually reads four or five a month so the reason why reading is so powerful is we live in this information age where the right knowledge is not only Power it's profit and I don't just mean Financial profit that's obvious there's a divide between those who know and those who don't know but the beautiful thing about it is we live in an age of not muscle power it's mind power and the quicker you could learn the quicker that you could earn and so we live in this knowledge economy but how do you learn most this knowledge it's still through done through Reading and so the challenge is is if you have a book and it's been sitting in your home or on the shelf for so long that most people don't get past the first chapter then it becomes self-help instead of self-help right and the reason why I love reading is that if somebody has Decades of experience in marketing or sales or leadership or health or relationships or whatever it happens to be productivity and they put it into a book that means you could download decades into days you could download it into the superhero super computer your quick brain if you will through the software of just reading right and so how many books are you reading right now and if you'd like to improve it that's what this episode is all about so here are just a few steps that I would recommend to go through a book A Week number one I would keep a book list keep an active book list and so every time that we recommend books whether it's from us or you get it from another source write it down or keep it into your in your smart device or keep it on Evernote wherever you happen to have it keep an active book list of things that you're excited about reading number two I would say is start by testing your reading speed and one of the simplest ways of doing it is picking up a book putting on your phone for a 60 second timer and time yourself reading 60 seconds and have the alarm go off and then after you're done you know reading as you normally would read count the number of lines that you read in 60 seconds and that gives you the lines per minute now if you want to test your reading speed it's done in words per minute like they do typing speed and you could count the number of words in the average law line and you could average it out a little bit most books it's about 10 words per line so if you wanted to know your reading speed in words per minute you would just take how many lines you read in a minute and multiply it by 10 using this example of 10 words per line the third thing you would do is you want to find out the median number of words per book according to Amazon is approximately 64 000 words medium meaning the fifty percent have more than that fifty percent have less but about 64 000 words that means that it if you're reading 200 words per minute it takes about 320 minutes to finish a book cover to cover if you break that down divide it by seven that's approximately 45 minutes of reading a day that you could finish a book in average lengths about 64 000 words in about 45 minutes a day cover to cover all right so that gives you kind of a framework so it doesn't sound like as much much probably as you thought the fourth thing I would recommend to be able to read one book and finish one book a week is to schedule your reading is to schedule it because if you don't schedule it it's not real if you just talk about it it's not going to happen you have to schedule it around a time where you know you could execute on it because just talking about is not going to make a difference and I would treat that time as time that's yours that you it's like time with your boss or it's time with an investors it's a very important time that you would not cancel because it's time for yourself now what is sub-vocalization have you ever noticed when you're reading something to yourself you hear that inner voice inside your mind reading along with you now why is that a challenge when it comes to your reading speed if you have to say the words inside your mind in order to understand what you're reading you can only read as fast as you could speak let me say that another way if you have to say all the words to yourself inside your mind your reading speed is limited to your talking speed but not your thinking speed and so when when you're reading something most of the words that you're actually going through and reading you don't have to pronounce to understand when you see a date like 2017 most of you don't say 2017 you see the date and you recognize what it is much like a stop sign much like if you're reading something and it says Los Angeles or New York City even if it was abbreviated NYC you would get it you don't have to pronounce it in order to understand it so how do you reduce this habit called subvocalization well I'll give you three tips number one the first idea is to be able to stretch yourself stretch yourself that means to read faster than you normally do because the goal is when you're reading faster what will happen when you stretch yourself is your mind is always looking for shortcuts and it's going to spend less time filling in the filler words like saying the filler words like and there because that is all these words that are there that don't have any inherent meaning because you're not reading for the words you're reading for the ideas right so you're not spending the time doing that so you want to be able to stretch yourself doing some of these drills the second thing I would recommend is to listen to music and I would listen to music you would have to find music that really agrees with you that I would avoid ones that have lyrics to It classical music has always worked well for myself and a lot of our students I am partial to Baroque music it has about 60 beats per minute and so having that listening to the sound of the music sometimes will help drown out the sound of our internal voice potentially and the third tip I will give you right now that you could use right away is a pattern interrupt a pattern interrupt so you need to distract yourself basically what it's doing is when people are