How to Read Faster

these are all the books that i read in 2010 10 years ago that's 14 books not too bad but these are the books i read in 2020 [ __ ] that's 81 books watch this video to get five tips on how to read more books each year and how to remember what the [ __ ] you [Music] read what's up everybody mark manson here you know harry s truman once said that not all readers are leaders but all leaders read there's a reason that reading has been around for 5 000 years it [ __ ] works it makes you smarter makes you more empathetic makes you more self-aware entertains the [ __ ] out of you i mean what else could you want reading is one of those things that everybody seems to wish they did more if you don't read any books you wish you read a few if you read a few books you wish you read a lot and if you read a lot then you're really aware of all the cool stuff that you don't have time to read since my job is to just read stuff all day and then regurgitate it to people with poop jokes and f-bombs i figured that i would sit down and go through some of the biggest things that have helped me become a better reader over the years and help you read more books and read better books and at the end of the video i'm going to talk about how you can remember more of what you read and you'll be surprised it has nothing to do with a highlighter or taking notes alright so tip number one cut the inner monologue this is probably something you don't even realize that you do most people don't but when you read there's that little voice inside your head talking out each and every word to you for instance you might read the man turned and deceptively smiled acknowledging the expectations upon him even though he had no intention of fulfilling them the reason you read these words aloud to yourself in your own head is because that's how you learn to read when we're little snot-nosed kids we're taught to sound out each and every syllable in each and every word and so we develop this mental habit of enunciating every single sound in our minds as we read now there's a problem with this it's [ __ ] slow and you don't need to do it i don't need to sound out deceptively to know what deceptively means i'm [ __ ] 36 years old i know what deceptively means what's incredible is that you can quickly train yourself to turn off your inner monologue try it try reading something without sounding out the words in your head you'll find that your eyes can actually move much quicker than the little voice in your head can move now this is weird at first and of course it takes practice but as you get better at it you will naturally find your reading ability to speed up tip number two read with your finger now this one sounds weird and you're gonna feel like a doofus sitting there with your computer screen moving your finger back and forth but it's surprising how much it helps now the reason for this is that our eyes are actually not completely stable now when we read text that's in front of us our eyes kind of naturally jump around and it takes mental effort to keep our eyes focused on each line this is why a lot of times when you're reading you lose your spot you forget which line you're on you read the same line twice sometimes you read a line and your brain will insert the word from below into the sentence that you're reading it's because our eyes do not move perfectly horizontally but if you put your finger below the words as you read it gives your eyes something to focus on and move with and it stabilizes them and surprisingly this makes you read quicker in fact a lot of people just by using their finger to scan the text can improve their reading speed by up to i don't know 20 30 percent i just made that number up but it's a lot you'll notice when you try it using your finger to scan as you read it works for everything you can use it with a book you can use it on an ipad you can use it on a computer screen yeah it feels weird but it helps all right tip number three this one's just a little bit more meta and practical stop reading [ __ ] you don't like it's amazing to me i run across this all the time but people have this idea with books that if you start a book you have to finish every single page or else you're a [ __ ] loser an idiot and a failure i don't understand why people have this attitude you don't keep watching movies you don't like you don't keep watching tv shows you don't like you skip youtube videos that are boring why do you force yourself to read a book that's not good it makes no sense again i think some of this comes back to our schooling in school you are graded based on how much of the book you read to get a good grade you have to read all the book life does not work that way take it from a non-fiction author most non-fiction books are full of crap the average non-fiction book has two maybe three useful chapters in it most non-fiction books are glorified blog posts repeated over and over and over for 200 pages if i'm reading chapter one and i get the idea and then i get the chapter two and the author is basically just restating the idea from chapter one in a different way i [ __ ] skip chapter two i go to chapter three and then if chapter three is repeating the same idea in another way i skipped that one too in fact most books if i realize that they aren't dense with valuable information i just go straight to the table of contents and i ask myself which chapters look interesting oh chapter 1 3 7 and 14. okay i'll read those and then if i read those and they're great maybe i'll go back and look at another chapter or find something else to read but if not that's fine i'd say half of the books that i end up reading i probably read half of the text in them maybe less