How to Speed Read | Tim Ferriss

greetings folks tim ferriss here author of 4-hour workweek tools of titans etc I think a lot about ingesting information and it sounds so sexy doesn't it learning how do you speed up the consumption of say text if you want to read faster how do you do that without succumbing to some pseudoscience nonsense about speed reading there's a lot of garbage out there but how can you improve your ability to absorb written information without sacrificing comprehension there are some very straightforward ways to do it I'm going to show you that right now and I will use these two books to demonstrate so these are fiction and nonfiction respectively how to get filthy rich and rising aja one of my favorites recent fiction books which I generally don't try to read super quickly but these books are the same size so I'll show and then vagabonding which is one of my favs has been since 2004 alright so let's take just for the sake of simplicity and I would recommend you do the same a book that has fairly standardized formatting in other words there aren't a lot of bullet lists there aren't a lot of graphs it's mostly text and since we can only manage what we can measure step number one is figuring out roughly how many words per page are on this particular say spread right and then throughout the book so you're going to go through and you're going to count say on a page like this the number of words in ten lines okay so you come up with total divide it by ten that's your average number of words per line and then you can see here most books have a consistent number of lines per page you multiply that let's just say it's 30 okay you have an average of 10 words per line that's 300 words per page great easy enough all right what we want to do next is establish your baseline so you're gonna read for one minute you're going to be focusing on reading at your normal speed of course now you have an experimental or observer effect so it might be slightly off but that's alright you're gonna read for one minute and then you're going to do the math and multiply it out and figure out how many words roughly have I read that is your words per minute rate wpm and what we do should help double or triple that without too much trouble right now I'll do demo before we go into how to mess with your book if you look at say my nose alright in this video can you still see my finger of course you can can you still see my finger over here yes you can that is your peripheral vision even if your fixation point if your primary point of focus is right here when we read most of us when we were taught to read we read word by word so we go from the furthermost left word to the furthermost right word and so on seems logical the problem with that is is you're not using any of this space or the margins and the way that you then remedy that is by drawing lines on some pages and I would suggest you indent one word from either side okay and so what that might look like is something like this so now you have lines going down either side of the page and instead of starting all the way to the left you're gonna start at this line and then you're going to end at that line so much like a say typewriter with a return carriage going down you're now going to be zigzagging just as you would normally but the parameters or the boundaries have been moved in by a word you will you will not have any trouble reading and you should still have full comprehension and if you do this for say 5 to 10 pages then if you're not having any trouble whatsoever you can indent by another word and you can either use lines or you can spit ball you can estimate it and by doing this alone just that you can train yourself to get to the point where effectively you are very much focusing on the middle third of the page and you're just dotting down the page left to right and that in and of itself could easily double your reading speed without sacrificing comprehension the next observation just mechanically that can be very helpful is that the eye doesn't track in a clean smooth line when you are say glancing from left to right right so if you want to do a test close one eye you put a finger on that eye and then slowly track across the wall on the opposite side and what you'll notice is that the eye jumps and these are I believe owner actually heard this set I've only read it a million times cicada commence the I will jump from fixation point to fixation point and you can see this with retina scanning and eye tracking which I've seen a fair amount of just in Psychological studies I've been an experimenter and the subject both at Princeton where I did stuff actually in the lab of Danny Kahneman who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow incredible incredible scientists but I was just clicking space bars looking at stuff on the screen and then at UCSF in other places how do we utilize that what that means is when you're looking at a given page your eye isn't moving smoothly across each line its fixation fixation fixation so the less that we can regress meaning bounce back or bounce up you want to stay on that reliable forward path and the fewer fixation points we have it's just a math problem the less time we're gonna spend reading each page what does this mean this means that thus far we've just been looking at the page and reading what we're gonna do now is use a pacer so you could use your finger and now you are actually going to track with your finger trace underneath the line like so and try to think of two fixation points per line for your eye but this will keep you from bouncing up to previously red material we've all had the experience of being really sleepy say and feeling like you've read the same two lines five or six times this is partially because your eyes are tired and you end up back skipping and jumping all over the place all right so then you use your your marker your pacer to move down the page and the last test I would have you run or experiment prior to re measurement so let's say you do that for 10 minutes and you can see you've you've moved in the in the boundaries the the edges of the page so to speak where you stop and go to the next line and then you're minimizing the number of fixations and you're preventing back skipping by using pacer the next thing you're gonna do is say for five minutes is to read slightly faster than your comprehension allows so you want to get to the point where you're losing maybe 10% and the effect that we're looking for is resetting your comfort set point in reading at full comprehension in other words if you're used to always driving at 30 miles an hour and then you get to the point where you're on a highway say I was just in Texas and it was speed limit 80 miles an hour oh my god does that feel fast and suddenly you feel like you're operating at very high speed you then dial back when you go into say a 55 zone it feels like 30 all right you've adapted to the faster speed so for five minutes just practice reading with slight comprehension loss so a little bit faster than it's comfortable and then what I want you to do is retest your word per minute rate so now you're going to use the bumping in from either side you're going to use the pacer and I want you to make sure that you have full comprehension and in doing that I would wager that the vast majority of you probably close to 100% if you followed all these instructions will have at least improved your reading speed by fifty percent some of you will double triple quadruple your reading speed without sacrificing comprehension no voodoo no magic involved it's just understanding the mechanics of the eye a little bit about the about optical perception and then recognizing how you can optimize that for the printed page and that's it so congratulations you've probably double or triple your reading speed and for poetry for fiction you can always read slower but now that you have a Ferrari instead of a Yugo you can choose from a wider range of speeds so there you have it have fun reading I recommend both how to get filthy rich and rising Asia and vagabonding among many many others there's a world out there to explore so let you get to it if you enjoyed this video I want to propose you check out the podcast the Tim Ferriss show why is it been number one on iTunes across all categories in some cases number one in business why does it have 70 million plus downloads because I interview world-class performers from athletics business that includes billionaires from everything imaginable entertainment to tease out the routines the habits the tools that you can use so checking out the Tim Ferriss show

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 2,081,985

Rating: 4.9284625 out of 5

Keywords: tim ferriss, timothy ferriss, speed reading

Id: ZwEquW_Yij0

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Darkmatch007]

I spent the whole video wondering why anyone would buy that hat. I guess I'll watch it again and see if I can learn how to speed read.

[u/roberoonska]

Reading things quickly impairs comprehension, regardless of method used.

Check out this article from lifehacker that cites some credible academic sources, (in particular the research of Keith Rayner). They even mention at the bottom how their research made them go back and append all of their previous articles on speedreading, saying that it is shown to always impair comprehension.

If someone can find a credible source that shows that this stuff actually works I would be interested in reading it.

[u/SeeSeeMonkeyMee]

FTLoG, I thought his bald head was abnormally large. Is he married? Does he have friends? Someone should have let him know that this hat/sweatband thing should have been a no-go!

[u/F1yingfinn]

I usually feel like Reddit isn't good for my development as a human in general, but posts like these really help me see that Reddit could be of great benefit

[u/sadop222]

I think this technique might explain the high level of general education in the US.

[u/sailorjasm]

I find that with speed reading, you lose some of enjoyment. Like eating too fast. What’s the rush ?

[u/KamikazeHamster]

I was going to share this with my wife until I saw it's by Tim Ferriss. She can't stand him. :(

[u/The_Sea_King]

Tl;dw... (just saving for later)

[u/ibizaman]

I watched it at 100x speed. What do I get?