reading you'll see them moving their lips or they're talking to themselves under their breath and what you have to do is you have to give your mouse something else to do while you read and so it could get disengage from that speak mechanism in the brain so what can you do number one in no particular order some people could hum you could hum while you're reading because that resonance that sound there will prevent you can't be humming and also be talking to yourself at the same time other things that you could we would recommend is chewing gum some people say that chewing gum is actually good for your brain I would say that would be dependent on the quality of the gum that you're using but chewing gum could help break the pattern that we've learned back again back in school where we're talking out loud and saying the words to ourselves and the other one I would recommend would be to count counting and what I mean by that is if you're saying internally you're counting numbers let's say one two three four five then you can't be also simultaneously subvocalizing and saying the words to yourself now in the beginning a lot of these practices will be distracting because you don't normally do that while you read but what your brain is also going to be doing is it's also very efficient and after it starts to do this for a while it'll start paying more more attention to what's in front of you in terms of reading and boosting your reading comprehension but counting as you're reading you can't be possibly be saying all the words to yourself while you're reading When you're counting one two three four do you have too much to read but too little time are your shelves full of books that you haven't read yet and become shelf help not self-help and that's why I created the quick reading course 15 minutes a day 21 days will absolutely transform your life just go to quickbrain.com forward slash reading use the code podcast 15 and you'll get instant access Dr Michael Bruce great to be here so I wanted to have a quick conversation with you we're talking about reading right and so what I thought we'd do is talk about ways that they could increase their mental acuity their energy and their focus and combat that fatigue so where would we start reading fatigue is a real thing so that's first of all is it definitely something that people experience quite a bit of and especially if you want to read and get that information in your head and you're so gun hoe to do it you need to be careful so one of the things I'm always talking about with my patients is taking breaks right so you don't want to be going and going and going because it will cause a decent amount of eye strain and now people might be wondering wait a second didn't he introduce you as a sleep doctor why on Earth are you talking about eye strain so it turns out that when light comes in can only really pretty much go one place and that's through our eyes and that actually affects our circadian rhythm that internal biological clock now the reason I bring this up is because there are certain times of day where you're going to be more alert and certain times of day where you're not going to be able to ingest all that great information and so some people can actually time their breaks when they're not going to be so alert it turns out that people have these things called chronotypes now folks out there might not have understood what a chronotype is or might not have heard that word before but you've probably heard of somebody being called an early bird or a night owl those are chronotypes and it turns out that different chronotypes have different alertness times now one General blanket rule for everybody out there is between 1 and 3 pm in the afternoon is really never a good time for most people and I'll tell you why there's actually a small core body temperature drop which releases melatonin in our brains for folks out to remember melatonin is that key that starts the engine for sleep so we don't want that in the middle of the day great time to take a nap by the way and feel even more alert but not necessarily the best time to read right so you there's tremendous differences so once you kind of get a feel for what your chronotype is you can really figure out exactly when is your perfect time to read so it's not even just what people do or how they're doing it it's actually when when they do it exactly so that's really key so when we're talking about fatigue and frustration I know one of the biggest frustrations people have is their their eye fatigue and really what it comes down to is this work called fixations these fixations where people are reading and they're stopping at every single word and every single time they make a stop it takes more time it takes more energy yeah I mean it would make sense to me because if your eyes are continually moving and not stopping nearly as much every time you stop up you have to pause which causes muscles in your eye to stop and that means that's where you're going to get the fatigue so it makes perfect sense and it's interesting when it comes to focus people think all the time that if they read faster their comprehension go down but in actuality you know we have students in over 180 countries when people actually read faster they actually have better comprehension because they have better focus it's similar going back to that metaphor of driving a car if you're driving really slow in that traffic you could be doing many different things right you could be drinking your Bulletproof Coffee you could be trying to text you could be putting on your makeup you'd be having a conversation with someone in the car with you you could be thinking about your dry clean five different things because you're going so slow right but if you're racing cars and you're going really like Breakneck speeds at let's say 200 miles per hour where's your focus right on the road exactly on the act of driving and on the road you're not thinking about the dry cleaning you're not trying to text you're not trying to do anything else and that's why the better reader