and you shouldn't feel bad about this the point of reading is to serve you not for you to serve the book similarly if a book is just bad [ __ ] put it down move on to the next one i have a personal rule i always read at least 10 of a book before i decide whether to put it down or not if it's a 200 page book i give it 20 pages but if i hit 20 pages and i'm not into it i look at the table of contents nothing looks interesting i put it away i tape for every two books that i buy and i read there's one book that i buy and i i end up not reading because i just don't really like it and i don't feel guilty about that finally what you'll find when you start reading more and more is that a lot of non-fiction stuff repeats itself so at this point i've probably read like 100 psychology books and what you discover is that there are maybe half a dozen seminal studies in the field of psychology major major breakthroughs in the field that get repeated all the time if i have to read about the [ __ ] marshmallow test one more time done by walter mitchell in 1972 i'll [ __ ] gag so when i'm reading a book and i come across oh it's the marshmallow test skip five pages go on to the next thing you'll find all the time that authors use similar anecdotes they use similar examples they use similar stories and when you keep running into these things over and over again just skip them you already know what's in them so why read it again for some reason out of these five tips that i always give this one is the most surprising and most difficult for people i don't understand why people have so much emotional attachment or judgment based on how many words in a book that they read for non-fiction if you're reading every single word of every single book you're doing it wrong now for fiction it's a completely different story no pun intended if a fiction book's good you read every word if a fiction book's bad you [ __ ] stop and put it away all right tip number four schedule your reading time now everybody i talk to who wants to read more they all say the same thing but mark i'm so busy i don't have enough time you should see my schedule it's no excuse reading is the easiest most transportable hobby or interest or activity that you've ever it's so [ __ ] easy you can read on your commutes in the morning or listen to an audio book you can read on your lunch breaks i always have an article or a book to read while i'm eating lunch i often take a book to the gym and read in between sets or even during sets hell if the books you're reading are big enough you can do sets with the books hell sometimes i keep a book in the bathroom so i can read while i take a [ __ ] i play a little game with myself i try to read more pages than i have flushes i call it poop for pages that might be the stupidest thing i've ever said on camera and this doesn't even get into scheduling time in your day even without scheduling anything i can easily find at least 30 minutes a day to read and then if you schedule time on top of that it's an easy 60 minutes at least and this is what people don't understand like people see that i read all these books and they think i'm like super human or something i'm not superhuman my reading speed isn't that much above the average reading speed the trick is consistency the average person can read a page in roughly about two minutes so if you read 60 minutes per day that's 30 pages a day and if you figure the average book is about 300 pages well now you're reading a book every 10 days or 37 books per year but if you're being smart and you're putting away shitty books and you're skipping shitty chapters then you're gonna end up reading way more than that you're gonna end up reading like 40 or 50 books a year and that's just by dedicating an hour a day all right and tip number five read more than one book at a time this is another one that people have a lot of weird beliefs about like the idea that reading two books at the same time is twice as mentally challenging as reading one book at a time it's not actually it's easier than reading only one book why because when you get sick of that first book you just move to the second one and it feels exciting and new again and then when you get sick of the second one you go back to the first one i actually find it much easier to sustain my attention and excitement for both books if i'm able to jump back and forth between them i generally try to read three books at any given time and i divide them up into three categories in my head i have kind of the philosophically and technically challenging book i have just a general non-fiction educational book then i have like a light fiction or a biography or something like that i see it as like my fun book sometimes if the philosophical book is is very challenging and requires a lot of mental effort i'll schedule time in my day to actually sit down and read that philosophical book i'm reading a novel and it's really [ __ ] good sometimes i'll just screw the whole morning and read my novel sometimes i just get sick of one of my books and i set it down for a week or two then i come back when i'm more mentally refreshed alright so we've got some basic tips on how to read quicker and more efficiently we've got tips on how to be ruthless in your book selection and also how to be more practical in terms of finding time during the day to read now let's talk about remembering what you read because one of the most common questions i get from people is what is your note-taking system how do you remember all this stuff how do you know where you saw what study people like to assume that i've got this like massive database of notes with like a super computer linking like 800 different concepts and ideas with sources and citations no no i don't use any of that stuff in fact i use almost nothing and this actually let's call this the harsh truth of the day [Applause] [Music] the harsh truth of the day is that highlighting and note taking is basically worthless this upsets a lot of people and again i don't [ __ ] know why why would you want to highlight a book like that just that sounds really annoying again this comes from school in school the reason you thought highlighting is important or note-taking is important is because you were tested on what you read people mistake the highlighting for memory studies have consistently shown highlighting underlining notes in the margin this has no effect in your retention the only point of doing it was so that when you went back and studied for the test you knew what to look at now some people say well you can do the same thing with books you read for fun you can highlight all the cool parts and then a month later you go back and you check all the parts you highlighted so you can remember her well that sounds [ __ ] awful because now you're just doing school in like real life why would you do that here's the thing about human memory we remember things that we use if i read a book on nutrition the way i'm going to remember what i read is by actually changing what i eat and paying attention to what i eat if i just highlight the whole nutrition book and then i eat the same garbage i always eat i'm not gonna remember anything basically we remember what's useful if you don't find ways to implement the ideas you read into your life in some way you're not gonna remember them and you're gonna have this feeling of like wow i read all these books and i have no idea what's in them yeah because you didn't [ __ ] do anything [Music] ultimately the only reason to read nonfiction is to change your life in some way is to become smarter in some way to improve yourself in some way now here's the thing a lot of books it's kind of hard to use what you read i mean even in my own books it's about concepts and principles you know it's not like oh go out and do x y z and then you'll make a million dollars like there's none of that stuff in it so this idea of like using stuff that you read it's actually kind of a nebulous abstract thing i can read a principle and my using it can simply be having a different perspective on an area of my life than i had before for example when i read kant's moral philosophy i found his ethical principles to be very profound and i was able to see how they apply to a lot of my beliefs about people and relationships and ethics in general and so a lot of times using something we've read it just happens in our mind but still we have to make that mental effort we have to go through that process of saying okay i read this how does this apply to my own life now if you are really dead set on like having a hack to remember the stuff you read there are ways to kind of trick your brain into thinking that you are using the stuff you read so that you remember it better one of them is to simply talk about the ideas to somebody else so you read a really cool book about neuroscience go find a friend or somebody else who's willing to be bored to tears and describe to them what you just read the human mind remembers what's useful and generally humans tend to see social interactions as the most useful and important things that happen in our lives so when you tell somebody else about an idea your brain is subconsciously saying oh this must be really important now the last thing i'm going to say about remembering stuff is that you don't have to remember every idea from every book you've read you only have to remember what ideas are in every book that you've read so speaking of neuroscience there's this famous neuroscientist named antonio dimazio i've read two of his books i couldn't explain off the top of my head exactly what's in his books i'm not a neuroscientist it's not my area of expertise it's not a piece of knowledge i use frequently but i remember the arguments in those books and so i know where to look if i need to find those neuroscience arguments again so the importance is not necessarily remembering everything you read it's remembering where you read it because when you need something you can just go grab the book off the shelf and find it takes two minutes i do it all the time ninety percent of the stuff in my articles and books it's because i grabbed [ __ ] off the shelf and i went looking for it i'm like oh yeah there's that thing there's that experiment let me write about that the only reason to try to obsessively remember every single thing you read is if you want to impress people at parties and let's be honest who the [ __ ] wants to impress people at parties alright that's a wrap be sure to like this video subscribe to the channel i'm gonna have a lot more practical life tips coming out and uh you know if you're really ballsy post in the comments how many books you have read this year and how many you wish you could read i think you'll actually be surprised how easy it is to bridge that gap until next time manson out

Channel: Mark Manson

Views: 2,871,379

Keywords: how to read faster, markmanson, what to do with my life, life purpose, motivation, careers, self knowledge, self improvement, life choices, life advice, blog, youtuber, reading, betterreader, #readinglessons, #bookslists, mark manson, how to read faster and retain more, how to read faster and understand, how to read faster and comprehend more, how to read faster and remember everything, how to read faster and memorize, how to read faster jim kwik, How to read faster ted talk

Id: KJ2Lvi9kG2Q

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020