is the faster you read the better your comprehension because the better your focus because if you don't give your brain the stimulus it needs it'll seek entertain payment in the form of distraction how do you boost your ability to understand what you read better because there's two parts to reading right there's reading speed and reading comprehension it doesn't make sense to have the speed if you don't understand what you read you see traditional speed reading has long been associated with skimming words skipping words getting the gist of what you read now maybe because I started as a Memory Trainer I think it's very important not just to read something but to retain it and understand it because have you ever read a page in a book got to the end and just forgot what you just read have you ever been asked to talk about something you just read I'm going to give you three techniques to boost your reading comprehension and I call them the three R's so let's do this right now the first R to boosting your reading comprehension number one is you have to read now that's obvious right because you can only understand something if you actually read it so you start by reading it so remember to go back to past previous episodes because this is not just a podcast this is your online brain Training Academy remember subvocalization that inner voice you hear inside your head you hear that voice inside your head while you read but that's a big obstacle because if you have to say all the words to yourself you can only read as fast as you could speak now the second thing I want you to do is I want you to relate that's the second R is to relate what do I mean by that I mean read something and then talk and relate about what you're reading to somebody else and now why is that important because you're going to be training yourself to learn what it really means to understand something maybe even for the first time and this is a very sensitive topic for me because as many of you know I had a brain injury at the age of five and had learning difficulties and challenges I had bad Focus I had to really challenge memory teachers would have to repeat themselves four or five times in order for me to understand what they were saying and it took me an extra three years just to learn how to read and when teachers ask me to talk about what I read I couldn't do that because I didn't understand it so relating and talking about what you read it's very powerful tool to teach yourself what it means to understand something brand new because as you've learned in the first episode I talked about the fast method and the T stands for what stands for teach because when you teach something you get to learn it twice so what I'm going to ask you to do after you read something to train your comprehension the second thing I want you to do is relate it to somebody else so what I'd like you to do is to dedicate three minutes just to talk about what you just read so maybe you're reading 20 30 minutes a day and then afterwards call up a friend or tell them that you're doing going through this online reading course and you want to talk about this book and talk about the book talk about who the characters are talk about the plot what's going on talk about when it's happening talk about where it's happening we all know the five W's and the H of course and here's the magic when you're reading something this information is going through your eyes it's being processed for your brain in order for you to be able to talk about it out of your mouth you have to do something really special with that information you have to make it your own because no longer does it belong to just the author it's your information when you're talking about it you're not even using the author's words whose words are you using you're using your own words and that's the power of it in order for you to do it you have to own it you have to personalize it you have to organize it and be able to articulate it to another human being and finally the third R I'm going to ask you to focus on is writing so first you read then you relate and then you write spelled r-i-t-e and what is writing I'm going to ask you to take notes so again information is being processed through your eyes into your brain in order for people to put it out there you either verbalize it through relating or use your hands and you write it in handwrite and I would recommend you handwrite this if possible we did a prior episode on note-taking and that's a must listen to episode many of you in our podcast community on Facebook have said that this is the most powerful episode that you've listened to and this is all about how to take effective notes so I'm going to ask you you to take notes about what you read to organize it in our program we actually have a grid system to do that we take a piece of paper we break it into four parts and we ask specific questions if you're part of our quick reading program now if you're not part of that then I would recommend you listen to the note-taking episode and do it that model where on the left side you take notes and on the right side you make notes meaning on the left side you're capturing the information about your what you're reading about who the characters are and what's going on with the plot and when and where and all those questions that you're answering and on the right side you're creating notes about wow I wonder what's going to happen what's coming up how does this relate to what I've already understood and understand [Music]

Channel: Jim Kwik

Views: 51,316

Keywords: jim kwik, how to read faster and retain more, how to read faster and remember everything, how to read faster and understand, how to read faster, how to read fast and effectively, how to read faster and comprehend more, how to read faster jim kwik, kwik brain podcast, jim kwik podcast, reading tips, improve reading, how to read a book, jim kwik speed reading, how to improve reading skills, reading comprehension, how to read more, speed reading

Id: fadSUxBFkNw

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023